2008年9月5日星期五

Film-makers on film: Aki Kaurismaki

Film-makers on film: Aki Kaurismaki

Last Updated: 12:01am BST 18/01/2003

For Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki, movie-making is a straightforward affair. "All you need are some actors and a camera. You get them to walk about and talk and the camera to shoot. That's all." The magic, he says, comes later, in the editing.

"This is the part that interests me most so I almost always do it alone - really alone. I shut myself in a room for days and days. What I specially enjoy is mixing the music - I always have some tunes in my head and then I take a pile of records into the editing room.

Aki Kaurismaki, director

Born Orimattila, Finland, 1957

Selected films

Leningrad Cowboys Go America (1989)

The Match Factory Girl (1990)

I Hired a Contract Killer (1990)

Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatjana (1994)

Drifting Clouds (1996)

The Man Without a Past (2002)

"I use a Steenbeck [editing machine] so that I can really handle the material - none of this digital equipment. Nowadays people think technology solves the mental problems - which it doesn't. Everything has to be based on a human story and technology doesn't help with that."

It's a recipe that has made 45-year-old Kaurismaki his country's best-known director, and last summer it won him the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival with The Man Without a Past, which opens in London on Friday.

The award was a surprise, for, like all Kaurismaki's 16 low-budget features, it deals with unpromising material - the lives of inarticulate, unglamorous losers in an impoverished economy. Each scene ends with a simple dissolve and the camera is conspicuously static. Their saving grace is the bravura of the acting and editing and their dry wit.

The characters almost never smile and their situations are usually grim but their director's handling makes them all chokingly funny. In I Hired a Contract Killer, a would-be suicide is so incompetent that he pays a gunman to shoot him; in the new film, a gormless amnesiac is torn between his love for a dog and a Salvation Army volunteer.

But Kaurismaki also deploys a profound understanding and knowledge of movie techniques and styles, and his heroes range from Michael Powell to Jean-Luc Godard. "He is one of my gods - he made a revolution all on his own. Every Godard film that I saw as a youngster exploded in me ideas about cinema."

He is particuarly attracted to the poetic realism of an earlier school of French cinema - Marcel Carné, Jean Renoir and Jean Vigo. He rates Vigo's last film, L'Atalante, as one of the most important ever made.

"I saw L'Atalante first in the late 1970s at a film club in Finland. It was made by a man who knew he was dying and for that reason he showed the beauty of life which he was never going to get for himself."

In fact, Kaurismaki learnt his trade by studying them. "I started making films because I wanted to. Film school wouldn't let me in - I was too stubborn. So I learnt by watching films from the archive and from reading - you learn a lot about cinema if you read a lot.

"Before I shot anything on my first film, I went with a friend and his camera inside an abattoir - a hallway of dead bodies of cows. Completely silent. And he explained what sort of lenses we had, the differences from an ordinary still camera. Once I understood, I said, OK, never mention this discussion to anybody! And so then I was able to go out on the set and command, camera here! Give me 50 millimetres!"

As Kaurismaki notes, Vigo started in an equally haphazard manner and was only 29 when he died in 1934, within months of L'Atalante's release. Yet this story of the watery honeymoon of a Seine bargee and his inexperienced bride has endured among cinema's masterpieces.

The uneasy relationship between the couple and their crew, played by a sinister, looming Michel Simon, develops a dreamlike quality as the squabbling lovers sail slowly towards Paris.

Kaurismaki admires especially sequences such as one in which the young husband, distraught at his wife's desertion, leaps into the river and swims underwater to search for her.

"That is the sort of cinema that is quite close to painting. I don't know how the hell they made it in the late 1920s, but scenes like those come as close to poetry as anything else in art. I'd sacrifice 300 Hollywood directors in return for Vigo being able to live and make more films like that - and that's an over-estimate because they don't have any directors there anyway!"

Unsurprisingly, Kaurismaki has no intention of joining them. "Even after winning at Cannes, I'm not interested in doing anything bigger. Hollywood doesn't interest me - it's like a rattlesnake, a rattlesnake that's dead but doesn't know it."

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