Poetic Realism and a Few Drinks
by Adrian Martin
Aki Kaurismäki website
One of the quiet but essential moments of modern cinema history occurred in 1964 when Jean-Luc Godard made Bande à part, which he described it as "a French film with a pre-war atmosphere". What this meant was that his story of three lovely young things flirting with death and danger would take place in the present day — Godard has never made a period film — but that everything would be rendered in the style, the feeling of another era. The markers of that era come from popular memory and myth, from music and literature, and mainly, of course, from cinema. In Godard's case his reference point was the famous 'poetic realist' French films of the 1930s and ‘40s, notably the movies of Marcel Carné that mixed romance and fantasy with a particularly poignant sense of everyday struggles and failures. Carné's famous classic, Children of Paradise (Les Enfants du Paradis, 1945) marks the high point of that poetic realism.
What Godard did in Bande à part defines a particular effect we also find in many contemporary filmmakers, such as Olivier Assayas and Atom Egoyan. They stick steadfastly to the present day for their characters, stories and settings, but will allow themselves this minimal degree of nostalgia: they sometimes allow the ghostly images of past times and past periods of cinema, certain moods and character types and stylistic effects, to drift into their cinema world.
It is often a very modest effect, just an echo or allusion, and it gives these films a slightly unanchored, fantastic air. Watching them, we are occasionally uncertain whether they are set in the present day, or in some more distant historical period. We float in a kind of fanciful dimension where many different historical periods and places — and the subsequent renderings of those periods and places in cinema — co-exist in a dream-like simultaneity. Jacques Demy did this comically in Donkey Skin (1970) and Jacques Rivette achieved it radically in his avant-garde pirate fantasy Noroît (1976) — where the pirates carry machine-guns! Even more conventional, commercial movies, like John Huston's memorable Prizzi's Honor (1985), occasionally attempt something like this.
There is no contemporary filmmaker more engaged in this subtle, dreamlike effect of mixing times, places and sensibilities than the Finnish director, Aki Kaurismäki. His films are truly odd, and — as I have come to appreciate over recent years — truly beautiful and affecting, combining a modesty of material means with a tenacity of artistic vision. He is one of those filmmakers, like Godard or Assayas or Edward Yang, who makes cinema in order to capture some ephemeral, complex, crystalline feeling of jumbled-up joy and melancholy, triumph and oblivion — a mood which he senses is in the air these days.
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