The Odour of Shadows In Paradise
Aki Kaurismäki's third film smells. And the school principal's new article is now out in MIA Journal.
Dear Students, Alumni, Faculty, and Trespassers,
Later in this post, you will:
Learn about our recent appearance in Moving Image Artists Journal.
Find writing on Shadows In Paradise (Dir: Aki Kaurismäki, 1986).
Be asked for your film school newsletter recommendations.
Discover a puddle of fascinating links of direct or lateral interest to the filmmaker-in-motion.
Firstly, please be aware that today (Monday, 9th May 2022), a wonderful film will have a rare screening in London, UK.
Peter Treherne’s Atmospheric Pressure (2022) enjoys its UK premiere in the Frames of Representation festival, at the Institute of Contemporary Art. Book now!
The ICA call it:
an immersive journey through the fluctuations of climate and nature in a English farm… [in which] remarkably dense visual language and sound design combine to create a highly sensorial experience[.]
As a privileged early viewer, I called it a:
very slow rumination on the purposefulness of cows and clouds versus the purposelessness of people… the enigmatic quasi-genre mystery pocket movie you didn't realize was missing from your brain… like James Benning meets Jacques Tati ... on *ale*!
And I stand by this. I’ll add that the movie nails the concept of ‘odour’ explored below in this bulletin.
I have only seen this cut of Atmospheric Pressure on a phone, where it fit perfectly: an audio-visual paperback from an other-weathered culture to slip into your rucksack and read on the metro to Mars. But I am confident - fearful, even - that the movie will expand from the ICA screen and suffocate us all with its mud and mulch. That’s cinema!
The beyond place of mediaphysics
Now, let’s draw your attention to a publication. The new Moving Image Artists Journal is now online. I wrote an article about Unfound Peoples Videotechnic (UPV) for it. The article contains actionable filmmaking advice. The theme is “Now.”
The UPV article also whirls around our academy’s ethos. Here is an excerpt:
The UPV curriculum interrogates the material and aesthetic qualities of the actor. And explores the fastenings and sealants you need to stick the pieces together. The school values the sad enthusiasm of the boom operator. It considers the recording and exhibition formats to be a sequence of membranes or wrappers, between which are trapped the odours of your movie.
All this is to say that our schools of thought and of making:
Destabilize the connection between
the finished movie and
the world where the production takes place and
the working mind of the viewer and
the beyond place of mediaphysics
Value, with healthy distrust, the physical universe
Distrust, with sneaking admiration, the metaphysical
Absolutely separate the physics of the movie diegesis from those of the ‘real world’ (i.e. the one with Tescos etc.) – redrafting them back into the movie law by law if needed
Believe decay to be integral to every element and factor of a movie and its creation
Are not so much anti-realistical as extra-realistical
Consider filmmaking to be an act of design and question the daft assumptions ingrained into 100+ years of filmmaking design.
I’m still reading through the other articles. But I recommend Anna Malina’s DE-/CONSTRUCTION OF A .GIF. You’ll find the artist exploring her efforts to create “charged little instances that resonate with a feeling or memory you carry inside” -
a palpable visual expression of emotions which make you feel as if you have encountered something similar before – somewhere, somewhen… Or which serve in a mnemonic or conductible manner, helping to shape or to pour out feelings, memories.
I could quote Malina on more specific matters. But instead, as an exercise, I suggest you visit her article and guess the words and phrases I highlighted.
Rotten lecture
Present work at UPV includes the excavation of a lost live lecture from 2016, Rotting the Image. The missing module concerns what we call “the odour of a film’s look.” Let’s hope the module will re-appear this year in video lecture format.
The reconstruction of Rotting the Image involves the addition of new notions and materials. Such is the new case study on Aki Kaurismäki’s stinky third feature film, which follows below.
New case study: The Odour of Shadows In Paradise
Regular visitors to the UPV website enjoy the regular addition of instructional texts. Here follows a copy of the latest. It contains mild spoilers of Shadows In Paradise. I don’t think they ruin a first viewing of the film. But see what you think.
To breathe life into something is to breathe death into it. Nothing lives if it cannot die. To make your film live, you must give it the capacity to rot.
Perhaps it will rot in front of the audience’s eyes. Perhaps the rotting process will unfold as the movie unfolds. Or perhaps the film will play in a state of perpetual rot.
Rot gives a scent. You create the odour of your film’s look by modulating your film’s decomposition within its image volume and surface.
In the natural world, the smell of rot may be:
Acrid, maybe.
Eye-watering.
Chemical.
Or sweet.
Soft.
Fragile.
Faecal.
But a film’s odour needn’t conform to this classification system. Each film’s odour is one of a kind. It is created with a complex recipe. A recipe of colour, resolution, grain, movement, performance, and even sound. And infinite other elements besides these.
The odour of a film’s look should be palpable. Even if ‘odour’ is a metaphor. The metaphor may have little or no literal connection to the scent-world of a movie’s characters. It is more common that the odour has a thematic connection to the movie.
For example, in Epizoda ? (2016) the visual odour is partly created through the use of wetness:
Dampened scenery.
Wobbly VHS transfer.
Tears.
And by the use of glassiness:
Wetness.
Reflections.
A glass shatters in a character’s hand.
The wet, glassy odour of Epizoda ?’s look communicates the dissolving nature of the characters and format. And the wet, glassy odour embodies the themes of fragility and the falling apart of things. The ‘odour’ of Epizoda ? has little do with what the characters can smell.
But Aki Kaurismäki’s Shadows In Paradise traces a literal connection between the odour of the film’s look and the scent-world of its characters. Even the title - Shadows In Paradise - evokes a quiet trail. A trail that we and our machines cast in our wake.
The Sound of Odour in Shadows in Paradise
The odour of Shadows In Paradise hisses. The hiss of the hero’s record player meshes with the hiss of plumbing and traffic. Throughout the movie, the background sound hangs in the air, making the background even backgroundier.
“Backgroundier” means that the background is ‘very background’ in the sense that:
It is weightier than the average background.
It feeds the foreground more pointedly than a casual background.
It is pushed backwards with more emphasis than the average background.
The background is out of the characters’ minds but in their skin.
Background drone in Shadows In Paradise includes:
Traffic.
Industry.
Smoke.
Rubbish.
The industry of smoking rubbish truck drivers.
These sounds are presences. And they contribute to the odour of the film's look.
Petrol Blue
Kaurismäki’s colours are pungent. They hum with film grain. The grainy film, although it is pungent, looks freshly baked. Like Don Draper’s cigarettes, “toasted.” Take “petrol blue,” for example.
The romantic lead is named Nikander. Nikander is colour-coded in petrol blue. His clothes, car, the cab of his rubbish truck. When Nikander first meets Ilona Rajamäki, he has been tinkering with his car engine. Stinky!
The colour stains their romance with the invisible smell of petrol. Just one element of Nikander’s personal odour.
Later, when Ilona decides to give Nikander a second chance, she tracks him down to a fuel station. She convinces him to drive her away as petrol fumes creep up their nostrils. His love rival, the trendy “Third Man” who works in a clothes shop, can:
Apply scent to himself
Wash it off
Adjust it.
But Nikander cannot escape his own smell.
The Grain of the Characters’ Faces
As ‘toast,’ Shadows In Paradise has the blotches and blemishes of toast in 1980s Euro-arthouse domestic dramas.
It would not be true to say the characters’ complexions are characters. But it would give the right sense.
The complexions in Shadows In Paradise are certainly aesthetics. And each complexion is, in today’s terms, “a vibe.” The vibe of the complexions echoes the hum of the film grain.
Ilona Rajamäki’s face struggles to hold itself together as a face. Most of her facial features want to be elsewhere. But her freckles are a fragrant landscape. Her eyes and freckles blossom as the movie develops. Ilona wears yellow against a yellow background. This accentuates the grain of her skin.
The stubble of Nikander’s love rival, “Third Man,” is rough and serious like sexual sandpaper. We understand from his pale shirt and laundered hair that he smells of aftershave. Or fresh sanded wood and better sex. “Want me to smash your face?” asks Nikander.
Nikander’s complexion has the quality of looking both overcooked and undercooked. Like something he might fry for himself at his kitchenette. His hair and moustache have collected oil from those 17-second close-ups of his sizzling frying pan. And rot from the city’s rubbish.
Nikander works as a rubbish collector. He is smudged into the city and retains no clear outline. His face has no obvious borders. His love rival’s face has the precise angles of excellent joinery. Turned away from a fine restaurant, Nikander propositions Ilona over food hut food. Their dining table is a trash bin.
This is a movie about work and after-work:
The smell of people and machines when they’re working.
The smell of people and machines after they’ve worked.
Shadows In Paradise captures the overlapping scent of the working individual’s parallel lives. The hopeful encounters in one life that breeze or gust up against your other life.
The breath of your film, the odour of its look, needn’t have anything to do with with the scent-world of its characters. But for Shadows In Paradise, Aki Kaurismäki traces a literal connection between the odour of the film’s look and the scent-world of its characters.
Film schools on Substack
I like Substack. Isn’t Substack pleasant? I would like to read other film schools and writers that are on Substack. Do you have any suggestions? Please comment on this post with your suggestions.
The film school (or even design or music or sound school) newsletter that you recommend might be:
Real
Quasi-
Pseudo-
‘Pata-
Imaginary
Conceptual
Defunct
Are you reading this as an email? To comment with your suggestions, please click the header of this newsletter above. Otherwise, when you reach the bottom of the page, you should find the facility to leave comment. Still otherwise, please send me an email or tweet.
Thanks for reading.
~Graeme Cole.
(Principal)
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Link Coaster
“Linearity is necessary for regimes of alienation”| Uncompressed “action” | “The little hands that make the devoured fictions” (in French) | Spirals | She’s a Jandek cover version of Paris Hilton | Creating a soil odour by filming on soil | A boy (Selznick) hiding in a man’s job | Honk if you knew this late Pavement b-side before it got big | Sheila Heti on the shape a book leaves | 🎥 A frayed & ragged amateur documentary of the pebble-smooth Futuro house 🎥 | 👂 Listenography 👂
