12.00 Opening, Chair: Matti Itkonen

12.15 Unusual Tension between Visual Storytelling and Spoken Narrative in Aki Kaurismäki’s The Match Factory Girl: Paul Majkut (University of San Diego)
The dramatic tension between the seen and the heard in Aki Kaurismäki’s The Match Factory Girl is the driving force of the film. This tension creates a sense of disequilibrium or lack of balance that, in turn, results in a sense of apprehension, anxiety, and disquiet. The minimalist use of dialog, replaced by silence or the sounds of machines or song, may be understood as an example of the inability of the subaltern working woman to “talk back” to her oppressors, whether they are at work, at home, or in social life. The Match Factory Girl is the relentlessly inevitable conclusion of Kaurismäki’s Proletariat Trilogy.

13.30 Screening of The Match Factory Girl (Tulitikkutehtaan tyttö, 1990) (Interior images shot in an old match factory, in Varassaari near Jyväskylä)

15.00 Slowly Moving Bodies – on Kaurismäki-style: Jarmo Valkola (Tallinn University)
Kaurismäki’s cultural context includes elements that his stylisation turns into national and transnational emblems of social communication and narrative interaction. The director’s cinematic strategy investigates and makes choices, bringing forth a social understanding of characters, which has a special communicative value. Aki Kaurismäki’s films have been under ongoing scrutiny for over thirty years. Finnish (and international) landscape, urban city feelings, time, movements, and nostalgic images are bound together in his films. This presentation focuses on the pictorial narration of Kaurismäki’s works, and on the attentive duration of filmic experience that works together with his stylistic and compositional features. Attention is laid out concerning the way Kaurismäki achieves specific pictorial states through his audiovisual design, which provides conditions for the viewer to allow herself to access the visuality of the shots in a phenomenological sense of the approach.

16.00 Closing Discussion

The seminar and the film screening is free for all. Please notice that all participants must reserve a seat through Kino Auroras website: https://kinoaurora.fi/elokuva/?movie=255&location=1

The seminar is organised by the Film Center of Central Finland (Keski-Suomen elokuvakeskus), Kino Aurora, Kulttuuritalo Villa Rana, The Inhabitants of Lutakko (Lutakon asukkaat ry) and Tallinn University (Tallinnan yliopisto).