The Cinema of Mika Kaurismaki

Finnish director Mika Kaurismaki'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 Kaurismaki'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.