Celebrity Biographies
Aki Kaurismaki
Aki Kaurismäki responds perfectly to the concept of auteur cinema. His films are very personal, they respond to a vision of things and a way of telling that would be said to be unrepeatable.
Aki Olavi Kaurismäki is the main representative of Finnish cinema, along with his older brother Mika, who has a very different film style. Born in Orimattila, Finland, in 1957, together with Mika, also a filmmaker, he created his own production company, Villealfa Oy, a name that honors the film Alphaville , by Jean-Luc Godard ; much later he would rename his company Sputnik Oy. The title that launched both brothers and revolutionized Finnish cinema would be Valehtelija (The Liar), from 1981. The direction was by Mika, but Aki co-wrote the script, as well as playing a character named Ville Alfa.
Although Aki has dealt with some literary classics –he made his feature debut in 1983 with Crime and Punishment , based on Dostoevsky’s novel, and Hamlet Goes on a Business Trip is a very particular look at Shakespeare’s work–, his cinema is characterized for minimalism, present even in the duration of the films, which states that they should never last more than an hour and a half, a rule that he strictly adheres to. The fact that she writes, directs and produces his films ensures her complete control of his stories. He says that he likes to improvise on set, but that it’s not the actors who improvise, but him, which gives an idea of his tight control over the final result.
In his films, silences dominate (“if the film is taken to a minimalist level, even the simple sound of a cough can be quite dramatic”, he affirms), and a certain sad air. The characters, humble workers, are laconic, and express their thoughts with few words. There is a longing for happiness in their focused gazes that is not always fulfilled. And the filmmaker has found a series of actors, especially the regulars Matti Pellonpää –who died prematurely in 1995 of a heart attack at the age of 44–, Kari Väänänen , Markku Peltola and Kati Outinen , the perfect interpreters for his stories, there is a clear complicity with them.
The following comment gives an idea of his particular sense of humor: “When I was young, I would sit in the bathroom and the ideas would just come to me. Now I just sit in the bathroom.” Is Aki a pessimistic or optimistic filmmaker? There is no simple answer. His stories are open to hope, the existential castaways that inhabit them can taste something similar to happiness (the open ending of Shadows in Paradise and Lights in the Sunset , the romantic story of Ariel ), but there can also be bitterness. irony (the terrible odyssey of The girl from the match factory). And in any case, that haven of peace that they can reach will have been preceded by vicissitudes that can even include physical violence (the beatings received by the characters is a fairly recurring motif in Finnish cinema, as occurs in The Man Without past , a title with which she won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes, while Kati Outinen was the best actress of the contest).
One of Aki’s great films is Passing Clouds , about which he commented “it’s totally tragic. When I started writing the script for this film, I put Frank Capra ‘s emotional rescue story to an extreme in How Beautiful It Is to Live! and in the other The Bicycle Thief , by Vittorio De Sicca, and the Finnish reality in between.” The result is a stupendous reflection on unemployment, more optimistic than usual for the filmmaker, and which is framed in a restaurant. It is not a casual place, since Aki is co-owner of several restaurants in Helsinki, and of the Hotel Nummi-Pusula.
Aki can be a paradoxical type. The light humor that accompanies the Leningrad Cowboys Go America band and Leningrad Cowboys Meet Moses gives an idea of this, contrasts with the ‘sad cinema’ label, which can easily be attached to it. While the careful and happy music that accompanies his films, and a photograph with a careful color palette, perhaps indebted to a Fassbinder or an Almodóvar (although the influences may be mutual), are also a departure from the common places .
About the deep moral commitment of his cinema, these words of the filmmaker give an idea: “The meaning of life is to acquire moral principles that respect nature and other human beings, and follow them.”