Music of the Cinema of the “New Sincerity”

Abstract

The article presents the basic principles and features of the cinema of the “new sincerity”, which asserted itself in the 1980s and reflected an important trend of modern artistic and philosophical-aesthetic thought in the form of a departure from postmodern irony. At the same time, an important “methodological” approach for a creator of a work of art in this direction is to find a balance between sincerity and irony. A significant example of finding such a balance is the work of Finnish film producer Aki Kaurismäki. The article presents a sound analysis of the three of the most famous films that are the most representative of the producer’s style, classified by critics as the so-called “proletarian trilogy” — Shadows in Paradise (1986), Ariel (1988) and 
The Girl from the Match Factory (1990). In these films, Kaurismäki’s musical “lexicon” is, likewise, crystallized, presenting an original, diverse and, at the same time, surprisingly organic set of “identifying signs” of the musical atmosphere of his movies. 

An analysis of the features of the functioning role of the music in Aki Kaurismäki’s films (both as presented in the text and as remaining outside it) makes it possible for us to arrive at the following conclusions: the musical accompaniment of an episode of a film creates an opportunity for an indirect, often subtly ironic, but, nonetheless, sincere author’s statement, without a straightforward voicing of the meaning of the intra-frame action; a conscious personal choice of the musical material (both the musical quotations and the original compositions), combined with the visuals, contributes to the creation of polysemantic (intertextual) audiovisual images; the relationship of the film’s music with the producer’s off-screen world presents one of the important principles and an effective way of manifesting “new sincerity” in cinema, simultaneously contributing to the creation of unique artistic screen images; the use of a personal “musical lexicon” contributes to the development of the author’s artistic style in filmmaking, one manifestation of which is bringing in musical meta-quotations that stylistically unify the producer’s various films. 

Keywords: New Sincerity cinema, auteur cinematography, Aki Kaurismäki, sound solution of film, musical quotation in cinema, intertextuality, polysemantics of the screen image, aesthetics of the cinema