Unfashionable History: Memory and National Identity in Aki Kaurismäki’s “Juha”

John Sundholm

Abstract

Sundholm concentrates on memory, especially on collective memory, and its relation to national identity. To describe it Sundholm uses the Freudian notion of condensation, i. e. when layers of psychical content, which are distant in time and theme, overlap in the form of a single condensed image. Sundholm says that memory acts in the same way, i. e. it always constitutes the structure linking contemporary elements with past ones. The visual arts, including film, are parti­cularly suitable to exemplify the phenomenon. They create the possibilities for a presentation of the condensed images which directly reflect the work of collective memory. The example analysed in this article is Aki Kaurismäki’s Juha. The screen version of the classic Finnish novel, which has been adapted (film, opera), has a strong national force, now virtually out-of-date due to historical changes. The essence of the Kaurismäki project is to tell the same story in such a way that its content and topicality is preserved. The condensation of Kaurismäki’s film is analysed on two overlapping planes, the formal (used techniques) and material one (film’s content), with Sundholm trying to show each time the meaning and range of the analysed artistic solutions.