AKI KAURISMÄKI, LECTURE

Aki Kaurismäki, born 1957 in Orimattila, Finland, one of the greatest living Filmmakers said: “Contrary to Michael Powell who was in love with rivers, or Luis Buñuel, a lover of quiet bars, above all I’ve always loved books”.     Books are the background to many of his films, starting from his first solo feature length film, Crime and Punishment (1983), followed by Hamlet Goes Business (1987), La Vie Bohéme (1992) and Juha (1999). The book appears, as in the previous examples, either directly in the title of the film or referred to in short-hand as occurs in fragments lifted from the Bible or Das Capital that punctuate the Leningrad Cowboys saga, and in The Match Factory Girl delivered by the match seller that refer to Andersen’s Little Match Girl, with the majority of films drawing from fairy tales while at the same time clearly giving a postmodern flavour.     In the seminar we will analyse the relationship established between film and text, a relationship that doesn’t leave room for the usual concept of “adaptation”. We are confronting relationships much more complex and cryptic, underground and subtle, with a continuous loop of innuendo, acknowledgement, betrayals and loyalties. It is a game of appraisal and condemnation, in short, it is about similarities and differences, between the familiar and the new. It is a game whose rules and relational systems give rise to a surpassing of all compartmentalisation (the book and the film are seen as unshakeable realities) and break down the usual system of “legitimacy”, in which the film is “evaluated” in the light of the literary work of “reference”, an attitude in which underlies the concept of the book and an atavistic distrust toward the image.   As expressed in Kaurismäki’s films this “traffic of influence” between cinema and literature will be the focus of this seminar, which will be divided into two sessions.   In the first one we deal with two “universal classics” and the process of transfiguration in which Kaurismäki submits Shakespeare and Dostoevsky’s works to. It’s worth noting that Crime and Punishment begins in a slaughterhouse (but don’t expect to find the kindly emergency exit of parody) we will also be looking at a soundtrack, a “sharp” version of Schubert’s serenade; as well as Hamlet Goes to Business, which takes place in the middle of the corporate restructuring of some dockers retraining as plastic duck fabricators, here we have a gelled back haired and feline Hamlet, from whose lips will never leave a To be or not to be.   The second session will be centred around two “inadaptations”. La Vie Bohéme, was “inspired” (this word being understood kaleidoscopically) by Murger’s book of the same name. We will look at scenes from the La Vie Bohéme, that Kaurismäki said he had read “more than fifty times”, and claimed to have shot the film to liberate it “from the jaws of the bourgeois Pucini”. In La Vie Bohéme we will encounter two-headed trouts and roofs that are hardly Parisian at all. In turn, will also look at Juha, which was was named after the book that the Finnish Juhani Aho published in 1911, a supposedly silent film, shot in sharp black and white to the pinnacle of precision and narrative economy, something which characterizes Kaurismäki’s films, shows us Marja, Juha’s wife, brandishing a cabbage with a gesture identical to that of Laurence Olivier’s when he is holding Yorick’s skull in the Hamlet that he himself had directed in 1948.       Other themes, that run through Kaurismäki’s filmography, such as the use of narrative patterns characteristic of fairy tales, the refined system through which he proceeds to tie the postmodern narrative together with the completeness of the classical narrative configuration, its particular citational system and the place of the objects in their stories, will also be addressed in this seminar.   All these themes will be illustrated with clips from his films. It couldn’t be any other way, the word to the image.   Speaker:   Pilar Carrera Professor at Universidad Carlos III, Madrid and author of the book Aki Kaurismäki ( Professorship, 2012)