Drifting Clouds Cinema Blog: “Q & A With Sanna Peden On Aki Kaurismaki”
Sanna Peden is currently Assistant Professor of European Studies at the University of Western Australia. Her key research interests are cinema, memory, nostalgia and place within the broad context of contemporary European identities.
She has written extensively on the work of Aki Kaurismaki. Her essays: “Aki Kaurismäki”, “Kati Outinen”, “Matti Pellonpää”, “Shadows in Paradise” and “The Man Without A Past” appear in the Directory of World Cinema. Her work has also been published in “Crossing Over: On Becoming European in Aki Kaurismäki’s Cinema” in Frontiers of Screen History: Imagining European Borders in Cinema, and “East, West and In-Between. Marginal Cold War Identities in Shadows in Paradise and Ariel”. Her work can be found on Amazon.
What first sparked your interest in Kaurismaki’s work?
I spent most of my childhood and adolescence in Finland, so I was always aware of the name ‘Kaurismäki’. It wasn’t until after I had moved to Australia, however, that I first saw a Kaurismäki film. The Man Without A Past was shown as part of the Perth International Arts Festival at an outdoor cinema surrounded by massive pine trees. I realised as I was watching the film that I responded to it in different ways to the Australians around me. Everyone found the placid dog being introduced as Hannibal amusing, but when Nieminen refers, in glorious deadpan, to the wealth of his shanty town neighbour – he owns a hand-crank washing machine! —- not a peep. There was something of the delivery and the arcane turn of phrase “hän on äveriäs” that the subtitle – “he is rich” – simply couldn’t capture, and I was left chuckling alone. At the time I was researching Finnish migrants and their identities, and I could see some similarities in the way Kaurismaki’s characters spoke – that out-of-time, alien way – and the way many migrants found their language was off-kilter when they visited their homeland after some years. I’d experienced it myself to a certain degree, moving from Malaysia to Finland as a child: although I spoke Finnish fluently it took me a very long time to accept certain colloquialisms and informalities that are part of the schoolyard grammar. I think I’d still wince if I had to say ‘matikka’ instead of ‘matematiikka’. Casting around for a PhD topic some years later I thought back to that peculiar experience of being a Finn in Australia, watching an exceptionally-widely distributed Finnish film in an incongruous environment, and decided to further explore Kaurismäki’s cinematic world – and the so-called ‘Finland’-trilogy in particular.
It seems that we non-Finns are perhaps losing one of the flavours of Kaurismaki’s work in translation?
There is definitely an element that cannot be easily translated, and the limitations of subtitling can subtly shift the meaning of a scene. For example, in Shadows in Paradise the garbage collector Nikander buys flowers for his date with the cashier Ilona, but lies to his colleague Melartin that the flowers are in fact in celebration of his brother’s high school graduation. In Finnish Melartin simply replies “but it is April” – any Finn will know high school graduations take place in late May or early June, and that the lie was not a very good one. To short-cut through cultural context, one DVD release translates Melartin’s response as “but you don’t have a brother” – which tends to imply the pair have intimate knowledge about each others’ families. Some years ago Tuomas Kainulainen identified similar shifts between the Finnish of the films and their French translations, where for example a metaphor in Drifting Clouds – “vielä niitä honkia humisee” or roughly “the mighty pines still grow” – has a rugged pioneer flavour, but in translation becomes the much more delicate “les lilas reflêuriront”, or “the lilacs will bloom again”.
Then of course there are broader cultural references, such as the intense nostalgia of that final ‘homecoming’ scene in The Man Without A Past, where the iconic Annikki Tähti as a Salvation Army officer sings her own hit from the 1950s, the ballad itself expressing longing for a town lost to the Soviet Union during WWII and of the hope of one day returning to that “wondrous land” of youth. So even though a non-Finnish audience will of course identify that there is a wistful nostalgia at play in Kaurismäki’s films, there are cultural specificities to that nostalgia that do not come across. Nor do they necessarily have to, I should add – one of the great strengths of Kaurismäki’s films is that while all of the cultural references do not always ‘travel’, the films themselves do. The films are complex enough to be meaningful to a range of audiences, and no one way of reading defines them.
I thought we might talk now about your books and essays about Kaurismaki…. What are you working on at the moment?
I’ve written a fair bit on some of those national aspects of Kaurismäki’s work and the way in which the films engage with representations of national identity. What I’m most interested in at the moment is the representation of ‘Europe’ in Kaurismäki’s films, and I’m working on a book that explores Kaurismäki’s post-Cold War films in particular from this new perspective.
My initial excursion into the subject, “Crossing Over: On becoming European in Aki Kaurismäki’s Cinema” was published last year in Intellect’s collection Frontiers of Screen History: Imagining European Borders in Cinema, 1945–2010. In the paper I talk about the way the end of the Cold War and the subsequent processes of Europeanisation are present in I Hired a Contract Killer and Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatjana. They’re quite an interesting pairing, in that Contract Killer is set in London, spoken in English and from the outset more international in outlook than Tatjana, which despite the border-crossings depicted in the film is rooted in the imagery of the Finnish countryside of a stylised 60s.
Contract Killer – as is typical for Kaurismäki’s work – was filmed on a very tight schedule, from late March to early May 1990. So this is a film that emerges out of an exceptionally unstable period of recent history: after the fall of the Berlin Wall, revolutions in Eastern Europe and the Malta Summit in 1989, but before the official unification of Germany or the breaking up of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. With that shifting geopolitical landscape in mind, the rubble, ruins and urban outskirts that Henri traverses, and his precarious position between life and death, carry particular significance in standing in for identities still in the process of being formed. The fact that it was made in London entirely in English also relieves it from some of its national ‘baggage’ and can be read as a broader allegory for European identities in the immediate post-Cold War world.
Tatjana, on the other hand, returns to an explicitly Finnish context in 1994. The European Union has been established and Finland has submitted its membership application. A presidential election is due in early 1994, and the candidates’ views on the EU and NATO are widely reported. A narrative of Finland ‘coming home’ to Europe following decades of neutrality ‘in-between’ the blocs has formed. In this context it is significant that the film returns to an earlier time – not that it is necessarily obvious in Kaurismäki’s famously anachronistic and stylised world! – revisiting Finland’s eastern connections and that endangered space ‘in-between’ with the chaste romances that form during a road trip between chronically silent Finnish men Reino and Valto and the lovelorn Tatjana and Klavdia from the USSR. There is a striking scene towards the end of the film where Valto, the repressed coffee-swiller who has had to say goodbye to both his best friend and love interest, drives home in the night. He suddenly crashes through a shop window, and in one fleeting moment his old companions are with him again — until he continues on his path home and recommences the unsatisfying life he had at the start of the film. The fantasy sequence is unusual in Kaurismäki’s work, and all the more effective for it. Valto quite literally ‘breaks the frame’, his sorrow over his lost friendships reflecting the shattering of old certainties and the rejection of the East in the Europeanization discourse of the 1990s. The fact that this happens in the context of a journey home, the same metaphor that was often used for Finland’s EU-ropean trajectory, links the film to the media landscape and identity discourses of that time.
Kaurismäki’s films can be read in a rich variety of ways, but what fascinates me the most is the way these films reflect the cultural and political shifts of the time they were made, and how and understanding of those shifts opens up new ways of reading the films.
How far do you think Kaurismaki is consciously reflecting these cultural and political shifts in his films? In Le Havre for example, he is clearly looking at a very specific issue. But Contract Killer and Take Care Of Your Scarf Tatiana, seem like more intuitive films. How far do you think it’s a question of the soul of the times living in the artist and being given expression in the work?
I don’t think there’s any question about whether films – or novels, poems, music – respond to the time of their making in one way or another. We know that they do: for example, we know not to read a film made in the 50s as if it were made today, and we know that a film’s meaning can’t be reduced to what is explicitly stated on screen. Context matters. And you are absolutely right – although Kaurismäki has made a career of creating subtle and nuanced social critiques, we do need to be careful not to reduce a complex network of references and themes into simply a question of what the director does or does not ‘mean’. It is deceptively easy to conflate themes and motifs, or that ‘soul of the times’, with authorial intent – particularly when talking about the films of an auteur director who we know has an exceptionally high level of control over the finished product, and who is highly sensitive to societal shifts. Yet even where we do have some knowledge – such as from interviews or other public commentary – on the director’s views on a particular topic or theme, I think it is important to walk a fine line, giving due credit to those who created a film without expecting them to define it entirely.
One useful solution is to be open to the idea that even ‘authorial intent’ can itself draw from serendipities and accidents. For example, in Drifting Clouds the restaurateur-turned-investor Mrs Sjöholm donates the curtains of her old restaurant, the Dubrovnik, to a newer venture run by the protagonist Ilona. She hands them over with the words “they are all that was left of the Dubrovnik”. Now, ‘Dubrovnik’ itself is a clear enough reference to the Balkan wars of secession: the Adriatic city was under siege for several months and badly damaged in the early 90s, so making a reference to the remains of the Dubrovnik is a way of linking the film to the Balkan conflict, still ongoing as the film was being made. Yet the words spoken are not the extent of the reference. Elina Salo, who plays Mrs Sjöholm in the film, mentioned in an interview that it wasn’t until filming the scene had begun that they realised the white curtains looked like the many funerary sheets that were shown on television as the fighting in Bosnia intensified, adding another layer of loss to an already complex interaction. So there we have a scene which already at script stage had certain contemporary references built into it, and we could with some confidence make that leap from the more ambiguous ‘reflects the time of its making’ to ‘Kaurismäki comments on the ongoing Balkan wars’ — but if the visual reference, itself consistent and true to the ‘intent’ of the script, was only realised incidentally and not ‘intended’ in the fullest sense of the word, then how productive is the concept of authorial intent in the first place?
Another way to defuse some of that possible tension between context and creator is to look at filmmakers’ public statements, promotional material, reviews and other reporting as some of the filters that influence an audience’s expectations of and responses to a film. If you know that Kaurismäki was highly critical of Finland’s prospective EU membership, for example, it gives you a frame of reference for reading the films of those crucial post-Cold War years of Europeanisation in particular. Even understanding that more explicit social commentary in Le Havre requires knowing something about asylum seekers in Europe and post-9/11 Islamophobia. Knowing biographical information about filmmakers can have an impact as well: I’ve wondered whether the many suicides that take place in Kaurismäki’s films will come to be interpreted in more personal rather that social terms, given the Guardian interview some time ago where Kaurismäki refers to the suicides of certain family members.
Ultimately it is not about to what extent the director is either a conduit for the times or an independent creative force, but about what combination of filters and expectations we as the audience bring with us. The films themselves do not change, but the changes in our own points of reference allow us to see them in evolving ways.
Follow Sanna on Twitter: @sannapeden.
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