“Cinema is dead. It died 1962, I think it was in October!”
-Aki Kaurismäki
Aki Kaurismäki is a legendary Finnish filmmaker, who is best known for making films like The Match Factory Girl (1990), The Man Without a Past (2002), and most recently Lights in the Dusk (2006).
Kaurismäki made his debut in 1983, directing Crime and Punishment, which was a modern-day adaptation of the Fyodor Dostoyevsky novel, set in Helsinki. Wold recognition arrived in 1989 with Leningrad Cowboys Go America. And thereafter, he never looked back.
I love Kaurismäki’s films because they are essentially eccentric parodies of various genres(road movies, film noir, rock musicals, Rocumentaries etc.). They are relatively shorter than a conventional feature length film, roughly around 70 to 90 minutes. His style is simple, darkly comic, narrative, and yet he manages to convey the complexity of the story in fairly short, downplayed humorous moments: very much like the films of Jim Jarmusch.
Aki Kaurismaki in his younger days
He is also known for boycotting the Academy Awards, not once but twice! His film, The Man Without a Past, won the Grand Prix and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 2002 and was nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Foreign Language Film category in 2003 at The 75th Annual Academy Awards. But he boycotted the ceremony, saying that he
[…] didn’t feel like partying in a nation that is currently in a state of war […]
Kaurismäki’s next film Lights in the Dusk was also chosen to be Finland’s nominee in the category for best foreign film. This time, he decided to boycott the Awards and refused the nomination as a protest against the then U.S. President George W. Bush’s foreign policy.
And that was not all. The rebel, in 2003, boycotted the 40th New York Film Festival because an Iranian fellow director, Abbas Kiarostami was not given a US visa in time for the festival. You can read the New York Times story on that here.
Kaurismäki is also known to direct his films drunk. The rebel director once himself conceded:
“When I write, I am sober. I can direct drunk. I can’t edit or write drunk.”
“The problem is, I have seen all the other films. All the serious films ever made I have seen, more or less. They are so good… and I am so bad. Very early in my so-called career, I knew I would never make a masterpiece. So I decided to make lots of decent films.”
And then came the understatement of the century:
Well, if he calls his films ‘decent’, it would be interesting to know which films have made it to his list of ‘masterpieces’!