The cinema of Aki Kaurismäki: contrarian stories

While Aki Kaurismäki’s cinema can be seen as an instance of postmodern aesthetics, Andrew Nestingen claims in The Cinema of Aki Kaurismäki: Contrarian Stories that his films’ melodramatic seriousness and moral purpose situates them in a more modernist framework (21), casting him with the likes of Lars von Trier, Michael Haneke and Steven Soderbergh, rather than Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson or the Coen Brothers. That being said, Kaurismäki’s access to film archives and his voracious consumption of films during his teenage years places him alongside François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Jim Jarmusch and Tarantino as a cinephile (and thus pomo?) auteur. These seemingly contradictory facets of Kaurismäki’s work nonetheless exemplify the ambivalence that Nestingen sees as being critical to understanding his work...