Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Ariel
1988 · Aki Kaurismäki · Ariel on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice how still and centered the camera stays in each shot. (camera)
Salminen frames people flatly and frontally against walls, cars, and cafe tables, rarely moving the camera, so small gestures carry unusual weight.
Payoff: With the camera doing so little, the smallest shift in someone's face becomes the whole event.
Notice a single deep blue, red, or green filling a drab room. (light)
Salminen pools unfashionable, saturated color into otherwise gray, working-class interiors, a controlled use of hue that stands out against the hard circumstances on screen.
Payoff: The color is carrying a feeling the flat faces and flat voices refuse to show you.
Watch how little Taisto's face changes after bad news. (performance)
Turo Pajala plays catastrophe after catastrophe with almost no visible reaction, lines delivered flatly and grief indicated only by the smallest adjustment.
Payoff: The less he shows, the more you find yourself supplying the feeling he is withholding. In the reading: qualisign (icon of quality). Deleuze calls a face holding one quality this steadily a qualisign, endurance held at the same level from first frame to last.
Listen for the music arriving right when the dialogue goes quiet. (sound)
Tango, schlager, and rockabilly needle-drops fill the silences the actors leave, carrying an emotional register the flat performances never voice directly.
Payoff: The soundtrack is where this film is allowed to feel large, since everywhere else it stays small.
Notice the convertible's roof will not fully close. (setting)
Taisto drives a white American convertible south through the Finnish cold with the weather sitting directly on him, a piece of Americana entirely wrong for the climate.
Payoff: A car built for freedom leaves its driver exposed instead, which is the whole film in one object. In the reading: symbol. The reading calls this car the film's one true symbol, absurdity and aspiration and bad luck folded into a single object.
Once you have seen it
Notice how many major events happen entirely offscreen. (cutting)
Kaurismaki cuts straight from a gesture to its aftermath, stripping out the scene that would normally connect the two, so catastrophe arrives as a near jump cut.
Payoff: You are handed the gesture and the result and asked to supply the missing scene yourself. In the reading: index of lack. Deleuze calls a gesture that points at an event the film withholds an index of lack, and this film is full of them.
Track how quickly each new stage of his life begins. (structure)
Mine, road, city, casual labor, prison, harbor: each segment opens fast and closes before it can build into a cause for the next one.
Payoff: He is in motion for the whole film without ever really changing what is happening to him.
Listen to what plays as the boat finally leaves. (sound)
The film closes on a Finnish rendition of Over the Rainbow, a borrowed piece of Hollywood longing gilding an escape to a Mexico we never actually see.
Payoff: The hope is secondhand and the wrong size for Finland, the same joke as the convertible's roof, and the film means it anyway.
Carry this in: Watch the camera do nothing at the worst moments. Notice how much you end up feeling anyway.