The Cinema of Mika Kaurismaki

Finnish director Mika Kaurismäki’s films challenge the boundaries of nations, genre formations, art and popular culture, and fiction and documentary. Synthesizing concepts from a range of thematic frameworks, including transnationalism, eco-philosophy, architectural theory, and cartography, this book provides an interdisciplinary reading of Kaurismäki’s body of work. The notion of “transvergence”—thinking in heterogeneous and polyphonal terms—emerges as an analytical method for exploring the power of these films. Through this method, the book encourages a rethinking of transnational cinema studies in relation to many oft-debated notions such as Finnish culture, European identity, cosmopolitanism and globalization.