Sottrarre le immagini alla violenza. Aki Kaurismäki e il margine

Abstract

This essay means to regard the silence of Kaurismäki’s image in clear opposition with the current media scenario, characterised by an increasingly dense stratification of visual narratives and an unprecedented anesthetisation to the violence of the visual, also in light of a refusal of a direct representation of war. We want to describe Kaurismäki’s cinema as ‘poetics of margin’ which expresses itself in the use of ‘figures from the margin’ (characters located at the bottom of the economic-social hierarchy) and in the peculiar narrative function of the off-screen as the space ‘beyond the margin’ of the frame, in which the significant event is moved, especially the war. The aim is to make the gestural silence of those figures of the margin, as new forms of subjectivity resistant to the paradigm of the image-action, and the silence of the image converge in poetics of subtraction which can be considered above all a subtraction from violence.