The Cinema of Mika Kaurismäki

Front matter

THE CINEMA OF MIKA KAURISMÄKI TRANSVERGENT CINESCAPES, EMERGENT IDENTITIES PIETARI KÄÄPÄ

The Cinema of Mika Kaurismäki Transvergent Cinescapes, Emergent Identities

Pietari Kääpä e intellect Bristol, UK / Chicago, USA

Chapter 8: The Polyphonality of Transvergence: The Reception of Kaurismäki's Cinema 165 Conclusion: Beyond the Happy Ending 195

Acknowledgements films that try to find new ways for exploring the transnational and increasingly global scope of this form of cultural production. Many individuals have been instrumental in providing substantial support for the project. Tommy Gustafsson, Kimmo Laine, and others have provided suggestions and feedback on different aspects of my work. Andrew Nestingen and Mette Hjort, Henry Bacon, Claire Thomson and Andrew Higson have been astonishingly supportive of the directions of my academic career. They have provided opportunities for publication and pervasive constructive criticism that constantly shapes my work. Mika Kaurismäki has graciously devoted time amongst his busy schedule to provide interviews and information on his films. Kansallinen Audiovisuaalinen Arkistos library and publications provided valuable research data for the project as did the online services of Project LUMIERE. My editors at Intellect have been extremely helpful and supportive throughout the writing of this book. Jelena Stanovnik has especially been a constantly and invigoratingly motivating participant in the editing process. Oskar Öflund Stiftelse and the Research Committee at University of Nottingham Ningbo provided the book with generous funding, for which I am very grateful.

This book is dedicated to my family, both Finnish and Chinese, and especially to Yan, for all her enduring support during the production of this work.

T his book is the result of a long fascination with Finnish cinema, specifically with those

Pietari Kääpä October 2010

Introduction: The (trans)national and the Global in Mika Kaurismäki's Films occurrence - Mika Kaurismäki, one of the most well-known Finnish directors, was

starting production on a major new film: Haarautuvan Rakkauden Talo/The House of Branching Love (Mika Kaurismäki, 2009). Normally, the start of a new Finnish production would be met with some enthusiasm, but certainly not the type of large-scale interest afforded to Kaurismaki’s film. Shortly after this event, on 14 November 2008, the Finnish multiplexes started screening a somewhat unusual film amongst the usual Hollywood Christmas blockbusters and large-scale domestic productions: Kaurismäki's Kolme Viisasta Miestä/ Three Wise Men (Mika Kaurismäki, 2008). The film, focused on three middle-aged divorced men who meet by chance on Christmas Eve, was a no-budget production that presented a distinctly bleak alternative to all the popcorn-fodder available for vacationing consumers. The reviews for the film were mostly positive, but most of the column space was devoted to Kaurismäki and his return to Finland after years of international co-productions. Yet, the film attracted only 1054 spectators.

How can we explain these contradictory modes of reception for Kaurismäki and his films? What are the reasons for the critics enthusiasm for Kaurismáki's return and the clear disinterest of the audiences for Three Wise Men? Why would the Finnish multiplexes release a distinctly non-commercial film at one of the busiest times of the year? And what is the significance of Kaurismäki's intervention in the topic of Christmas celebrations: a festival seen in Finland as a distinctly family-centred national event? The discourses of national culture, popular entertainment, non-commercial art-house characteristics, and a distinctly bleak view of societal alienation intertwine in Kaurismäki's films and the discourse around his work. The introduction of this work will explore these questions as many of these seemingly banal instances hold a key to unpacking Kaurismäki's complex relationship with Finland. Before we move on to discuss some of the potential implications of Kaurismäki's complex relationship with his native country, we have to explore the implications of return in more depth through a brief retrospective of his career.

E summer 2008, cultural columns of Finnish newspapers were reporting an unusual

Mika Kaurismäki and nation

Kaurismäki's career spans nearly 30 years and involves productions ranging from small-scale Godardian exercises (Valehtelija/The Liar, 1981) to multinational commercial productions (Helsinki-Napoli: All Night Long, 1987), from Finnish heritage films (Klaani - Tarina Sammakoiden Suvusta/The Clan - A Tale of the Frogs, 1984) to documentaries on Brazilian music (Solar Mirror, 2007). He completed a degree in film production in Munich Film und Fernsehen Schule, where he produced the Finnish-set The Liar as his dissertation project. The film gained positive notices on its release in Finland's Tampere Short Film Festival and moderate success on its commercial release in domestic art-house cinemas. Critics invariably discussed the Godard-inspired work as instigating a Finnish New Wave, a conceptualization that both indicates the film's transnational inspirations and its status as something novel and distinct in the annals of Finnish cinema. Working alongside brother Aki (who starred in The Liar), Mika Kaurismäki became one of the leading producers of the Finnish New Wave of the 1980s with films such as Arvottomat/The Worthless (1982) and Rosso (1985).

These films were a response to what Kaurismäki and many of his contemporaries perceived as the stilted, inward-looking state of the Finnish film industry, dominated by lengthy, monumental historical epics and farcical comedies. During the 1970s and the 1980s, few of these ‘official’ films, reliant on state-subsidies from the Finnish Film Foundation (Suomen Flokuvasäätiö), met with any substantial interest from domestic audiences - despite the occasional ‘national’ blockbuster such as Tuntematon Sotilas/The Unknown Soldier, (Mollberg, 1985) and Talvisota/The Winter War, (Parikka, 1989). It was up to independent farces, such as the immensely popular Uuno Turhapuro series, and imported films to cater to domestic cinemagoers. The contemporary situation was a result of far-ranging debates over national cinema in both policy and critical circles, debates which reflected concurrent national cinema rhetoric Europe-wide. The delineation between the artistic (experimental, or more often in Finland's case, ‘nationally-relevant’ film production) and the populist (sensationalist or farcical films) has a long history, ranging from the high taxation levied on popular cinema in the 1940s and 50s to the Foundation's support for historical epics and politically-engaged, modernist art films in the 1960s and 1970s. Both Foundation-approved and independent productions dealt with the many tumultuous changes Finnish society had gone through in the previous decades. Fast-paced urbanization and the decrease of traditional agrarian lifestyles became collectively known as the Great Migration; as thousands vacated the countryside for the city, or moved abroad to Sweden or other neighbouring countries. These ideas were metaphorically reflected in the class divisions and contrasting lifestyles of the protagonists of the historical epics and farcical comedies, but they largely avoided socio-realist discussion of the contemporaneous disappointment and alienation these transformations were causing amongst the population.

Established film-makers such as Mikko Niskanen and Tapio Suominen also took part in chronicling these experiences in distinctly socio-realist terms with the financially and

Introduction: The (trans)national and the Global in Mika Kaurismäki's Films critically successful youth-oriented productions Täältä Tullaan Elämä/Right on, Man! (Suominen, 1980) and Ajolähtö/Take-off (Niskanen, 1982). While depictions of alienated and rebellious youth culture are nothing new, productions by middle-aged directors in the 1950s, such as Kuriton Sukupolvi/The Unruly Generation (Kassila, 1957), portrayed the youth of the nation as a threat to social order. It was now these young artists that sought to destabilize established conventions with anti-institutional agit-prop theatrical productions like Pete Q (1978), where the avoidance of casting these themes in terms of a moral panic fostered understanding of the need to have these previously marginalized and victimized voices heard. Furthermore, punk rock and bands such as Sielun Veljet and Eppu Normaali were engaging in similar modes of protest via popular music that was increasingly a locus of identification for their target-audience groups. Youth culture of the 1980s thus gave voice to the experiences of urbanized, alienated youths, whose decidedly claustrophobic and disillusioned experiences were increasingly vocalized as part of the emerging pop culture scene.

These emergent forms of pop culture often expressed their identity politics in terms antagonistic to the nation, or more accurately, the transforming welfare state. As President Urho Kekkonen vacated his position in 1981, after more than 30 years of autocratic governance, and the more progressive social democrat Koivisto took over, the Finnish welfare state found a new direction. Instead of the careful appeasement politics with the Soviet Union which characterized the Kekkonen era, Finland during the 1980s took a decisive turn for European integration and increasing privatization of the welfare structures of the state. As many commentators note (Toivianen 2002a, Von Bagh 2000), Aki Kaurismáki's Varjoja Paratiisissa/Shadows in Paradise (1986) and Ariel (1988) captured these societal metamorphoses in minimalist terms, presenting a seemingly-ordinary Finland, where the 'silent majority' fall victim to capitalist restructuring and individualistic heartlessness. These films also chronicle the increasing globalization of Finnish society by focusing on the transnational circulation of cultures and capital and include a pervasive sense of criticism of the gradual metamorphosis of the Finnish welfare-state into a compromised information society' infused with neo-liberalist characteristics (Nestingen 2004, 2010).

Mika Kaurismäki' films feature a similar set of critical targets and transnational tools for exploring the compromised welfare-state. The Worthless, Kaurismäki's first feature-length production, was self-consciously marketed as a breakthrough for ‘new Finnish cinema in its decidedly international approach. But while internationalism is often seen as a key ingredient in Mika Kaurismäki's work, this is also nothing new in Finland. Films such as Teuvo Tulios Rakkauden Risti/The Cross of Love (1948) were filmed in Swedish and Finnish so as to widen their markets. International genre conventions were adapted to the popular farces and melodramas of the Studio-era (roughly 1940s to the end of the 1950s), and directors such as Mikko Niskanen and Risto Jarva adopted the experimentalism of Godard, Truffaut et al. with their 'new wave films inspecting the contemporary state of the nation from the perspectives of the alienated youth or marginalized socio-economic groups. New Waves are thus nothing new in Finnish cinema, but The Liar was a breath of fresh air because of its transnational approach to cinematic conventions. Instead of localized adaptation of conventions from international art-house cinema, Kaurismäki's debut distinguishes itself from the previous wave, as it now seems the whole world in which the film is set is defined by ideas, ideologies, material elements, and people who have very few clear connections to antecedent forms of national traditionality or belonging. Furthermore, while films such as Täältä Tullaan Elämä and Ajolähtö had acted as the focus of much critical debate and received significant commercial success, their approach was more or less socio-realist as they focused on the despairing conditions of contemporary youth lost in the tumultuous changes of the Great Migration. They also rely on a distinctly moralizing or outraged tone, targeting both unstable family structures and the fallacies of the welfare state. Kaurismáki's film, in contrast, moves past such socio-realist techniques as it captures the plight of its protagonists in the international genre vernacular of the road movie, an approach novel for its time in Finland. As these disenfranchised (or liberated) youth flee from Helsinki to the lakes of East Finland pursued by a group of gangsters, the open road offers possibilities for visualizing the land through a set of perspectives substantially different from any antecedent social order or traditional vision of social existence.

Many seemingly out-of-place elements distinguish The Worthless from its contemporaries and indicates the extent to which Kaurismäki's international approach relies on his cineaste roots. For one, the characters communicate in a manner that is reminiscent of the hardboiled dialogue of film noir (‘the most important thing is leaving, intones one character). On other occasions, the lines resemble advertising slogans (the main protagonist answers his phone with 'American Express). The camera work and mise-en-scene are more attuned with film noir and the detective thrillers of Jules Dassin and Jean-Pierre Melville than with the conventions of mainstream Finnish cinema as the constantly moving camera follows the overcoat-wearing protagonist Manne (Matti Pellonpää) through the murky streets of Helsinki. A café-bar only serves Calvados instead of the expected beer and spirits. And the characters end up in Paris, which they find to be a similar space of disillusionment as Finland instead ofthe exciting and even mythical land recreated in the films of Vigo, Melville, Truffaut and Godard. The protagonists of the film are constantly on the move, but there seems to be no direction for this movement. Whereas the young protagonists of Ajolähtö strove to move to Sweden in search of employment, there are no such ‘lofty’ goals in The Worthless, no attempt to settle in with the expected conventions of society or to climb the social ladder. For the protagonists of Kaurismäki's film, the most important thing is leaving. The process of transition, of liminality and in-betweeness, is the point of their existence.

According to the funding application submitted to the Finnish Film Foundation, The Worthless focuses on ‘mythical Finnish melancholy and exploring what is happening to this land and its people’ (Toiviainen 2002a: 188). This statement requires unpacking, as it encapsulates Kaurismäki's approach to representing Finnishness. What is meant by this ‘mythical’ sense of Finnishness? Several critics have suggested that Finnish cinema remains focused on depicting national cultural identity as ‘stuck’ between the poles of rurality and urbanity (Sihvonen 1999, Toiviainen 2002a). Certainly, nostalgicevocations ofthe countryside

Introduction: The (trans)national and the Global in Mika Kaurismáki's Films and the agrarian way of life form freguent topics of both heritage films and the populist comedy productions. These recourses to localization (or nationalization) function as a sort of antidote to increasing internationalism and globalization. Here, eventual accession to the European Union in 1995 and Finland's increasing interconnection in international economic and political networks present challenges to ‘imagining’ the nation in any traditional terms, challenges which are accordingly met with a resurgence of heritage films and a reinforced emphasis on traditionalism. While such elements are certainly present in the majority of Mika Kaurismáki's films, their manifestation is very different from the heritage genre. In The Worthless, Finland is constantly changing - a space where antecedent traditions and their cultural remnants (such as traditional wooden housing and idyllic rural landscapes) exist alongside signs of transnational flow of culture, capital and people. Whereas many heritage films use dichotomous conceptions of rurality and urbanity, Kaurismäki's films are adamant about deconstructing these binaries. In The Worthless, we see a sense of reciprocity to this relationship, one which unavoidably alters the constitution of both spheres, and in fact shatters any notion of understanding these ways of life as spherical. The film captures the implications of the Great Migration, where its dynamics of interchange blur such binaries, as the people from the countryside migrate to the cities, and the economic and cultural influence of urbanity becoming submerged in the facades of agrarian communities. Accordingly, we see characters such as Harri, influenced by international forms of pop culture, vacating their countryside habitats for the city. Once the protagonists return to the countryside, they find it is now a space in transition where commercial slogans and logos of multinational corporations are thoroughly immersed in the landscape. The reworking of mythical Finnishness is nowhere more apparent than in the opening titles of the film, under which we observe a helicopter shot which moves from the harbours of Helsinki to its centre, underscored by a re-orchestrated rock version of Jean Sibelius’ Finlandia. The bird's eye view of the city and the hybrid musical score blur the distinctions between traditional Finnishness and the mindscapes of its emergent generation, indicating the complexities of contemporary nationhood. Kaurismäki's films can be considered historical documents of the transformation of Finnish society, while they simultaneously provide specific versions of that change.

Glocalization and the postnational condition

The local and the global, mythic Finnishness in relation to European mythology, reality and a fantasy world meet in Mika Kaurismäki's films. This is what Kaurismakis’ 1980s' films are about: how one can relate to and even preferably include in the same picture the local and the international. The relationship to Finland is consistently contradictory, because it is at the same time mythology and reality. Similarly complex is the relationship to the global, as the impression of Europe is more mythological than realistic. (Aitio 2000: 44)

Tommi Aitio is one of the only historians who has commented on Mika Kaurismäki's work in any sufficient depth. From the above guotation, we get an idea of the level of complexity he affords these films, as any sort of simplistic impression of national homogeneity is compromised by technigues ranging from plays with levels of reality to infusion of cosmopolitan ideology. Aitios assertions are certainly suggestive in providing a foundation for analysing the complexities of Kaurismäki's cinema, but some of his analytical suggestions need further refinement. For one, the suggestion that Kaurismäki's films go ‘against’ the mainstream of Finnish culture seems to miss some of the nuances of Kaurismäki's work. While antagonism towards the mainstream is certainly to be detected from his works, understanding them as working on a polemical nexus of abidance and antagonism is unproductive. Thus, the main aim of this work is to interrogate the films’ relationship, not only to the nation, but also to the global, and attempt to understand them from a more multifaceted, complex perspective. Focusing on the fissures and disjunctures these films open in the structure of the globalizing Finnish welfare state instigates an ongoing dialogical negotiation with existing conventions of representation. The films situate their protagonists in these vertiginous gaps (such as those discovered by the protagonists of The Worthless as they venture into the transforming countryside), which act in the form of black holes where the antecedent matter of traditional national structures ceases to exist in their original form. The characters seek to desperately build some sense of cohesion out of these complex and constantly changing structures, even if this process is ultimately a futile one, as the protagonists of The Worthless discover in Paris. From such perspectives, it is impossible for the films to simply affirm or antagonize the national order. Instead, this reorganization constructs portals through which the protagonists enter cosmopolitan ideological spheres inscribed with ambivalence and heterogeneity. We do not know what waits on the other side of these black holes, and it is precisely this uncertainty that is the point of Kaurismäki's films.

Many of the transformations these films represent (and present, of course) emerge as a consequence of cross-border flows of culture, capital, ideologies, and people — societal transformation is thus a direct result of the transnationalization of Finnish society. Transnationalism is here taken to indicate different forms of exchange between national entities, where this interaction results in the metamorphosis of most, if not all, cultural formations involved in the exchange. Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden suggest that the ‘key to transnationalism is the recognition of the decline of national sovereignty as a regulatory force’ (Ezra & Rowden 2005: 1). Increasing cultural and political globalization compresses the spatio-temporal boundaries of the globe, creating transformations of such magnitude that the concept of the nation is fundamentally challenged. This is the starting point for many academic works on transnational cinema, as they understand cinematic production as part of an increasingly interconnected global system where ‘transnational cinema transcends the national as an autonomous cultural particularity while respecting it as a powerful symbolic force’ (Ezra & Rowden 2005: 2). The national in transnational cinema, then, seems to operate on two levels: both as an essentialist concept challenged by thematic content, production,

Introduction: The (trans)national and the Global in Mika Kaurismáki's Films distribution, and exhibition factors; and as a means of grounding cultural production to some identifiable socio-cultural contextual matrix that seeks to avoid the homogenizing connotations of globalization.

The identity and cultural politics of Kaurismäki films clearly emanate from transnational considerations, and transnationalism is a key feature throughout this work. But is transnational cinema the be-all-and-end-all framework for exploring these films? To answer this guestion, we must pay due attention to the ways the films emphasize the disembedding - or decentralizing - connotations of globalization. As the protagonists of the films are alienated by state organizations and traditional cultural constellations they barely recognize, they are constantly searching for stability, driven by a desire to settle the internal imbalance by integrating (often temporarily) into a culture they deem suitable. Thus, ‘we are... "post" any fixed or essentialist conception of identity' (Hall & Du Gay 1996: 275). This is something we can clearly observe in many of Kaurismákis cosmopolitan and globalized films, where his protagonists are characterized by movements 'in which neither the points of departure nor those of arrival are immutable or certain, as they are ‘open to the prospect of a continual return to... their re-elaboration and revision (Chambers 1994: 3-5). Kaurismäkis relationship with Finnish identity has transcended the confines of national specificity to a level that is somewhere in between cultures, a transnational identity characterized by interstitiality, 'at home only when he is not at home to use Catherine Russell description of cosmopolitanism (Russell 1999: 285).

Many of the key themes of Kaurismáki' films — social fragmentation, urbanization, the erasure of identity formations and boundaries, scepticism over representational subjectivity, and the role of increasing globalization in all this - produces a pervasive sense of vertigo, of constant and uncertain transformation. While translocal or transnational culture, according to film theorist Yingjin Zhang, 'seeks pluralism and interculturalism, favors cultural flows in space, and tends to produce syncretism, synthesis, hybridity, and possibly even third cultures’ (Zhang: 2002 140), Kaurismáki' films focus on cultural disjunctures and dead-ends. This emphasis on difference and asymmetric patterns requires that we view Mika Kaurismáki's cinema in postnational terms. How do we characterize this type of cinema and what is its unique potential that the transnational is not able to achieve? Political philosophers and sociologists have developed the concept of the postnational to emphasize the ways in which the structures and sovereignty of nation-states are challenged by economic and political neo-liberalism, the complex connectivity of global culture, intergovernmental integration, and the migration of populations across borders. For some, civic identity is part of a larger collectivity, such as the European Union, or social collectivity is more to do with ethnic or religious affiliation than any national designation (Ferry 1991, see also Habermas 2001). Much of this work focuses on the role of immigrants in Europe, whose communal membership is less defined by their judicial belonging to nations, but more by universal conceptions of human rights, as individuals who are more than mere property of the nation-state structure (see Kastoryano 2002, Soysal 1994).

Kaurismákis films focus on these shifts and permutations in identity and social collectivity. To account for these complexities, they feature protagonists who situate themselves in antagonistic relationships with hegemonic societal structures, and who exhibit a fundamentally critical stance on the changing nature of that society. What makes this cinema postnational rather than just transnational is the maintenance of a critical, often self-reflexive perspective that interrogates the socio-political implications of potentially homogenizing categories like the EU and ‘world’ cinema. The postnational thus operates as a way of conceptualizing Kaurismáki' increasingly complex vision of a global society where national designations still prevail, but where individual agents and communal organizations increasingly build their complex connectivity based on other forms of identification outside of the nation, or they find themselves at odds with the ideological roles that nations play in the contemporary social order.

To these ends, Andrew Higson (2000b) has suggested that postnational cinema involves texts which cannot be comfortably equated within the cultural and social body of the nation. He is talking in the context of British cinema, where films such as My Beautiful Laundrette (Stephen Frears, 1985) and Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1995) challenge the dominant Britishness (or more appropriately, Englishness) of British cinema. While the ‘Scottishness’ of Boyles film and Frears’ multicultural dialectics seem to suggest cultural pluralism within the wider body of British national cinema. Yet, Higson suggests that restricting the scope of these films to a singular, umbrella-like conception of national cinema can effectively limit these films to merely alternative approaches to dominant Britishness. As a means of enunciating the perspectives of subjects excluded from the homogeneous promises of the cultural and the civic nation - for example, immigrants to the city or those whose ideological perspectives do not match dominant conceptions of civic duty - postnational cinema can point us to new directions in terms of the potential of cinema to work from the basis of the nation, but also address concerns of social belonging that do not necessarily seek assimilation or hybridity. Rather, focusing on moments of uncertainty indecision, fragmentation and disjuncture - moments which reflect the momentous and tumultuous changes to which individuals are consistently subjected to as part of globalizations momentum - indicates a need to approach the meanings of nation from an intensely critical perspective which ‘mere’ transnationalism may be too transient a concept to adequately realize.

Postnational cinema can also complicate our conceptual understanding of globalization in relation to Kaurismäki's films. The roles of the global and the local are never as clearly distinct in Kaurismäki's films as they are in protectionist discourses of national cinema. Focusing on the disjunctures and contradictions that characterize the postnational condition provides an alternative critical perspective on the ways the local and the global intertwine. Approaching globalization from the perspective of ‘glocalisation’ (Robertson 1995) allows us to understand the dynamics of globalization as a complex, reciprocal process involving local interpretations and appropriations of elements and processes with more global implications. The dynamics of glocalization, or of interpreting and navigating the complexities of globalization from individualised, local perspectives, will form a key strand that runs through this work.

Introduction: The (trans)national and the Global in Mika Kaurismáki's Films

Kaurismäki's work often emanates from a strong sense of social justice, where the films depict their marginalized protagonists (the local elements of the glocalization eguation) striving to counteract cultural and socio-economic changes larger than their habitats. Yet, many of his films also function as the globalizing influence in this eguation of power. This is especially the case with the films he has produced in Latin America (adventure films like Amazon, 1990, and music documentaries such as Brasileirinho, 2005). These films combine Kaurismäki'sdominantoutsider perspective with elements ofsubversive Finnishness, popular culture, marginalization, and a strong sense of social inequality between the developed and the developing nations. As we will see, Kaurismáki's films consciously seek to involve the presence of the author and the spectator in the representational fabric. Through this, they aim to find new and emergent avenues for expressing the complexities of unstable social and cultural identities as they take part in global debates over politics of representation and social injustice. The complex constellations of the films create an impression of globalization as a constantly ongoing and even contradictory process, where spectators are encouraged to question their own involvement in maintaining global inequality and structures of cultural and economic domination.

Transvergent cinescapes

The incomplete, searching identities of the protagonists, the liminal plays with hegemony and marginality, the inwardly-combusting narrative authority, and the self-reflexively critical spectator-positioning provide a 'transvergent quality to Kaurismákis cinema. Transvergence, according to architectural theorist Marcos Novak, is a term indicating something unformed, something “alier that cannot be adequately discussed by relying on established paradigms of cultural representation and critical thinking. In Novak's view, such paradigms rely on 'epistemologies of continuity and consistency' and maintain antecedent socialand epistemological structures (Novak 2002). Transvergence, in contrast to convergent or divergent modes of philosophical inquiry, of which these epistomologies consist, implies ‘incompleteness’ and the formation of something we cannot yet decipher. Following Novak, I use the concept of transvergence to imply a sense of constant transformation, where cultures, identities and societies are never stable, but always in flux, morphing into ever-changing new formations. Transvergent cultural products that seek to capture this transformation do not necessarily gesture towards any sense of completion or stability, but reveal the very process of transformation, in all its insecurities, as a relevant social condition in its own right. In their persistent foregrounding of transitory moments and unstable social structures, Kaurismäki's transvergent films work from the opposite of the realist discourse which John Fiske famously identifies in mainstream television. Whereas the impression of 'realism resolves the contradictions and does not leave them unsolved and reverberating in the viewer, Kaurismáki's films use contradictions and complexity to leave the viewer with ‘discomfort, uncertainty and an active need to think through these contradictions not only in textual terms but in terms of the reader's social experience (Fiske 1987: 35). While Fiske suggests that the radical power of these contradictions lies in the readers and not the texts, I argue in this volume that Kaurismäki's transvergence is radical on both levels. As we will see throughout the work, Kaurismäki's films merge different forms of subjectivity into their textual and production features which complicate spectator positioning and resist identification with clearly definable ideological positions.

Transvergence indicates a situation where the goals and the intended outcome of social movements are far from certain. Such movements may result in unpredictable circumstances with no promise ofcontinuity or maintenance ofestablished social paradigms and conventions of order. If there is a transvergent condition, it is one that is defined by the circumstances of fluidity and uncertainty. The collision of emergent perspectives and traditional structures in The Worthless, and its protagonists’ constant need for movement, exemplify this feeling of uncertainty well, as the transvergent perspective captures the moment of transition in all its impermanence. Instead of attempting to provide a comprehensive description of transvergence here, we have to let Kaurismäki's films extrapolate this concept, asit can account for many of the topical and even controversial notions these films explore; notions which range from Eurocentricism of film anthropology to the persistence of national cinema, from generic mutations to depictions of cosmopolitan cityscapes. The purpose of transvergence is to examine how these films formulate new conceptions and perspectives on these much-discussed ideas, situating their rhetorical structures in a sort of critical liminality that avoids any limiting connotations these pre-existing theoretical formulations may have.

A further discussion of Kaurismákis international career will unpack some of the complexities of cinematic transvergence. By featuring an Italian hit-man as the main protagonist in his first international co-production Rosso in 1985, the socio-critical outsider perspective of the New Wave found a new addition - the perspective of the foreign 'other who explores Finland through a disassociated gaze. Typically for Kaurismäki's unconventional approach, Rosso's title role was performed by frequent collaborator, the Finn Kari Väänänen, in Italian. Never settling for the easy option, such methods complicate any understanding of the film as simply an ethnographic external gaze on this strange Nordic land. The casting and the focus on language and other cultural barriers are part of the film's transvergent identity politics, where the outsider is simultaneously the insider, the insider the outsider. The internationalism that was evident in his early films and that was heightened by Rosso's embodiment of the insider-outsider gaze has been a frequent feature of his works. As Finland is presented through a transvergent lens, so depictions of spaces outside of Finland refuse to be captured in any simplistic touristic sense or through cultural otherness. Kaurismáki's next production, Helsinki-Napoli All Night Long, took place in a Berlin divorced from socio-realist cultural confines, where its depiction of West Berlin is a compendium of a fantastical Europe and an ideologically-charged place where capitalism, socialism, cosmopolitanism, and nationalism intertwine, often in precisely transvergent terms. The film presents no conclusions to the many problems and complexities that West Berlin (and the whole of Western Europe) faced in 1987. Rather, the film settles for