THE MAN WITHOUT A PAST
Chale Nafus
Director of Programming, Austin Film Society
If you see me face down in the gutter, turn me on
my back. –
Electrician in THE MAN WITHOUT A PAST
What
is Finnishness? This is a
question which has haunted and intrigued Aki Kaurismaki for decades. Given the
complex history of the geographical territory known as Finland today, the
answers are many. Subject to the whims and armies of two powerful neighbors,
the area between Sweden and Novgorod [Russia] was carved up in 1323. The
eastern portion of “Finland” was annexed by Novgorod, whose religion was
Eastern Orthodox. West and south “Finland” became part of Sweden, which
practiced Catholicism. Even though Swedish legal and social systems ruled over
Finland, the Finnish peasants never became serfs. By the 16th
century Finnish regions under Swedish control could send representatives to the
Swedish parliament. As Martin Luther’s protestant revolution spread, Sweden and
its Finnish territories converted to Lutheranism. One key element of the
protestant movement was that the Bible should be written and published in the
language of the congregations. Thus came about a Bible written in Finnish,
thereby strengthening a Finnish identity, but centuries would pass before that
could be acted on.
In
the 17th and 18th centuries Sweden rose to even greater
power in the Baltic region. Russia was going through a period of weakness, so
Swedish forces successfully pressed on into the eastern regions of Finland
controlled by Russia. Swedish rule of Finland was tightened, and Swedish was
the official language. High offices in Finland were held by Swedes. This
situation lasted throughout the 18th century.
A
newly strengthened Russia went to war with Sweden in 1808-1809. The result of
the Russian victory was that all of Finland became a Grand Duchy of Russia, a
situation that would last for the next hundred years (1809-1917). Under Sweden,
Finland had been a group of provinces, not a nation. Surprisingly, Russia made
Finland an autonomous Grand Duchy, run by a Governor General residing in
Finland. It had its own Senate, composed of native-born Finns. Enlightened
Russian emperor Alexander I gave Finland so much autonomy that it finally
gained a national identity even though Swedish remained the official language.
In 1821, Helsinki became the capital of Finland [only 18 years before Austin
became the capital of the Republic of Texas].
With
this relative freedom, Finns could safely pursue the idea of Finnishness.
A
movement arose in the mid-19th century to make Finnish accepted as
the second official language, culminating in success in 1863, the same year the
Finnish parliament also reconvened after more than a 50-year hiatus from power.
The
national identity movement spread among Finnish artists and intellectuals in
the mid-19th century. Together they “began a vast enterprise of
collecting that aimed to edify popular memory of the national past. Beginning
in the 1870s, delegations of students voyaged to outlying regions of Finland to
collect and assemble ethnographic evidence of everyday peasant life, domestic
utensils, tools, and records of folkways.” [Kyosola, JFS, 47]
By
1878, Finland had its own army. But there were growing forces in Russia which
didn’t approve of so much freedom for Finland. In 1899 began the “Era of
Oppression,” during which Russian nationalists moved to decrease Finnish
autonomy. In 1905, when the first (but unsuccessful) Russian Revolution flared
up, Russian royalists and conservatives in St. Petersburg had to pay closer
attention to their home front than worrying about Finland. The Finnish
parliament took advantage of the Russian hiatus and passed Europe’s first
women’s suffrage laws. Once the Czar had apparently overcome the rumblings of
revolution, a new era of oppression in Finland began and lasted from 1909-1917.
Once
the Romanovs were imprisoned and executed, Finland was pretty free to go its
own way and declared independence from Russia on 6 December 1917. The
Bolsheviks were too busy fighting the Civil War against the Menshiviks and
other dissidents who did not support the new Revolution led by Lenin.
In
Finland, in quick succession, came a leftwing coup, a short civil war, and a
republic created in 1919. Finland was finally to be led by a president and a
parliament. Knowing it was still subject to the whims of more powerful
neighbors, Finland joined the League of Nations and in 1935 became more closely
allied with other Scandinavian countries. However, the rise of Nazi Germany
would soon make these alliances irrelevant.
The
Soviet-German “non-aggression pact” (1939-1941), which shocked all
anti-fascists throughout the world, contained a particularly lethal agreement
“relegating Finland to the Soviet sphere of interest.” Consequently the USSR
attacked Finland on 30 November 1939. Though the Finnish troops fought hard and
valiantly, a peace treaty was signed March 1940 with the result that
Southeastern
Finland was ceded to the Soviet Union.
After
Hitler cast aside the non-aggression pact with the USSR in the summer of 1941 –
the German invasion of Russia clearly signaled the deal was off – the
government of Finland was in a quandary whether to side with the Nazis and
fight against their traditional enemy Russia or to side with Stalin against
Hitler. Even though Sweden maintained its traditional neutrality, that course
didn’t seem to be an option for Finland. The brutal invasions of Denmark and
Norway goaded the Finnish government to dance with the Germans and become a
cobelligerent on the Nazi side. It was not a decision easily arrived at, but it
would be paid for after the USSR and Finland signed a separate armistice in
September 1944. Finland lost more territory to the Soviet Union (Petsamo on the
Arctic Ocean) and had to pay reparations. One Kaurismaki critic points out that
this war compensation caused accelerated urbanization, increased industrial
production, and rural depopulation, all factors which are part of Kaurismaki
nostalgia for the Finland of his childhood [Kyosola, JFS, 49].
The
fortunate part of the armistice agreement is that Finland would not be occupied
by Soviet troops, unlike the Eastern and Middle European countries which fell
behind the “Iron Curtain” after World War II, nor would Finland be subject to a
puppet government set up by the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, despite this welcome
independence, Finland recognized its potentially precarious position during the
Cold War for the next 40+ years. Just as it had once been caught between Sweden
and Russia, it now found itself poised between the struggles of capitalism and
communism. Geography would be a determining factor. Finland shares a long
eastern border with the USSR and it shares the Baltic Sea with Estonia (under
Soviet control in the postwar era) and the Russian coastal area including
Leningrad, the name given to St. Petersburg after the death of Lenin in 1924.
Consequently a “Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance” was
concluded between Finland and the USSR in 1948. However, Finland also looked
westward toward a Nordic shared labor market and passport union which allowed
easy travel among the Scandinavian countries, long before the European Common
Market effected such liberal changes. Urho Kekkonen was elected president in
1956, and during his 25 years in that office he tried to pursue a policy of
neutrality among world powers. Communists and Social democrats, who ran the
Finnish parliament from 1966 to the mid-80s, passed a lot of socialist
legislation, which made Finland somewhat akin to the Swedish model and provided
great safety nets for Finnish workers.
In
the late 1980s and early 1990s, with “the end of the division of Europe, the
collapse of the communist system and the dissolution of the Soviet Union,”
Finland was finally able to enjoy a “liberalized intellectual atmosphere.” But
the economy collapsed as market forces swept over the globe, and a large class
of jobless workers – Kaurismaki’s heroes – was created.
Three
years after Finland became a member of the Council of Europe in 1989, it signed
a new treaty with Russia, which had risen out of the ruins of the Soviet Union.
This treaty created trade deals and “good relations.” It is in the midst of all
this social-economic-political upheaval that Aki Kaurismaki positions his
films’ characters. While rarely commenting on the historic changes, he creates
characters who are truly buffeted about by history. A description of one of his
films applies to many of them: “The prevailing feeling … is melancholy, sadness
before life’s options and unavoidable facts.”
The
two threads of recent Finnish socio-economic history that dominate Kaurismaki’s
work are: the effects of a global market economy on workers and the transition
from agricultural society to a modern, urban, industrial one. This latter
evolution has taken place during Kaurismaki’s lifetime and he laments the
change: “When I was three, I witnessed the last moments of old Finland, the
agricultural Finland I loved so much. Then I saw everything that has happened
until now. My reaction was to archive what I’ve seen, at least.” Besides being
great and moving dramas, his films can be seen as an archive of Finland in the
past three decades.
To
announce this new intention, Kaurismaki created what has been called the
“Finland trilogy” – DRIFTING CLOUDS (1996), JUHA (1999) and THE MAN WITHOUT A
PAST (2002). JUHA, a much filmed book originally written in 1911, gave
Kaurismaki the opportunity to recreate that idealized Finnish agricultural past
with its setting along the Finnish coastal areas near the Karelian border in
the 1700s.
With
THE MAN WITHOUT A PAST, Kaurismaki was able to consider a blank slate in his
search for a definition of Finnishness. The questions “Who are we? Where do we
come from? What language do we speak? What is it to be Finnish? What is Finnish
reality?” could be slowly reconfigured for a man who has amnesia. Not only does
he not remember his larger, social self – middle-aged male speaking Finnish –
but he is unaware of his name, address, hometown, marital status, profession,
and past. He is a tabula rasa and slowly with the help of others living on the
fringe he is able to create a new self, perhaps what Finland is doing now.
The
people who take care of “M” and get him back on his feet are not the
bureaucrats attached to a system. They are the people who have fallen out of
the system and are barely hanging on themselves. Kaisa and Nieminen live in a
shipping container with their two sons. The husband would have turned “M” into
the authorities, but the wife determines she will nurse him back to health.
Irma, the Salvation Army worker, though curt and direct, becomes a major part
of M’s recovery. She starts with his appearance and suggests that he come to
the Salvation Army store to get clothes that will help people take him
seriously rather than assume he is a drunk. Thanks to her, also, he gets a job
sorting out the donations to the store. A woman who runs a café gives him food,
which “would be thrown out anyway.” A female construction boss is also willing
to bypass his lack of identity, but he must at least have a bank account before
she can give him a job. Antilla, a security guard who also owns the shipping
container village, is superficially gruff and unhelpful, since money is his
major goal, but even he gives “M” a bit of slack from time to time. Still,
women are usually the life-saving conscience of a Kaurismaki movie (LIGHTS IN
THE DUSK presenting a very strong exception).
It’s
the officials who are so cold, like the employment officer here and the banker
in LIGHTS IN THE DUSK. They are confused by someone like “M” who has no
identity cards, in fact no name, and they want him to go away and leave them
alone. With none of the standard identifiers required by bureaucracies, it is
as if he doesn’t exist. Without a wallet with the cards which connect him to a
system and a place, he is no longer a known entity that can be dealt with. At
one point it is even doubted that he is Finnish, even though he speaks it well.
But
it is not all a one-way street. M sees how he can help the people who have
helped him. Naturally, he starts with music. Music, as usual in Kaurismaki
films, is so very important here. Even though at the bottom of the economic
rung, M manages to get a juke box full of R&B, blues, and rock 45s to play
in his “container.” The first thing he listens to is Blind Lemon Jefferson’s
“Crawlin’ Baby Blues,” which describes him quite well. Once she has removed her
Salvation Army uniform, Irma has her wilder side, too, as she goes to sleep
with a rock ‘n’ roll station playing. This American music, some transformed by
Finnish bands, represents freedom, hope, and joy to Kaurismaki’s
characters. “M” sees that the
Salvation Army band might update its repertoire and attract some younger
people. To that end, he invites the band over to his home and plays rock and
R&B for them. When he suggests to the female sergeant that a broader
selection of music would be good, she becomes the singer of moody ballads. When
“M” tells Irma that he is thinking about becoming a rock ‘n’ roll manager, the
situation and composition of the shot are the same as in LIGHTS IN THE DUSK –
when Mirja tells Koistinen that he has rock ‘n’ roll in his heart. Both shots
are direct, head-on compositions of a male driver and a female passenger in a
car. Cars and rock ‘n’ roll – Kaurismaki understands American freedom quite
well.
After “M” kisses Irma on the cheek, she touches
it just like Koistinen touches his cheek – wet from Mirja’s kiss – in LIGHTS IN
THE DUSK. Some of Kaurismaki’s characters are simply not accustomed to
tenderness and love (real or feigned).
In homage to the Finnish agricultural past,
Kaurismaki has “M” plant potatoes, maybe just 8 or so, on the outskirts of
Helsinki in the 21st century. The director chooses to show a man
still somehow attached to the agricultural past, even if he doesn’t know his
name or origins.
And finally, Kaurismaki does provide wry
references to the globalizing world market in several ways here. “M” had gone
south to Helsinki in search of better pay in his profession as a welder. We
soon learn of a Helsinki bank “sold to North Korea” (!) One minor but poignant
character in THE MAN WITHOUT A PAST is a man without a future – a former
construction boss, who has to rob a bank to withdraw his own money, after the
bank took his business away in repayment for new equipment. Even the sushi and
sake that “M” (by then known to be Jaakko Antero Lujanen) eats and drinks on
the train imply Japanese culinary culture has also made its way to Finland.
Jaakko is still trying out new things to go with his new identity.
Sources
- Andrew Nestingen,
“In Search of Aki Kaurismaki, Aesthetics and Contexts” (Special Issue of
the Journal of Finnish Studies, Vol. 8, Number 2, December 2004.
- Satu Kyosola, “The
Archivist’s Nostalgia,” This Is
- (Special Issue of the Journal of Finnish Studies,
Vol. 8, Number 2, December 2004.
- Dr. Seppo
Zetterberg, professor of
history, University of Jyväskylä, Finland, November 2001, updated January
2005, “Finland, things you should and shouldn’t know"
- Back to THE MAN WITHOUT A PAST page