Over the centuries Finns have moved around the world. Some have succeeded, some haven’t. We can only congratulate them for their success, and acknowledge that our country has been too confining for them. But I want to stress that understanding such lives within a national framework – which is the underlying ideology of the Commission to Develop Finland’s National Brand – is a notion that belongs to the past.
Jörn Donner (2008)
How does nation, or more specifically Finnishness, figure in the cinema of Aki Kaurismäki? Finnish and non-Finnish commentators routinely understand Kaurismäki and his films as figures of nationality. Indicative titles include K/K: A Couple of Finns and Some Donald Ducks (Connah 1991), ‘Do the Right Finn’ (Floyd 1991), ‘Original Finn’ (Andrew 1997), ‘The Mighty Finn’ (Andrew 2003), ‘Finnish Character: An Interview With Aki Kaurismäki’ (Cardullo 2006), and ‘The Finnish Touch’ (Coslovich 2003). Finnish critics sometimes employ the same frame when writing about Kaurismäki: ‘Suomi-elokuvan suuri hiljainen puhuu’ (‘Finnish cinema’s silent man speaks’, Sallinen, 1998), ‘I melankolins finska ruinlandskap’ (‘In a landscape of Finnish melancholy’, Sundström 2002), ’Aki Kaurismäki ja suomalainen todellisuus’ (‘Aki Kaurismäki and Finnish reality’, Von Bagh 2002c).
An exemplary construction of Kaurismäki as ‘Finn’ is the journalist Wille Hammarberg’s interview with Kaurismäki, which appeared in the provincial Finnish daily Satakunnan kansa in September 2002. The article demonstrates how commentators attribute a Finnish identity to Kaurismäki by positioning the filmmaker within a series of opposite pairs and related associations. For example, Kaurismäki does not care about money, but about friends. He disdains the film business, but loves cinema. He makes universcal films, not particular ones. On the other hand, the ‘opposite term’ in such pairs also tells us a good deal. Kaurismäki can denigrate the film business, since he is successful. He can display indifference to the film festival network, because he has been involved in hundreds of them. Universal stories matter, because Kaurismäki’s reputation is for national stories. Analysis of such examples points towards key concerns in this chapter by showing how nation causes us to ignore ‘opposite pairs’ and oversimplify the layers and relationships that make up an auteur’s cinema. While Kaurismäki’s cinema coheres with some representations of Finnishness, we see the complexities of his cinema more fully when we recognise him as a participant in ongoing, multiparty debate over the status of nation, a discourse I will call multinational. Further, Kaurismäki’s cinema often ironically subverts and disperses conventions of national identity, at the same time as it finds its audience primarily outside of Finland. In analysing Kaurismäki’s relationship to a transnational audience, it becomes clear we can understand the director as a small-nation auteur for whom transnational distribution and exhibition at film festivals is crucial. His example helps us advance understanding of the category small-nation cinema.
Other Reporters’ Agendas
Hammarberg interviewed Kaurismäki at the Hamburg Film Festival, where the director was scheduled to receive the Douglas Sirk prize at the festival’s gala on the eve of The Man Without a Past’s theatrical release in Germany. The picture and director had been in the spotlight at Cannes the previous spring. With fifty prints scheduled for the German market, one hundred and thirty for France, and the film’s rights sold in forty-four total markets, the Hamburg event furnished a timely marketing opportunity for European distributors of the director’s films and for Kaurismäki’s production company Sputnik Ltd. What is more, the journalists awaited humour and maybe scandal from Kaurismäki. And so, Hammarberg writes, ‘a representative of the Finnish press who happened to show up before the gala did not seem to stand much chance of an interview. “Well, as you took the trouble to come all the way here, you may have some of his time, since he seemed to want to talk to you. But ten minutes max,”’ conceded Kaurismäki’s handlers. Kaurismäki gave Hammarberg an hour. The wide-ranging interview includes many of Kaurismäki’s most frequent tropes: ‘I don’t give a shit about money’ (Hammarberg discovers Kaurismäki had given the award money from a recent prize to a film and video club for the disabled in the Finnish town Ulvila); Kaurismäki sees himself as trying to tell universal stories ‘anyone can understand’; that ‘love and death are life, just like planting potatoes’; that in Hamburg the director was reading a novel by early twentieth-century Finnish neorealist and ironist Joel Lehtonen; that Kaurismäki plans to go into exile if Finland joins NATO; that he thinks Social Democrat Tarja Halonen is ‘a good President’ for Finland; and that Kaurismäki has a busy travel schedule: ‘I am leaving Hamburg for New York, then France, Italy, Japan, Portugal, and Belgium.’ By the time an hour has passed, the handlers are in a rage. Hammarberg concludes: ‘Since they didn’t dare say anything to the director, and lacking a better target, they turned on the reporter. Although he had just sat and listened’ (Hammarberg 2002). An anonymous remark is scribbled in the margin of the copy of Hammarberg’s article, which is on file at the Finnish Film Archives: ‘The other reporters NOT the company…’.1
Hammarberg’s interview with Kaurismäki constructs an opposition between the business of cinema being transacted in Hamburg, and Kaurismäki the Finn. Following the prelude describing the struggle among journalists and PR representatives over access to the director, Kaurismäki is introduced as being disgusted by money.
When he arrives, Kaurismäki makes a gesture that representatives of the European press have awaited. ‘Should we have something to drink?’ he says gesturing to the waiter. ‘Two beers for me, and one for the reporter.’ Kaurismäki does not look comfortable amid the opulence of the five-star hotel … ‘So this is it. I haven’t had any chance to choose this year. But believe it or not, I don’t give a shit about money. What matters most is remembering your friends.’ (In Hammarberg 2002)
Hammarberg’s account of Kaurismäki’s behaviour and remarks differentiate the director from the hotel, the journalists, and the commercial context. The entertainment business is synonymous with rapacious pursuit of profit; in Hollywood, according to another stereotype invoked by Hammarberg, your friends are the people who can make you richer. Kaurismäki stands in an opposing camp. Friends, not money, matter to him. Further, by juxtaposing the director’s beer order with remarks about money and friends, Hammarberg invokes a familiar national stereotype, which we have already seen. The honest Finn drinks his fill and gets drunk. For their part, the press exoticises Kaurismäki’s drinking, hoping for the colourful or scandalous moment that might heighten sales of their publications and shows. Hammarberg presents himself as intuitively understanding Kaurismäki, identifying with the director amid the hotel lobby, content to sit over beers. The interview underscores Kaurismäki’s violations of convention in the transnational art-film business, but implies that the explanation for them is to be found in the director’s ‘Finnishness’ – a rather different notion of the national cultural export than held by Jouni Mykkänen or Suvi Lindén.
Another strand of this interview becomes evident when we ask, who wrote the note in the margin of Hammarberg’s interview held at the archives? Finnish production companies and publishers maintain their own archives and also provide copies to the national archives. Read as a note scrawled by a Sputnik employee, the comment in the margin tells a story about clashing agendas. The note in the margin rebuts the reporter’s supposed identification with the director, suggesting that Hammarberg failed to observe professional convention, angering the other journalists. Hamburg is an important market for Kaurismäki’s films, for he is ‘more than a cult director in Germany, where his most popular films will exceed 350,000 admissions’ (Jensen 1994: 30). That is more than six times the admissions of Kaurismäki’s best-performing films in Finland, excepting The Man Without a Past’s numbers. The note in the margin raises the question, what is the purpose for Kaurismäki of such a media transaction? He is deeply experienced with film festivals, having attended hundreds, and having founded the Midnight Sun Film Festival. The latter has included scores of eminent filmmakers and actors, including Samuel Fuller, Abbas Kiarostami, Chantal Akerman, Francis Ford Coppola, Carrol Ballard, Amos Gitai, Fatih Akin, and Thelma Schoonmaker, among others, while also screening Finnish films and providing a forum of conversation about contemporary Finnish cinema. In general, the film festival as an institution concentrates media attention, making it an overdetermined and crucial event for film workers, journalists, companies and investors who form networks and transact business at such events. Film festivals have little to do with categories of nation, art, or auteur, argues Marijke de Valck, despite the fundamental contribution festivals make to the perpetuation of these terms in cinema discourse; such terms as nation ‘often result in thinking in binary oppositions and do not offer any starting points for considering the transnational dynamics, the multiple agendas, nor the complex spatial and temporal dimensions of the international film festival circuit’ (2007: 206). In such a context, Hammarberg’s story misses the point. He tells the wrong story, and crowds aside others with agendas different than his. The margin note reminds us of his error, and thereby of the complex transactional nature of an appearance by Kaurismäki at the Hamburg, Berlin, Venice, or Cannes film festivals. Hammarberg takes a niche story and tells it to a tiny general audience in Finland, the readership of his newspaper. In Hamburg, Kaurismäki is indeed a niche story, but framed and addressed to a large niche audience – and perhaps a general audience at the height of the festival – which far surpasses in size the total audience of Hammarberg’s paper.
Kaurismäki’s role as filmmaker and public figure involves presenting himself in different ways at different times, and in this sense Kaurismäki continually co-authors his self-presentation with the many journalists, critics, and writers who interact with him. This entails an address of a variety of audiences, but also shifts in the tone of address. Sometimes Kaurismäki plays the straight man, sometimes the ironic joker, and sometimes (if rarely) the good citizen, as he does when he remarks on President Tarja Halonen. Some interviews provide a means of heightening interest in his films. Others have taken up politics, or ethical stances held by the director. For example, one prominent story bubbled up when Kaurismäki was chosen to receive an honorary doctoral degree from the Helsinki School of Industrial Design (known as Aalto University since 2010). He refused the degree privately, but ultimately explained publicly that he objected to sharing the stage with the chief executive of a Finnish design company, that also owned a large fur concern at the time (see Kaurismäki 2001). Kaurismäki’s multilayered public image recalls Richard Dyer’s theory of stardom, which we have touched on over the course of this study. Layers of stardom and celebrity, argues Dyer, work to address a diverse audience in varying ways. This variance in audience address makes it necessary to move away from some of the usual categories for considering national cinema, and to approach it via an alternative framework, which I do by developing a discussion of multination and transnationalism, and by analysing Kaurismäki’s cinema through the prism of Mette Hjort’s theory of small-nation cinemas and Valck’s discussion of film festivals. It will also prove useful to situate Kaurismäki in the niche and general audience dynamics mentioned above, which prove highly relevant to the role of the film-festival in Kaurismäki’s cinema.
The multinational and the transnational
Film scholars and cultural studies scholars use the term national cinema to invoke a sense of homogeneity and cohesion, whether in speaking about continuity within a certain tradition or, by contrast, in critiquing exclusions of gender or ethnicity, for example, from an ostensibly homogeneous national culture or cinema. Yet closer analysis of any national history or cinema will lead one to qualify significantly claims about homogeneity and to come to see national cinema as ‘multinational’, insofar as multiple groups contest the cultural and political identity of a nation, even if there are moments of national unity as well. For instance, participants and publics involved in debates about immigration, class, and gender construct the nation in strikingly differing ways. Similarly, debates over European national cinemas since the 1960s and the advent of the state funding model have involved competing constructions of national cinema. Industry participants argue that cinema is an economic entity, maintaining the state should support films with large audiences. Some officials believe that national cinema is a political entity, and that national films should project a certain image at home and abroad. For their part, intellectuals often argue that national cinema is a cultural and aesthetic category, and that state support should go to film artists with something to say, whether they are young and promising or established; the favour of artists’ films among audiences should not be relevant to the funding of national cinema. These arguments construct national culture and cinema in multiple and sometimes non-reciprocal ways. These arguments take on even greater complexity as visual culture has globalised and the materiality of cinema has changed through a proliferation of new media and distribution platforms – digital video, DVD, Internet, streaming video, digital television, on-demand television, and so forth. Such changes have fostered aesthetic transformations, from the emergence of the global martial arts film, to the rejuvenation of realism (as evident in Dogme 95) and documentary cinema, to a renaissance in national cinema, evident in the efflorescence of, among others, Danish, Mexican, and Romanian cinema since the 1990s. We have also seen a sea change in audience dynamics, as there is at once more audience for events and texts able to command national or global attention; more audiences for a cornucopia of micro-cinemas, subnational, and transnational cinemas; and less audience for traditional theatrical-release cinema, which must now compete with proliferating digital platforms – from MP4 files, to cable television, to on-demand streaming media. National cinema is at once defined by larger audiences, bigger films, and more effective release and marketing strategies, at the same time as it involves a more dispersed and fragmented audience, viewing a greater variety of cinema on a wider variety of platforms. We need to question fundamental categories to help us better fathom their relevance, at the same time as we need new categories and theoretical models to guide analysis. Studying Kaurismäki’s cinema can contribute to the reconfiguration of the theoretical and analytical practices by which we study national cinema in times of globalisation.2
The terms ‘multinational’ and ‘transnational’ that provide the subtitle for this section designate a continuum of production, distribution, and aesthetic practices. We return to the term transnational below. Multinational here denotes the contested multiplicity of any national arena, its heterogeneity – not a commercial operation across national territories, as in the multinational corporation. A nation is never homogeneous, for even the smallest national arena consists of multiple, changing political positions and associated institutions, which find diverse allies within and beyond the borders of the state. These positions and alliances of course change over time, leading to new alignments. The theoretical impulse here is Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s poststructuralist arguments about social identity (see Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Laclau 2005) rather than Benedict Anderson’s ‘Imagined Communities’ argument (1991). Laclau and Mouffe argue that no representation can ever be self-sufficient, for there is always a signified which cannot be encompassed within a signifier’s representation. When the nation is represented by the image of the self-sacrificing soldier, we must ask in what ways men, women, children, and groups distinct from the militarised representation of the nation are encoded in such an image. There can never be a perfect homogeneity, or identity, in questions of representation, making struggles over representation highly important to the formation of a notion of national identity, at the same time as such an identity will always be the contingent and exclusionary outcome of struggles. By contrast, Anderson famously argues that consumption of print culture constitutes a communicative space, which inculcates assumptions about strangers’ identity with oneself within that space. Representations of the nation matter less in Anderson’s analysis than practices and markets that cultivate and delimit imaginative interconnection. For cinema studies today, the relevance of Anderson is insignificant, for the local and transnational distribution and exhibition of cinema does not correlate with the discrete reading publics and print cultures on which Anderson’s theory is premised.3 Multinational is a term that places emphasis on the contested and changing character of any nexus of national discourse, which contributes to representation of a nation.
This argument about multinational cinema finds theoretical support in Philip Rosen’s elegant argument that national cinema takes shape around cohesive and dispersive arguments, texts, and other dynamics. ‘The discussion of national cinema assumes not only that there is a principle or principles of coherence among a large number of films; it also involves an assumption that those principles have something to do with the production and/or reception of those films within the legal borders (or benefiting capital controlled within) a given nation-state’ (2006: 18); yet at the same time, Rosen observes, coherence is in tension with ‘countervailing, dispersive forces’, for example, critique of the national cinema, audience address going beyond the nation, or transnational financing of production, among others. So while commentators may stress the historical continuity and homogeneity of a national cinema – in the history of Finnish cinema the importance of natural lighting, summer-time location shots, midsummer celebrations, staging designed to make the actors ‘glow’ with summer enchantment, as Antti Alanen has pointed out (2005: 619) – homogeneity is a construction that always exists in tension with dispersive forces – for example the long historical preference for Hollywood imports, rather than national scenography, among Finnish audiences. When conceptualising the national in Kaurismäki’s cinema, this dialectics of coherence and dispersion helps us think about his cinema as a multilayered, contradictory, and disputed body of work.
Dispersive qualities are evident in what Kaurismäki omits from his films and in their audience address, even though there are strong coherences to national convention, as we will explore shortly. In the context of Alanen’s point, we can see a dispersive quality in Kaurismäki’s construction of nationality. Despite critical consensus about the national character of visual expression in Kaurismäki’s cinema, on the few occasions Kaurismäki includes the conventions mentioned by Alanen – as for example in Juha or in images of the potato garden in The Man Without a Past – there is a strong charge of irony, creating a tone of ambiguity in what on the surface appears to be a nod to tradition. The dialectic of coherence and dispersion is also plainly evident in questions of audience address. Kaurismäki could seek the favour of national audiences by valorising nationally coded elements in his films. But he constructs his films around one of the least symbolically privileged figures in Finnish culture, the lumpen prole, a small urban aggregate which does not belong to the working classes, does not belong to the intelligentsia or administrative classes, and stands a great distance from the Finnish-speaking, land-owning peasantry, around which Finnish national identity took shape. The author Kaurismäki was reading in Hamburg, Joel Lehtonen, created one of the most famous literary analogues to the lumpen prole, Juutas Käkriäinen, a landless agrarian worker who figured in Lehtonen’s highly ironic critique of the Finnish intelligentsia’s self-understanding at the time of the Finnish Civil War (1918). Kaurismäki often treats nationally coded elements in the films ironically or even parodically. The Leningrad Cowboys films, for example, mock the national audience’s notions about Finnish culture in circulation outside the country – as is evident in the opening sequence of Leningrad Cowboys Go America. Jean Sibelius, Alvar Aalto, Lasse Virén, and Ville Valo (HIM) triumphed on the world stage, while remaining true to their roots – or at least living most of the year in Finland. The Leningrad Cowboys leave home, fail abroad, and return to a collective farm in the Ukraine, after the fall of the Soviet Union. Such parody attacks the representations and narratives that a national audience views benignly or even prizes, questioning the elements that ostensibly appeal to the national audience. ‘The comic, ironic and violent tones of the narration create a distance, blocking and hindering rather than encouraging national sentiments and nostalgic pleasures’, writes Anu Koivunen (2006: 134). Omissions and the ambiguous tone of the films question the status of national convention, suggesting it is not natural or necessary, but subject to irony, parody, and humour from diverse perspectives.
Issues of representation and audience address are also relevant to viewers beyond Finnish borders, which brings us to the discussion of transnationalism. In a thoughtful criticism of the term’s use in cinema studies, Mette Hjort observes that transnationalism is often taken as self-evident. ‘The term functions as shorthand for a series of assumptions about the networked and globalised realities that are those of a contemporary situation, and it is these assumptions, rather than explicit definitions, that lend semantic content to “transnational”’ (2010: 13). It also enjoys a positive semantic charge, as transnationalism entails the ‘welcome demise of the ideologically suspect nation-states and the cinematic arrangements to which they gave rise’ (2010: 14). My notion of transnationalism draws on Rosen, for I see it as tending towards the construction and maintenance of non-national coherences and tending towards dissipating or making less significant national and state-based ones. Transnationalism is significant for Kaurismäki’s films, for like many other auteur cinemas, his depends on crossing borders. Kaurismäki’s films are a niche product in all their markets, but that niche audience can total millions when cobbled together through festivals and art-house distribution. Kaurismäki’s films address a multi-local, transnational audience far more than a national one. For example, just nine percent of the theatrical admissions of The Man Without a Past occurred in Finland, although the film is also Kaurismäki’s most successful film on home soil; admissions in France accounted for some thirty-five percent, Germany eighteen, and Italy fifteen.4 The Lumiere Database on Admissions of Films Released in Europe shows that France, Germany, and Italy account for sixty to seventy percent of the director’s admissions. Yet even with France making up thirty-five percent of the admissions for The Man Without a Past, one percent of the French population purchased a ticket to the film – the cinephile audience in large cities. Given this niche audience, the importance of film festivals is obvious: festival impact and related publicity help put a film on the cinephile’s viewing agenda, for the media attention focused on a festival performs a ‘value adding’ function, as Marijke de Valck argues (2007: 210). It momentarily elevates a collection of largely niche-audience films to a general interest story – a notion we will return to below. Festivals act as transnational multipliers, generating notoriety that translates into distribution, word of mouth, enhanced reputation, and so forth. We would miss these dimensions completely, if we failed to consider the transnational dynamics of Kaurismäki’s cinema.
Transnationalism in Kaurismäki’s cinema is an instance of globalisation, rather than internationalism, to draw on terms from a relevant discussion to further develop the point in question. The political scientist Peter Katzenstein writes that
globalization [is] a process that transcends space and compresses time. Internationalization [is] a process that refers to territorially based exchanges across borders. It refers to basic continuities in the international state system. Globalization highlights the emergence of new actors and novel relations in the world system, internationalization, the continued relevance of existing actors and the intensification of existing relations. (In Hjort and Petrie 2007: 14)
Katzenstein’s distinction between internationalism and globalisation complements our approach to Kaurismäki’s cinema, in which we have sought to track a dialectic of cohesion and dispersal. Globalisation disperses the formations around which the nation-state system coheres, internationalism shores up the political, economic, and cultural cohesion of the nation-state system. We see echoes of these dynamics on many levels of Kaurismäki’s cinema, inasmuch as repeating images of summer light, location shooting, and agrarian life in Juha and the Leningrad Cowboys films can be read as instances of internationalism, projecting abroad a repertoire of Finnish iconography, even as Kaurismäki’s ambiguous audience address and distribution patterns indicate that he belongs to a globalised auteur cinema – comprised of festivals, rights representatives, boutique distribution, and associated forms of narration, tone, audience address and so forth.
The multinational and the transnational are entangled, for the auteur can work in multiple locations and address diverse audiences, making films with national dimensions that also speak to a broader, larger, more diverse audience. Whether we frame Kaurismäki’s cinema in a national and international framework or transnational and global framework, forces of cohesion and dispersal push and pull his cinema, making clear that it cannot be reduced to a singular identity. This ambivalence brings us back to Laclau and Mouffe’s argument that signifiers, or symbols, of identity always involve a relationship between a part and an impossible whole. What matters are the parts chosen to represent the whole, and the arguments we make about what these parts represent. Symbols can be chosen that connote cohesion, in Rosen’s sense. By contrast, symbols can be chosen that connote dispersion and heterogeneity. While Kaurismäki’s cinema tends to be framed in terms of national cohesion, seeing his cinema in multinational and transnational contexts make evident the dispersive dynamics.
Ambiguous Identities
By turning from a theoretical emphasis to closer analysis of some symbolic and often discussed elements of Kaurismäki’s films we find confirmation of the ambiguity we have noted. In its resistance to categorisation, Kaurismäki’s cinema prompts us to specify further the categories under discussion, a project that correlates with Hjort’s argument about the necessity of elaborating more carefully terms such as transnationalism. In so doing, we find that Kaurismäki’s cinema shows the persistence of national and multinational cinema, at the same time as it shows pervasive and significant dimensions of transnationalism.
One of the oft-cited aesthetic elements taken to express national sentiment in Kaurismäki’s cinema is the silence of the characters and the films’ sparse dialogue. The characters are laconic, bordering on the catatonic. The director Kaurismäki is also often described as silent. The characters and the director’s silence are supposed to express a national trait. This conjunction of elements has coalesced since Kaurismäki came to the attention of the festival circuit in 1989, and it has become one of the typical narratives for treating Kaurismäki’s cinema. Swedish critic Gunnar Bergdahl makes clear the cohesion between the films, the silence, the director, and the nation in a 1990 interview with Kaurismäki. ‘Should we see Ariel as a depiction of Finnish reality?’ asks the journalist. ‘I take out a cigarette. I light it. Then the police arrive, and it’s over. That’s why I keep making my films shorter and shorter. Do you understand what I mean?’ replies Kaurismäki (in Bergdahl 1989). Here Kaurismäki advocates narrative and visual concision; by showing very little, and including little dialogue, one empowers the spectator to read the film’s omissions and silences. Yet he also implies that the concision comes from a national mentality premised on the notion that verbal expression is a relatively weak form of social interaction, and moreover one ill-suited to social struggle, such as when the police arrive. Helsingin Sanomat critic Heléna Ylänen, who has commented on Kaurismäki’s career and films since the director appeared on the scene in 1981, sums up the consensus: ‘Everything is laconic and minimalist. One speaks of overpowering feelings with few words and almost imperceptible expression. Eroticism is absent, since Aki makes films about the enchantment of feeling, not meat’ (in Siistonen 2006: 28). Feature magazine articles in the Finnish press often tell the same story, as their titles make clear: ‘The Quiet Man of Finnish Cinema Speaks’; another says ‘Chairman of the Quiet and Small’ (Sallinen 1998; Leppä 1996). But how to situate this silence? Does the quiet of the films and the director embody the quiet Finnish nation? Or is it more complicated, an ironic signifier? Does silence necessarily involve cohesion, given its privileged place in Finnish self-understanding? Might it also involve dispersion?
The silence of a film or filmmaker can be interpreted as failure, as an aesthetic choice, as an existential expression, as an ironic gesture. Perhaps the films and the director have little of substance to say? Such a critique has been levelled at Hamlet Goes Business as well as the Leningrad Cowboys films. Or perhaps the silence is an affilliative aesthetic gesture towards the silent cinema or the melodramatic tradition. Kaurismäki has for example remarked that cinema died when sound was introduced. The melodramatic strand in French poetic realism relies on silence, as Jean Gabin’s pregnant silences in films such as Les bas-fonds (The Lower Depths, Jean Renoir, 1936), La grande illusion (The Grand Illusion, Jean Renoir, 1937), and especially La bête humaine show. In the poetic realist film Golden Marie, Georges Manda delivers just eighty-seven lines (see Andrew 1995: 340). Perhaps the silence in Kaurismäki’s films is an existential one, that is to say, it expresses a stoic worldview. Then again, perhaps the silence is ironic, working by indirection, saying nothing in order to say something else, negating speech in order to convey meaning. Let us focus on the last two of these readings, as we have touched on the others in earlier chapters.
The silences, sparse dialogue, and the dramatic stress these receive in Kaurismäki’s films arguably give expression to a range of emotions that are coded Finnish. Given symbolic emphasis as a metonymy for Kaurismäki’s cinema, it is easy to see the films’ silence cohering with a Finnish worldview in which silence tends to be regarded as a dignified expression of authentic emotion, of respect for others’ boundaries, of longing, but also as an expression of durable stoicism. When Iiris sits while others dance in The Match Factory Girl, the unfulfilled longing evident in her silence might be seen as an expression of the evocative Finnish word kaiho. Likewise, Rodolfo’s silent departure from Mimi’s deathbed at the conclusion of The Bohemian Life might be seen as a similar forlorn expression. Kaiho also captures the feelings evoked in Drifting Clouds, when a photograph of the late Matti Pellonpää is examined by Ilona.5 Kaiho is also called to mind by the images of Koistinen eating alone at a Hopperesque kiosk in Lights in the Dusk, by Irma’s goodbye to M on his departure to find his wife in The Man Without a Past, and by many other silent images of loneliness in Kaurismäki’s cinema. Kaiho is a brooding nostalgia, often associated with a feeling of longing for the community of the agrarian village and its society, which largely disappeared through the urbanisation of the post-war period. Music critic Ilkka Mattila (2009) points out that kaiho and national-romantic themes help explain the relatively high popularity of Finnish-language albums in the domestic market. Finnish recording artists sell more albums in their home market than domestic music sells in many other national markets, where English-language pop tends to receive a higher market share. At the same time, these albums and the acts that record them have not been exported or have performed poorly in export. Identifying a combination of silence and kaiho as a seminal theme in Kaurismäki’s films provides a means of identifying a coherence with national culture and national cinema.
Yet the silence can also involve painful ambivalence, when silent longing mixes with shame. This occurs when longing is placed in a cultural context, as well as when the longing involves a triangular relationship, in which the subject of longing identifies with others like her, at the same time as she identifies with an ego-ideal or ‘social eye’, who sees the subject longing for something possessed by the ego-ideal, as the scholar of visual culture Tarja Laine has argued (2004: 92–101). Silent longing in such a case still involves coherence with a positively coded national sentiment. Yet it also includes a painful lack, inasmuch as being seen as a subject of longing means that the subject does not have that thing, which the ego-ideal possesses. In a number of Kaurismäki films, the ego-ideal or ‘social eye’ possesses work, and the subject of longing does not. Such relationships are key features of Shadows in Paradise, Ariel, Drifting Clouds, The Man Without a Past, and Lights in the Dusk, for example. As Laine points out, work is a constitutive feature of Finnish national identity, and everyone is supposed to have it. As a constitutive national myth, enduring, silent work figures prominently in the texts of such canonical authors as J.L. Runeberg, Aleksis Kivi, and Väinö Linna. The idea is that through long-suffering and tireless labour Finns can transform their boggy soil and northern forests into a nation among nations. ‘The place of the “ego-ideal” has been defined by the features of an honest, hard-working subject’, writes Laine (2004: 94). When the unemployed subject longing for work recognises herself among the unemployed at the same time as she identifies with the ego ideal, ambivalence is generated and shame results. While the narrative of Drifting Clouds can be understood in terms of universal experience, Laine suggests that the experiences of ambivalent longing and shame in the film draw emotional force by situating them historically and culturally in a Finnish context. The representation of silence in Drifting Clouds and other films helps explain the relevance of a national context to Kaurismäki’s cinema, at the same time as it shows the complexity and multivalence of a national myth like silence. It can involve coherence, but also ambivalence that diminishes certainty about what exactly silent longing means.
The openness of silence in the national context entails the possibility of varying responses to representations of silence. Silence can be linked to shame, as in Drifting Clouds, but as we have seen it can also be charged positively, associated with stoicism and doggedness. These different perspectives often turn up in ironic ways. Consider for example the scene in The Match Factory Girl in which Iiris’s love interest Aarne (Vesa Vierikko) comes to pick her up for their date. Aarne and Iiris’s stepfather sit silently at the coffee table, neatly set with a lace tablecloth and china. The scene’s exaggerated silence mocks Iiris’s mother and stepfather, saying something more about them than the images convey literally. In this case, the excess would seem to speak not of an alignment with a positively valued national feeling. Rather, it evokes bitter laughter that implicitly attacks the parental silence that conceals Iiris’s suffering.
The link between silence and irony has been analysed by the critic Jonathan Romney, who argues that in combination they lend the films openness and undecidability. It’s hard to describe the response Kaurismäki’s cinema calls for, writes Romney:
Kaurismäki’s humour – except for the surreal farce of the Leningrad Cowboys – is characteristically deadpan in the extreme … a humour that is so acute and economic that laughter seems a superfluous extravagance. As a result, many have walked out of his films uncertain whether they have seen a comedy at all … His detractors may think he’s a joke, but then so do his fans – they feel he’s the best joke the art cinema has to offer at its own expense. These films are jokes about the seriousness of the art-house tradition by a man who reveres Robert Bresson, Carl Dreyer and Yasujiro Ozu; and jokes about the stereotype of the national character by a man who has made a career out of presenting himself as a the gloomiest of Finns (his own lead actors excepted) who ever stared into a glass of Koskenkorva, the national tipple. (1997: 10)
The silence forces spectators to suspend their judgement, prompting them to reconsider the status of the film, the filmmaker, the art cinema, and the discourses it invokes, nationality among others. Laine makes a similar point, suggesting Kaurismäki can be understood within the tradition of the ‘cinema of irony’, which uses self-reflection and emotional detachment to prompt critical responses that prod viewers to try and square the absurd depiction of national stereotypes in the films with widely-held notions about the same stereotypes (see Laine 2004: 93–4). Such arguments lead Romney to place Kaurismäki in the modernist tradition of the art cinema, wherein humour and absurd self-presentation discourage identification and accentuate distance, prompting spectators’ self-aware response to the films and the director.
The tension between a sympathetic reading and an ironic reading of the national discourse also raises some productive questions about the cultural politics of gender, which once again show how contested a national stereotype like silence can be. When critics laud the beauty of silent expressions in Kaurismäki’s films, their praise is usually directed at men’s silence. To be sure, films such as The Match Factory Girl and Drifting Clouds are notable for their dynamic and comparatively unusual working-women protagonists. Yet still, what do we talk about when we talk about longing, nostalgia, kaiho? We talk about the men who express these feelings: the performance of Matti Pellonpää in The Bohemian Life, Markku Peltola’s role as M in The Man Without a Past, the feelings expressed by Koistinen in Lights in the Dusk, and so forth. Yet, praising these male characters for their stoicism also genders silence or kaiho, making it an experience controlled by and especially relevant to men. The erasure of women can be seen in The Bohemian Life, especially when set in contrast to Sally Potter’s well-known feminist adaptation of Murger’s text, Thriller. Potter’s film shifts the perspective of the Rudolphe and Mimi plot from the vantage of the painter to the seamstress arrived in Bohemian Paris from the countryside. Like Kaurismäki’s The Bohemian Life, Potter’s film also screened at Berlin in the festival’s Forum for New Cinema.6 Noting this institutional connection, film critic Amy Taubin compared the cultural politics of gender in Potter and Kaurismäki’s films:7
as easy as it is for me to be moved as a ‘human being’ by … the devotion of man and, yes, dog … as a woman I just felt left out. Thriller poses and answers the powerful question, ‘Why did Mimi have to die?’ … Potter’s answer was that Mimi died so that Rudolfo could be transformed by loss and so that we could identify with him in his loss. What’s disturbing about La vie de Bohème is not only that Kaurismäki (whose The Match Factory Girl is a great feminist text) seems totally unaware of Potter’s intervention, but that he ironises every aspect of the original novel except Mimi’s death, which he accepts as a given. (1992: 15; emphasis in original)
While Kaurismäki eschews the objectifying male gaze that often accompanies an implicitly masculine narrative perspective, his films are often premised on the equation of male, lower-class experience in post-war Finland with national experience, which is arguably represented in the silent, stoic man. The film scholar Sanna Kivimäki points out that few critics and scholars have commented on the issue of gender in Kaurismäki’s films. Yet she argues that even in a film with strong feminist aspects such as The Match Factory Girl, the film’s many clichés of the silently suffering woman, driven by her emotions and body, also require critical attention. The representation of gender in Kaurismäki’s films replicates images and narratives that have often been criticised by feminists, yet the films’ irony and their status within an auteur cinema have forestalled criticism, suggests Kivimäki (2010; 2012). Here questions related to multination and representation arise.
Beyond silence, the gender politics of Kaurismäki’s films can also be seen in the typical structure of their narrative. Time and again, the films are built around the experience of a lower-class man. His alienation furnishes a motivation for his longing, melancholia, or hope for love and acceptance. His emotional stance is then taken by critics to be an expression of national experience and sentiment. The typical narrative of Kaurismäki’s cinema overlaps with the narrative of Finland’s industrialisation and urbanisation – and is typical as a ‘narrative of education’. In the Finnish context, the story tells of men (re)building Finland and its industry after the wars. This connection is underscored by the privileged status of industrial work in Kaurismäki’s cinema. In such connections, we find a powerful force of cohesion between Kaurismäki and the national history and cinema. But whose national history and cinema? These categories and the narratives that underpin them involve gendered perspectives. This perspective is emphasised in Anu Koivunen’s analysis of masculinity and nostalgia in The Man Without a Past (2006), which shows how the film equates nostalgia and a nationally coded, working-class masculinity. Koivunen’s argument resonates with a body of scholarship which has documented and challenged the gendering of national experience as male in Finnish social discourse (see Gordon et al. 2002). Scholars such as Mia Spangenberg (2009) have pointed out that even as growing gender equity pressures the privileged male and induces a ‘crisis of masculinity’, such films as The Man Without a Past and Lights in the Dusk maintain men’s status as the privileged representative of the Finnish nation (if not urban late modernity) by presenting male experience as symptomatic. By minimising or downplaying gender difference within national discourse, they code as male such privileged symbols of nation as silence, stoicism, and longing. While appearing to cohere with national discourse, they replicate a gendered exclusion, which in fact diminishes the inclusiveness, legitimacy, and emotional resonance of the national culture they invoke. In this point we see the relevance of studying cohesion and dispersion of national discourse within the context of Laclau and Mouffes’s argument about the politics of identity and representation, and the notion of multination. Who and what stand as representatives of the nation?
What we have seen is that nation in Kaurismäki’s cinema is multiple and contested, insofar as diverse elements of national discourse are put into dialogue in the films. The characters are not simply expressions of the laconic reality of Finnish experience, or a stoic worldview, but representations constructed in ways that stage questions about national discourse. While there is clearly good reason to analyse nation in Kaurismäki’s cinema, it is also clear that the self-aware, ironic status of his work raises questions about the premises of such analysis. Might we better understand Kaurismäki by seeing him as a Socratic figure, who uses indirection and humour to drive home existential questions and dilemmas, as Søren Kierkegaard suggested about Socrates? The irony is so pervasive and open that it becomes necessary to ask whether the body of work might be considered an ironic critique of national discourse, among other targets. When coupled with Kaurismäki’s frequently blunt remarks about nation – ‘Finland is run by idiots’ (Jutila 1999) – this imperative becomes even clearer.
Ironic Nationality
‘Jätä kaikki ja tule kanssani Eiraan’ (‘Leave everything and come with me to Eira’) says one of the Franks in Calamari Union. The film chronicles the odyssey of thirteen Franks and one Pekka, as they make their way from Helsinki’s working-class neighbourhood Kallio south across the ‘Long Bridge’ (Pitkä silta), past the University of Helsinki and into Eira, where lie Helsinki’s jugendstil (art nouveau) apartment buildings, foreign embassies, and the city’s premiere park (Kaivopuisto), nestled against the water. The men’s journey might well be construed in picturesque terms, as other filmmakers have done. Such a depiction of Helsinki and the Eira neighbourhood characterises Kaivopuiston kaunis Regina (Beautiful Regina of Kaivopuisto Park, T. J. Särkkä, 1941), one of Finnish cinema’s all-time most popular domestic productions. This costume drama set in the mid-nineteenth century seeks to enchant the viewer by presenting the park and Eira as a surprisingly pastoral space, alive with the beauty and romantic charge of nature. Other films have adopted the tourist’s gaze in approaching Eira, glamourising the wealthiest corner of the city to portray it as an appealing space, which the average viewer cannot fully access. This approach structures the hit film Kuutamolla (Lovers & Leavers, Aku Louhimies, 2002), a Bridget Jones-style romantic comedy, which associates the cultural geography of Helsinki with characters to distinguish their moral status. Eira and the characters living there exude elegance, caché and inaccessibility, for which the protagonist Iiris (Minna Haapkylä) yearns, but which she ultimately discovers are confining and disingenuous. In the Moonlight thematises the conflict between appearances and reality by making Iiris a film buff, which also motivates intertextual references to images of romance and Helsinki in Finnish cinema. The spectator is positioned as a tourist and consumer. Calamari Union, by contrast, eschews the picturesque and the touristic gaze. Shot in black-and-white and occurring diegetically in the course of twenty-four hours, its low-key lighting, noir costuming, and location choices make the city and Eira look gritty, rather than picturesque or appealing – like the London of I Hired a Contract Killer. Calamari Union’s framing avoids recognisable landmarks, or severs their usual framing. We see similarities in Kaurismäki’s urban images in general. London, Paris, New York, and New Orleans are depicted with realist location shots, yet deterritorialised and stripped of landmarks, familiar architecture, and markers of place. While Kaurismäki’s cinema latches on to some of the cohesive forces within Finnish cinema, lending the films to national understanding, we can also see how Calamari Union’s aesthetic distances the film from historical and contemporary conventions by which Finnish visual culture has defined its status in national terms. Kaurismäki’s style can be understood in terms of irony, for in differing from the conventions by which Helsinki and other cities are represented, the films take a position about the visual construction of city and nation. This irony can be likened to ‘the wig’, as explored in chapter three, drawing on Certeau. Kaurismäki’s ironic nationality insinuates a competing socio-ethical position into the consumerist and touristic image of city and nation.
One of the chief ways by which Kaurismäki’s cinema ironically disputes the conventional means of representing nation is by unmasking the images and narratives promulgated by state institutions. The premise beneath such a project is that the mode of communication, rather than the mode of production, figures most prominently in the ways that people produce meaning in their lives and communities. It goes without saying that in late modernity electronically mediated images and narratives help shape quotidian perceptions, experiences, and hopes. They make visual culture a charged arena of competition over which images and narratives will take and hold sway in defining cultural, economic, and political outlooks and agendas. This struggle is not about signs, but about images whose relationship to their apparent referents is tangential. The issue is how images can create chains of associations that engender ideas, affects, and attitudes. Such a task involves public diplomacy for the state. In contrast, critique of the state can be accomplished by twisting tropes of national self-representation, thereby modifying the images and associations the state affirms.
The power attributed to the mode of communication in defining Finland as a nation was made particularly overt in the country in a pivotal moment during autumn 2008, but the fabrication and modulation of the national image goes back to the nineteenth century. One key moment in this history is the artistic contributions of composer Jean Sibelius and visual artist Akseli Gallén-Kallela in 1899 and 1900, seeking to resist Tsar Nicholas II’s exertion of strong Russification pressure on Finland. Sibelius composed the symphonic poem Finlandia, and Gallén-Kallela created four Kalevala-themed frescoes for the Finnish pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair of 1900. The pavilion played an important public-diplomacy role, seeking to define the legitimacy and autonomy of the Finnish nation before European eyes. Another key instance is the 1952 Helsinki Olympic Games, in which Finland sought to project an image of modernity and neutrality, erasing the stain of its cooperation with Nazi Germany during World War II. The recent pivotal moment in this history occurred in September 2008, when Finnish Foreign Minister Alexander Stubb appointed a commission to research and propose a ‘national brand’ for Finland. Art and sport were no longer sufficient; corporate strategy needed to be used to burnish the national image. Stubb chose former Nokia CEO Jorma Ollila to lead the commission. The purpose of the national brand is ‘to support the business activities of Finnish enterprise, enhance Finland’s influence abroad, develop interest in Finland as a site of investment, and increase tourism to Finland’ (Finnish Foreign Ministry 2009). As filmmaker and public intellectual Jörn Donner pointed out in a number of comments on debates over this commission and the national image, Sibelius, Gallén-Kallela and the 1952 Olympics are but several instances of a long-lived obsession with the national self-image. Donner should know, as he and Martti Häikkiö had written a book on the topic entitled Finland’s Image, Year Zero, published by the Finnish Foreign Ministry one year after the fall of the Berlin Wall and on the eve of the dissolution of the Soviet Union (1990).8 In recent writing, Donner (2008) disparages the national-branding project for seeking to engineer a brand, rather than encouraging the development and competition that would foster success and consequent global visibility. What is clear is the extent to which the iconography, images, and indeed vision, are multinational, objects of struggle between many quarters, including the state. In the context of such debate, Kaurismäki’s irony and his conscious refusal to repeat conventions of nationalised visual culture helps us see the way his films embrace disseminating and pluralising forces that diminish the hold of national cinema, more so than they embrace cohesive forces.
Kaurismäki’s thinking on this issue is visible in an interview with a Swiss magazine published just before the Hamburg Film Festival in 2002 – one of the stories that heightened the excitement over Kaurismäki, according to Hammarberg in his interview. The Swiss journalist says: ‘You’re a hopeless nostalgic … Was everything really so much better in the past?’ Kaurismäki replies:
It’s purely a question of aesthetic values. Old cars, old cameras, old radios, old glasses, and old ashtrays are simply more beautiful than new ones … My films have never included what [mainstream Finnish critics] want: no reindeer, no new cars, no computers. The Finnish Tourism Bureau has considered taking legal action against me. Every film I make apparently sets their efforts back a decade. (In Stecher 2002)
One way of reading this remark is to understand it as an ascription of subjective value to old objects, which would support a nostalgic reading of the films as an expression of kaiho-like longing. These objects are beautiful ‘in my eyes’, so to speak. But why make a comparison to images of the new, then? The important point about aesthetic values requires unpacking the comparison between old cameras and radios and images allegedly desired by mainstream Finnish critics and the Tourism Bureau. They are the very group allied with Stubb and his national brand project.
The cited passage compares two lists, one of old objects and a shorter one of images not included in Kaurismäki’s films, which he says critics wish he would include. In Kaurismäki’s view, officials have noticed the films lack the iconography disseminated by the Finnish Tourism Board. Kaurismäki implies that Finnish critics want to see images in his films that would represent Finland in the way the state represents the country to non-Finns. They want Kaurismäki to contribute to the public-diplomacy mission of the Tourism Board and the Foreign Ministry.
Making this remark in an interview with a Swiss journalist, Kaurismäki makes two suggestions about the national status of his films. He implies that his image of Finland is at least influential enough to compete with the advertising campaigns familiar to the Finnish critics. Hence his films are a threat because they may crowd out the official representation of the country to non-Finns, undermining the work of the Tourism Board. Kaurismäki also implies that film critics and officials in the Tourism Board, intellectuals and officials, share an agenda which views cinema as an advertising tool for promoting the nation-state. So while at first glance this remark about aesthetic values seems to be an expression of subjective nostalgia for beautiful old things, on closer inspection it reveals itself also to be a statement that contrasts Kaurismäki’s films with the image-making agenda Finnish elites have for national visual culture. What is more, it calls to mind the point made by Donner in the epigraph to this chapter. It attacks the premise that art, thought, and ideas are the expression of the nation-state, suggesting that the particular qualities of the image matter far more than their representation of an entity such as the nation.
We see a premise underlying Kaurismäki’s films, which relates to what he means by aesthetic values: people, people’s experiences, and the objects that fill their lives have value that cannot be effaced by the new, the desirable, and the commercially available. Here we again see an echo of the argument about everyday nostalgia explored in the previous chapter. These objects insinuate a disruptive socio-political ethics into the instrumental rationality of the late-modern welfare state. It is no mistake that his list of the old in the passage above is not a list of images, but a list of objects. By representing the objects in ways that ascribe value to them, Kaurismäki contests images of the new, whose value in his films tends to be cast in negative terms.
A target of Kaurismäki’s critique is the project of building a cohesive image around a specific agenda. The stakes of that agenda are brought out by the comments of one prominent viewer of The Man Without a Past. For this viewer, the story of the homeless amnesiac M’s search for his identity created the wrong picture of Finland by featuring shipping containers and Salvation-Army soup lines too prominently. Social Democratic MP and former chair of the parliamentary Health and Human Services Committee, Marjatta Vehkaoja, remarked on seeing the film: ‘Bread lines are going to be our new export product once this film goes into worldwide circulation’ (STT 2002), a remark made several months before the film generated enthusiasm in Finland on account of its Grand Prix at Cannes, an Academy Award nomination, and the Nordic Council film prize. ‘When we’ve organised bread lines in the past, we’ve been able to help these people. But we need to push ourselves further and remember to ask whether food stamps actually provide people relief in a more dignified manner’, said Vehkaoja (Finnish Press Agency 2002). The MP considers bread lines undignified and disjunctive with contemporary institutional practice, and the image it has fashioned of itself. The problem for the MP is that Kaurismäki’s film is an export product that creates the wrong image of Finland. Paradoxically, another state institution, the Finnish Film Foundation, is promoting Kaurismäki and his films as a model of cultural export. What we see is the multinational dispute to which Kaurismäki’s cinema contributes.
Vehkaoja’s comment also makes evident the politicisation of vision we have been discussing, implicitly acknowledging the logic driving such projects as the Commission to Develop Finland’s National Brand. In speaking of food stamps as more dignified than bread lines, Vehkaoja is also arguing that one loses dignity when one sees oneself on display for others in a breadline or waiting for soup served by the Salvation Army. The nation loses confidence when it sees itself lining up for help. The premise here is that recognising oneself within an image of poverty creates shame. If a person in need of assistance did not need to display himself lining up for food, then he would not lose dignity, and so would escape shame, calling Laine’s argument to mind again. The image and visibility of poverty stigmatises as much as poverty itself does, according to Vehkaoja’s account.
Vehkaoja’s criticism of the film also relates to the image of stasis she attributes to the Salvation Army. This transnational institution has branded itself as a perennial source of relief to the impoverished. In the film, the Salvation Army’s uniforms, store, and soup line operation are represented as timeless and unchanging. In their stasis, they create an image that disrupts the narrative of modernisation and progress, which representatives of the state recurrently emphasise. ‘We used to do breadlines,’ says Vehkaoja, ‘now we do electronic payment cards.’ We used to be a ‘land won by our fathers’ combat, passed up by proud strangers’, suggests Stubb and his commission; now we need brand synergy to attract those strangers to visit and invest.9 The discourse of nation here concerns the images by which nation is made visible to its citizens and others. Such representations must compete for visibility in a crowded media environment. Kaurismäki is hence a threat, for he violates the conventions of representation favoured by the national intelligentsia.
These points bring us back again to Laclau and Mouffe’s argument about the hegemonic struggle involved in all forms of representation. Within any representation of social identity, parts stand for wholes. While Nokia and its global economic success may be presented as standing for a national history of innovation and engineering skill, the company and the engineers that built it do not represent another symbolic national tradition of excellence in musical composition and performance, represented by Jean Sibelius, Kaija Saariaho, Karita Mattila, Jussi Björling, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and others. And such representatives of a tradition in musical culure can hardly be said to stand for the story of Finland’s wars, its suffering, sacrifice, and impoverishment into the 1950s. To be sure, some try to reconcile these. But any representation of the nation, or brand, must also involve exclusions and misrepresentations. The politics involved in such multinational contests concern who will be represented, and who will be excluded. In engaging the politicisation of visual culture, Kaurismäki uses irony to question and contest the primary narratives of Finnish visual culture. In so doing, his films do not build a cohesive national visual culture, but dissipate and distinguish, contributing in some ways to the formation of a more plural visual culture. In other ways, Kaurismäki’s films continue exclusions of gender that have figured prominently in national identity discourse. Categorising Kaurismäki’s cinema in national terms, then, must avoid oversimplifying notions of identity and cohesion, which the director has questioned and attacked over the course of his career. Such a view does not entail that his films have nothing to do with national cinema, however.
Kaurismäki as Small-Nation Auteur
We have analysed a set of tensions and contradictions that run through Kaurismäki’s cinema understood as a national cinema, noting the way that self-presentation of the director and commentators’ agendas weave together strands of national and transnational discourses to address different audiences and to generate various effects. The premise of the argument has been that national cinema is not a homogeneous or unified discourse, but a heterogeneous and conflicted one, which intersects with transnational debates, institutions, and networks. What then is the relationship between the national and transnational dimensions of Kaurismäki’s cinema? The best point of departure in examining this interconnection is to analyse Kaurismäki as a small-nation filmmaker in a way that builds on and expands the arguments about this term put forth by Mette Hjort (2005; 2007). While Hjort places emphasis on small-nation factors related to production, Kaurismäki’s cinema makes clear that a crucial dimension of small-nation cinema is also distribution and exhibition. Adding these factors to the discussion of small nation helps further enrich this useful category, and provides an account of how Kaurismäki’s cinema works as a small-nation cinema.
The small-nation filmmaker makes his films within a context of asymmetric forces. The institutional, economic, and cultural dimensions of these forces have been ingeniously analysed by Hjort in Small Nations, Global Cinema (2005) and her edited volume, Cinema of Small Nations (with Duncan Petrie, 2007). Hjort argues that the way filmmakers from small nations negotiate the asymmetries of small nationhood figure prominently in the way they make films, the kinds of films they make, and the way these films circulate in and outside their home territories. Small nationhood entails population size, geographical scale, gross domestic product (GDP), but also any nation state’s embedding in differentiated relationships of power (see Hjort and Petrie 2007: 3–6). Hjort’s argument stresses the extent to which small-nation cinema needs to be conceptualised with attention to a different set of imperatives and opportunities than those of cinemas with larger domestic markets, more widely-spoken languages, and more influence on the nations and markets around them. Asymmetries distinguish the globalisation of Anglo-American popular culture from, say, the global prominence of Malian music, Finnish architecture, or Tibetan Buddhism. Analysing the renaissance in Danish cinema that has occurred since the 1990s, Hjort shows how institutional redesign at the Danish Film Institute, increases in parliamentary appropriations for film, investment in specialised and general film education, ‘gift culture’-based collaboration, and creative leadership have together fostered a New Danish Cinema (2005; 2007). This cinema has attracted up to nearly fifty percent of total Danish theatrical admissions since the 1990s, while racking up thousands of screenings and scores of prizes at film festivals around the world. Denmark devotes significantly more money to cinema than the other Nordic countries do, producing almost twice as many films as Norway and Finland respectively, although all are similar in population size and GDP. The other Nordic cinemas have also enjoyed rising cinematic fortunes, but not to the extent of Danish cinema. As Hjort shows, Danish cinema has successfully fostered prolific and high-quality production, creating a reputation that attracts audiences at home and abroad. When it comes to small-nation cinema, then, a key question is how it attracts an audience, and this is a question for an auteur like Kaurismäki as well.
One way that Kaurismäki has attracted an audience has been to maintain and build upon a consistent production practice established early in his career, which generates a distinctive style at a low price. This distinctive style heightens audience recognition of the films, at the same time as it furnishes relative commercial flexibility, as low production costs minimise financial risk. Low-cost production can provide competitive advantage. The underground filmmaking techniques we noted in the discussion of Filmtotal in chapter two have remained significant in Kaurismäki’s career since the 1980s. Location shooting, relatively minimal shot planning, economical use of film stock with one-take shooting, sound synchronisation during shooting, and working with the same crew of actors and technicians has kept Kaurismäki’s production budgets to a ceiling of €1.2 million, of which the lion’s share is covered through grants and pre-sold arrangements with European television channels (see Nestingen 2007). The recurrent, cost-efficient production choices in Kaurismäki’s cinema require little financial outlay. For example, the bold, saturated colours that create the films’ distinctive palette can be inexpensively achieved. Another example is visible in films such as Crime and Punishment, Calamari Union, Hamlet, Drifting Clouds, Man Without a Past, and Lights in the Dusk, which include numerous night-time sequences: such a production choice allows shooting in urban locations free of pedestrian and vehicle traffic, and does not require using any of the production budget to close streets or hire police assistance (see Kuosmanen 2007). Kaurismäki has long refused to spend money on expensive musical royalties: one reason no Finnish tango features in Lights in the Dusk or Le Havre is that F-Music, formerly Fazer Music, which owns most of the Finnish repertoire, has raised the cost of usage rights significantly, causing Kaurismäki to decide to omit such music. Even Kaurismäki’s screenwriting has remained ‘underground’: he still speaks of writing his screenplays in a weekend, or a week in recent years, and many of his films have no script, including Calamari Union, Hamlet, The Match Factory Girl, the Leningrad Cowboys films, and Take Care of your Scarf, Tatiana (see Frodon 2006: 32). Rather than relying on ever larger budgets, then, Kaurismäki has maintained a disciplined production strategy, permitting maximal control and flexibility in how he and his films seek and reach their audience. Because Kaurismäki does not depend on big budgets, he can maintain control of production and have significant input concerning distribution.
While such a production strategy may not be unusual, even for a figure as established as Kaurismäki, it is the basis for an alternative mode of globalisation. In the first place, Kaurismäki is simply maximising the advantages he has: he exploits a distinctive ‘brand identity’ with an established audience, which has, since 1987, provided access to the premiere international film festivals. We can duly see this as an alternative form of globalisation, to recall Katzenstein’s argument and to pick up Hjort’s point about the value of analysis that comprehends how small-nation cinema works. Such analysis can help
pinpoint the causes and dynamics of alternative imaginings that to some extent challenge the dominance of the neoliberal model and especially its tendency to reinforce pre-existing patterns of exploitation or domination, be they political, economic, or cultural … The challenge is to pinpoint the ways in which the neoliberal conception – one favourable to global capital, to corporations governed by narrow strategic rationalities, and to the priorities and putative entitlements of the United States – itself can become the engine for alternative conceptions while agents in specific contexts mobilise the institutional resources of a local situation and effectively yoke them to the salient features of a globalised world. (2005: 26–7)
What is at issue is not making films that differ from the likes of Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977), Titanic (James Cameron, 1997), or Saw VI (Kevin Greutert, 2009) but rather contribute to a system that sustains alternative modes of filmmaking, distribution, and exhibition. The analysis of small-nation cinema as a part of this system has emphasised the significance and novelty of institutional and production practice and strategy. Yet Kaurismäki has maintained the same model of production, and the Finnish Film Foundation has made few and relatively small changes, compared to Denmark and Norway, for example. What is distinctive about his transnationalism is the role of the film festival, from the establishment of the Midnight Sun Festival to the key role of Berlin and Cannes. Kaurismäki’s cinema suggests that small-nation cinema as a category also requires theoretical examination of distribution and exhibition pattern and practice. What we see is a patterns of festival premiere, sale of distribution rights in multiple territories, and subsequent release by an art-house distributor to art-house exhibitors, with more established figures and companies exploiting consistency in distribution and exhibition through pre-production financing arrangements, and the like.
The vitality of this system is hardly evident if we place it within the conventional and much-criticised Hollywood–Europe dichotomy. For example, if we follow Toby Miller and his co-authors’ argument in Global Hollywood about the New International Division of Cultural Labour, by which they mean multinational entertainment corporations’ distribution of labour around the world in pursuit of inexpensive production, it would seem that there is little analytical space for the festival system (see Miller et al. 2001: 52–3). The simultaneous theatrical release of the Hollywood majors’ blockbuster films, their DVD releases, their availability online as streaming files, and their ancillary products would seem to crowd out other visual culture entirely. Since the 1990s, foreign releases have made up some sixty to seventy percent of Hollywood’s worldwide theatrical gross (see Aft 2004: 59). Yet to situate Kaurismäki and small-nation cinema in such a context would be an apples and oranges comparison.
A more telling frame of analysis both for Kaurismäki’s cinema and auteur cinema in general is available when we ask the question, What kind of product is the film distributor who purchases the rights to distribute Kaurismäki’s cinema buying? What does Sony Film Classics seek to do with The Man Without a Past, when it releases it in the US market? One reason for the heavy emphasis on production in analysis of the globalisation of cinema is the fetishisation of the massive media corporations that have been involved in cinema production since the mergers of the 1990s and 2000s. Correspondingly, film scholars have sought to unmask the function of these corporations with critical analysis. Yet as the authors of the media studies and business contribution The Curse of the Mogul: What’s Wrong with the World’s Leading Media Companies (2009) Knee, Greenwald, and Seave argue, any media business (including art-house and small-nation distributors) must face the key issue of competitive advantage. What are the barriers to entry to a market that provide a given enterprise an advantage?
There are only a few true advantages: economies of scale, customer captivity, costs of doing business, and government protection, point out Knee, Greenwald, and Seave. Relative economy of scale provides an advantage in a large market with high costs of doing business: a big established business can spread its costs across more sales, while doing more marketing, making it difficult for smaller companies to compete with it. (This is the key advantage that the Hollywood studios have.) Customer captivity designates the habits and investments of customers, which prevent them from switching their consumer behaviour. Costs of doing business refers to the costs of acquiring technology or locations necessary to successful business, for example patented technology or a strategic production location. Finally, government advantage recognises state support that favours one competitor over another.
The most important competitive advantage for Kaurismäki is the relative low cost of doing business, which involves low production costs and established relationships with distribution companies around Europe, Asia, and the Americas. This arrangement allows Kaurismäki maximum flexibility, for the films’ production budgets are covered by grants and pre-production financing arrangements with a variety of co-producers. As a result, Kaurismäki’s cinema can count on finding distribution in many niche markets, at a relatively low risk. The distinction I have in mind here is made by Knee, Greenwald, and Seave between mass-media entities and niche speciality entities. The line between general and special interest media is not self-evident. ‘What distinguishes true “niche media” is that the product itself is designed around a shared interest or activity. The Food Channel vs. USA Network; Fly Fisherman vs. Newsweek; dailycandy.com vs. MSN.com’ (Knee et al. 2009: 21). To speak about more relevant examples for this study, we can distinguish between production companies in the Nordic countries’ and their audience address. In the Finnish case, for example, such companies as Solar Film-Nordisk, Matila-Röhr, and Timo Koivusalo’s Artista Filmi Ltd. make general interest films for the domestic audience. Their films are released in sixty to eighty prints and have reached audiences in the hundreds of thousands domestically, but do not play at festivals and get limited, if any, foreign distribution. In contrast, a company like Kaurismäki’s Sputnik Ltd. releases films in a dozen or fewer prints domestically, but relies on a festival release to generate visibility which propels the film into multiple niche markets that are geographically widely spread. Niche media companies in the Nordic context include auteur and art-house cinema distributors, exhibitors, and producers, such as Lars von Trier and Peter Aalbek-Jensen’s Zentropa. These companies market themselves to specific audiences, at the same time as they seek to cultivate a network that enhances their status within a specific market segment, to increase their capacity to conduct business effectively and to enhance interest in their brands, who are their auteurs.
What is striking in examining these niche companies in the domestic context, however, is the extent to which they are construed in terms of general interest. It is often but not always the niche films that generate discussion and debate, gain visibility at festivals, and attract coverage including stories about their long lists of awards and controversies over production, and ultimately when such niche films acheive broad international distribution, they can have much greater economic success than even the most successful general interest domestic releases. Niche films also tend to represent the national culture in critics’ comments about national cinema, because of their perceived artistic quality. So when one speaks of Finnish cinema as a small-nation cinema, one tends to think of the Kaurismäki brothers or the documentarist Pirjo Honkasalo, not a Solar Films’ release like Pahat pojat (Bad Boys, Aleksi Mäkelä, 2003), viewed by some twelve percent of the Finnish population according to the Lumiere Database.
In Kaurismäki’s case we see disjunctions between the identity of the supposed audience for his cinema, the identities of the institutions which have financed the films, and the film personnel with whom Kaurismäki has collaborated to make the films. Critics both in Finland and abroad tend to assume the films are addressed to a Finnish audience, writing often about their Finnishness, a topic which has proved to be of limited interest to audiences outside the nation’s borders. Film scholar and Kaurismäki expert Pietari Kääpä points out that distribution of Kaurismäki’s films only confirms the insignificance of the Finnish market for him, releasing his films of the 1980s and 1990s in only four to seven prints. The Match Factory Girl was released in Finland on four prints in 1990 (2008: 88–94). These are tiny numbers – although they do predate the saturation release approach, which since the 1990s has seen Finnish blockbusters released in fifty to eighty prints. Further, it must be pointed out that Kaurismäki’s films have attracted TV viewership in the hundreds of thousands in Finland. Still, Kaurismäki’s films have a niche identity in their domestic market. They are also a niche product in France, Germany, and Italy, but the size of these markets adds up to sixty to seventy percent of the total theatrical admissions of Kaurismaki’s films. In the big picture, Kaurismäki’s primary audience is outside Finland – hence his handlers’ consternation at the provincial Finnish reporter in Hamburg. Kääpä observes that ‘while the implied or desired audience of Kaurismäki’s films may be constructed on the basis of cultural homogeneity, the reality of the audience constitution differs significantly from this’ (2008: 44). Similar contradictions are evident in Kaurismäki’s production schemes. While they appear to be national – Kaurismäki having been the single largest recipient of production subsidy from the Finnish Film Foundation since the 1980s (see Arolainen 1999) – the co-financing and co-production arrangements underpinning his cinema have consistently been transnational. Finally, while Kaurismäki is often associated with his troupe of Finnish actors, including Kati Outinen, Matti Pellonpää, Esko Nikkari, Elina Salo, and Kari Väänänen, among others, his use of cameos and guest roles by such directors and actors as Samuel Fuller, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Serge Reggiani, Andre Wilms, Nicky Tesco, and others makes the films diverse. What we have is a small-nation filmmaker who has developed a filmmaking practice that straddles the national and the transnational.
Kaurismäki and many other small-nation auteurs aspire to be a global niche interest and a general interest one at home. Kaurismäki’s niche status has become evident in the previous chapters. The bohemian narrative that circulates about Kaurismäki positions him not as mainstream figure, but as idiosyncratic, an outsider, and a social critic. His films’ aesthetics, moreover, embrace a niche status, telling stories of outsiders and aliens in an anachronistic and unfashionable, if also appealing cinematic idiom. The release of his films in Finland has also consistently followed niche exhibition practice, released as they have been in small numbers of prints at art-house theatres, attracting audiences over a long period with the help of favourable reviews and word-of-mouth. As the critic Markku Koski (2002) sums it up, Kaurismäki is fiercely opposed to the mainstream. Yet at the same time, the previous chapters have also shown the extent to which Kaurismäki’s cinema and the director aspire to the mainstream, to a mass market. When he remarks, ‘Tarja Halonen is a good president’ to Ville Hammarberg, or talks about political corruption on a national and global scale, he implies he is a commentator whose opinion matters. When commentators present Kaurismäki as the most vital figure in Finnish film history, someone whose stature compares to Jean Sibelius, Alvar Aalto, and other prominent Finns, they are seeking to define the director as a national figure (see von Bagh 2007). As we saw in chapter three, many arguments have insisted that Kaurismäki’s niche status is a misrecognition of the director’s importance, which should be mainstream in the national culture. Yet one of the main arguments for this mainstream status is the director’s international niche success. For Kaurismäki, and other small-nation filmmakers, one of the most effective means of enhancing their notoriety, impact, or brand is to shine in the international spotlight. While the actual globalisation of a figure is sure to secure increases in funding, influence, and stature, the appearance of global prominence does the same. The sociologist Dan Steinbock made precisely this point about Kaurismäki in 1989, when the director and his brother Mika’s films were featured in a retrospective series at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. While articles in the Finnish press touted Kaurismäki’s success, Steinbock observes that the retrospective was barely visible in the New York media. Steinbock attacks the argument that the small-nation auteur is a general interest story outside the national borders by recontextualising the MoMA event in a broader context. Yet Steinbock makes a parochial mistake in his comment as well, for he presumes that the MoMA event is a general interest story, rather than a niche one. MoMA, too, is a niche entity. What we see, though, is the extent to which the appearance of global prominence, even as a niche figure, gives Kaurismäki a means of intervening in national discussion as though he were a globally mainstream figure. At the same time, his filmmaking practice remains aimed at a niche audience, both at home and abroad. And since that niche audience is largest in France, Germany, and Italy, the mode of globalisation that is relevant has to do with effective address of these audiences.
What is clear is that a niche is a nice place to be: that is, it provides the savvy auteur with a way of speaking to multiple audiences, without taking on a risk that would undermine his capacity to address those multiple audiences. The established niche auteur can access his domestic culture as both a niche figure and as a general interest newsmaker, with significant cultural and political clout. At the same time, the established auteur can access the media, debates, and discussions of a number of other territories: Hamburg, Berlin, Cannes, Paris, Venice, London, New York. Kaurismäki deftly exploited this access by stirring up controversy in 2002, when he cancelled his attendance at the New York Film Festival to protest the denial of a visa to Abbas Kiarostami to attend the festival, puckishly inviting Donald Rumsfeld to Finland to go mushroom picking. He employed a similar tactic in spring 2003, when he declined to attend the Academy Awards. The New York Film Festival is of course a niche event, but Kaurismäki recognised that Kiarostami’s bit part in George W. Bush’s War on Terror was a general interest story globally, which furnished him with a general interest moment to do politics. The Academy Awards are a general interest story globally as well, which Kaurismäki exploited skilfully. Festivals and awards events provide a special context, insofar as they multiply the reputation of a filmmaker, but also inasmuch as the events are general interest and address broad television, print, and online audiences.
The Film Festival and the Small-Nation Auteur
The film festival network, estimated at between 1200 and 1900 festivals in 2007, constitutes a distribution system of its own, positioned in a liminal space between the Hollywood majors, their boutique distribution labels, national cinemas, and third cinemas (see Valck 2007). All of these entities come together at festivals such as Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Toronto, Karlovy Vary, Sundance, and others. The majors give sneak previews at out-of-competition screenings and press conferences. Feature series bring emergent names in the avant-garde and third cinema to global attention. Established auteurs and stars such as Wong Kar Wai, Michael Haneke, Lars von Trier, Gus van Sant, and others figure in the competition series. The system comprises an alternative distribution network built around high profiles, a moving transnational bazaar, which gives niche films visibility, adds cultural and political value through debate and discussion about them, and diversifies film culture by producing surprising and unexpected events (see Valck 2007). Kaurismäki’s cinema, and small-nation auteur cinema, works through this festival system, and its global distribution and impact could not be achieved without it. The festival system may sand down national differences, raising questions about the relevance of national and small-nation cinema to the festival system, yet at the same time it provides a showcase for national-cinema institutions to market themselves as vital. The festival system shows the extent to which a notion of small-nation cinema must come to terms with distribution and exhibition practice through which it can be defined as vital.
Kaurismäki’s films have risen on the growth in the festival system since the 1980s. Kääpä points out that the Kaurismäki brothers’ breakout film The Liar won the jury prize at the Henri Langlois Festival at Tours in 1981, as well as other prizes, generating significant Finnish press coverage, although the film was released in one print theatrically in Finland, attracting an audience of some 1,200 (Kääpä 2008: 88). With Shadows in Paradise in 1987, Kaurismäki made it into Cannes in the Directors’ Fortnight series. I Hired a Contract Killer was featured in the competition series at Venice in 1990, winning wide critical favour (see Ylänen 1990). The Leningrad Cowboys films and The Bohemian Life featured in competition at Berlin. Since then, with the exception of Juha, Kaurismäki’s films have been in the competition at Cannes.
Kaurismäki has proved a deft hand at generating interest in his films at these festivals with eccentric performances in press conferences, including constant smoking, frequent drinking, and cryptic and laconic statements. The primary time that he makes the headlines in the Finnish media, and is a figure of debate in cultural and cinema discussions in the global media, is in the context of festivals featuring his films. This creates a profound ambivalence, for the festival circuit is largely a business enterprise, as Hammarberg pointed out in the interview with which we began, yet it is also a rich discursive space. The Midnight Sun Festival has involved an eclectic ‘affinitive transnationalism’, to take a term from Hjort (2007: 17–18), gathering together diverse professionals and audiences around a shared object of pleasure and study: cinema. As we saw in the Introduction and chapter two, Kaurismäki’s performances at the mainstream festivals have worked in concert with media coverage to amplify attention to his films and to steer debate towards issues on his agenda, be they geopolitics or his assertions of corruption in Finnish politics. Without the event-based forum created by the film festival system, such interventions would be impossible, and they would not receive the general interest status they enjoy when they occur at festivals. The festival system is crucial to the general interest impact of a niche filmmaker from a small nation, who nevertheless has come to count among the significant cinematic figures of his generation.
In Kaurismäki, then, we have a concrete example of a successful model of niche-market globalisation, but it would seem that the model is largely that of most niche products: exploit one’s competitive advantages to define one’s relevance to a widely spread, multi-local audience. Kaurismäki’s films play best in the art-house theatres of European cities, and for collectors of speciality cinema DVDs. That niche audience is sufficiently large, and sufficiently influential to make Kaurismäki into a figure of cultural importance. That is, returning to Laclau and Mouffe (1985) one more time, Kaurismäki’s festival and critical success signifies cultural importance, visibility, and notoriety. That status also provides cultural capital, which is paradoxically most valuable in the Finnish context, where he appears as a distant and powerful representative of world cinema. But it also provides moments of general interest relevance in the global media, which permits interventions of the kind that occurred around the New York Film Festival and the Academy Awards. Niche importance thus becomes a signifier associated with mainstream importance. Yet we might miss the significance of Kaurismäki’s negotiation of these dynamics if we focus analysis on production. By adding analysis of distribution and exhibition, we get a richer picture of Kaurismäki and of small-nation cinema.
Coda
Kaurismäki has always responded ambivalently to his oscillating status as transnational niche figure, and national niche and mainstream figure. He cultivates this ambivalence in his films, I have argued, in ways that foster both cohesion and dissipation of the national cinema, foregrounding issues of multination. In this way, Kaurismäki’s greatest contribution to Finnish cinema, and the cinema of small-nations, lies in his unrelenting challenge to question these categories, and the premises that subtend them. We come back around to the national stories told about Kaurismäki and figures like him. As we saw in Ville Hammarberg’s interview, the national story furnishes a simple and powerful framework for making sense of the filmmaker and his films. Yet at the same time, as we see in Jörn Donner’s ridicule of the Commission to Develop National Brand, the logic by which we make a figure like Kaurismäki a signifier of the nation is arguably premised on worn-out notions of national expression. Kaurismäki’s cinema situates us at a rich global crossroads, which leads us towards the nation, at the same time as it reminds us that home today is always dislocated and transnational, part of other cultures, other lives, and other imaginings.
Notes
1 Other markings also appear in the margin. One is the name and phone number of the editor in chief of the newspaper Satakunnan kansa, Jouko Jokinen. The title of the newspaper and the article’s publication date are also handwritten on the document, apparently in a different hand.
2 Here I am echoing Michael Patrick Gillespie’s observation that in analysis of national cinema ‘long-established analytic habits have impeded any reconfigurations of traditional conceptions’ (2008: xiii).
3 Anderson continues to figure prominently in many studies of national cinema, such as Gillespie (2008: 13).
5 Pellonpää had long played Kaurismäki’s leading man, and his death at age forty-three before Drifting Clouds shook the director and his troupe.
7 Also see Richard Porton (1993).
8 The title tellingly alludes to another famous contribution by Donner, his 1971 book Finnish Film, Year Zero (Suomalainen elokuva vuonna nolla), which made the case for the development and funding of a Finnish Film Foundation to support production of domestic cinema.
9 The cited verse is from J. L. Runeberg’s poem ‘Vårt land’/’Our Land’ (1848), which is also the source of the lyrics of Finland’s national anthem.