Lilya! De-Stigmatizing the Image of the Post-Soviet Other in Nordic Cinema*
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BALTIC SCREEN MEDIA REVIEW 2014 / VOLUME 2 / ARTICLE Article Take Care of Your Scar(f), Lilya! De-stigmatizing the Image of the Post-Soviet Other in Nordic Cinema* TZVETOMILA PAULY, University of Helsinki, Finland; email: [email protected] * An abridged version of the following text has been presented at the international conference , 12–13 December 2013, University of Helsinki, Finland. 36 DOI: 10.1515/bsmr-2015-0014 BALTIC SCREEN MEDIA REVIEW 2014 / VOLUME 2 / ARTICLE ABSTRACT The article discusses the cinematic representations of the post-Soviet individual in two internationally acclaimed Nordic fi lms, namely, Aki Kaurismäki’s Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatiana (Pidä huivista kiinni, Tatjana, Finland/Germany, 1994) and Lukas Moodysson’s Lilya 4-Ever (Lilja 4-ever, Sweden/Denmark, 2002). The guiding premise is that the fi lms represent cross-cultural inquiries on identity and otherness that refl ect and chal- lenge the (male) gaze of the West European North upon the (female) post-Soviet East soon after the collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe. The following comparative reading stems porary continental philosophy, especially from an observation of the cinematic in gender and postcolonial studies. A com- representations of identity and otherness, mon view expressed in this discussion has national and foreign, in two Nordic fi lms been that master dichotomies are operat- that met with the approval of critics as well ing in the cognition and representation of as audiences throughout Europe. The fi lms subjects and groups in Western civilization, are Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatiana (Pidä such as male and female, master and slave, huivista kiinni, Tatjana, Finland/Germany, national and foreign, we and they, western 1994) by Aki Kaurismäki and Lilya 4-Ever and eastern, etc. These oppositions derive (Lilja 4-ever, Sweden/Denmark, 2002) by from a fundamental philosophical distinc- Lukas Moodysson. The fi lms are quite dif- tion between the subject and the object, ferent in aesthetic, thematic, and generic the Self and the Other, which is intrinsically terms. Kaurismäki’s black-and-white pas- connected to the constitution of power rela- tiche-styled road movie has hardly anything tions and the asymmetric distribution of in common with Moodysson’s realistically power among individuals. Hegel’s parable coloured, ruthless drama. Kaurismäki’s of the master and the slave, presented in idiosyncratic cinematic language is miles his Phenomenology of Spirit (Phänomenolo- away from the naturalistic auteurship of gie des Geistes, 1807) has provided special Moodysson. However, they both settle on incentive for speculations on the intersub- an undemanding linear narrative that best jective mechanics of power. According to renders the virtue of their marginal char- this parable, the self-consciousness of acters and they both voice strong social a subject arises from an encounter and criticism. Moreover, the fi lms present highly “battle to death” with another human being. intriguing images of the Eastern European Drawing on Hegel, Simone de Beauvoir individual, and, by reference, of Eastern asserted that “the subject can be posed only Europe before and after the fall of the Ber- in being opposed – he sets himself up as the lin Wall – images that are produced from essential, as opposed to the other, the ines- the external perspective of two acclaimed sential, the object” ([1949] 1989: xxiii; my directors of the Nordic cinema. emphasis). Accordingly, the theoretical back- The current article does not engage in ground of this reading is informed by the an ontological consideration of the prob- discussion of the concepts of identity and lem, but rather focuses on its intercultural otherness that has taken place in contem- aspects by examining certain tropes in 37 BALTIC SCREEN MEDIA REVIEW 2014 / VOLUME 2 / ARTICLE the cinematic representations of Eastern also by analogy Asia), as “passive, seminal, European individual in two Nordic fi lms. feminine, even silent and supine” (ibid.: 138; Specifi cally, in this case, the Other is con- my emphasis); that is, as a feminised Other, sidered to be an image based on a more or irrational, weak, often despotic, and bizarre less typifi ed individual representation, a in its cultural practices; a negative image fi lm character or characters who are usually that is contrasted to the rational, strong, and intentionally constructed to seem different masculine West. Thus, a woman and an Ori- from or even oppose the Self, and thus to ental Easterner become cultural signs con- defi ne them by opposition. The social mak- structed in opposition to the white Western ing of the Other, or “othering”, is achieved by male as the essential and the universal. In presuming a hierarchical difference based Beauvoir’s and Said’s view, men have “oth- on national, gender, or class identity, among ered” women and the educated elites in the others. In the Nordic fi lms under discussion, West have created a view of the Orient by the Other is represented by the image of a inventing a hierarchy that legitimises their young woman from the Eastern Bloc, that (male, Western) right to dominance. is, through an image clearly implying gender Several historians and humanities and geopolitical distinctions. scholars have implemented Said’s per- These two instances of the Other – spective in regard to Eastern Europe as the female and the Easterner – have found a sub-cultural region within Europe – for ample theoretical consideration, for exam- example, Larry Wolff in his Inventing East- ple, in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second ern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Sex (1949) and in Edward Said’s Orientalism Mind of Enlightenment (1994), Milica Bakić- (1978). Interestingly, Beauvoir introduces Hayden in her article, “Nesting Orientalisms: us to the problem of female otherness The Case of Former Yugoslavia” (1995) or with the stereotypical example of Russian Maria Todorova in her study, Imagining the women, who, according to the proponents Balkans (1997). Their research has shown for the eternal feminine, are “still women” that similar discursive practices based on in comparison to their emancipated West- binary oppositions, civilising rhetoric, semi- ern counterparts (Beauvoir [1949] 1989: xix; colonialist policies, and “othering” have emphasis in the original). In this seminal shaped the Western imagination about the feminist text, Beauvoir further dismantles eastern parts of the continent as the back- the popular idea about “women”, femininity ward periphery of European civilization: “It and the female sex as “the sex” and refutes was Western Europe that invented Eastern the reduction and objectifi cation of the Europe as its complementary other half in social position of women that is used to the eighteenth century, during the age of defi ne and differentiate women from men: Enlightenment. It was also the Enlighten- “He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she ment, with its intellectual centers in West- is the Other” (Beauvoir [1949] 1989: xxii; ern Europe, that cultivated and appropri- my emphasis). In Beauvoir’s view, men had ated to itself the new notion of “civilization”, “othered” women by mystifying and roman- an eighteenth-century neologism, and civi- ticising them, and by inventing the myth lization discovered its complement, within of women being eternal, but feeble, capri- the same continent, in the shadowed lands cious, and devoid of reason. Edward Said’s of backwardness, even barbarism” (Wolff postcolonial critique, on the other hand, 1994: 4; my emphasis). However, the out- attacks the subtle but persistent west- lining of Eastern Europe as a different and Eurocentric prejudice about the inferiority opposed cultural zone occurred during the of the Eastern (Muslim) people and their Cold War, when it was seen as an adversary cultures (Said [1978] 2003: 3). According to political entity. Winston Churchill coined the him, Western culture has created a power- powerful metaphor of the Iron Curtain that ful discourse, Orientalism, which represents had cut through the middle of the continent the East (the Middle East or the Orient, but “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the 38 BALTIC SCREEN MEDIA REVIEW 2014 / VOLUME 2 / ARTICLE Adriatic” and cast a deep shadow over the informed and realistic portrayal of a group left-side other Europe, so that the eastern of Finnish recruits representing differ- parts were once again associated with the ent social strata of wartime Finnish soci- realm of darkness (Wolff 1994). After the fall ety. Although it deals with war against the of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Europeans from eastern neighbour, the fi lm hardly depicts both sides seemed to celebrate the abolish- any individual Soviet men. There is only one ment of the division, obviously, with higher short episode with a Soviet offi cer who is enthusiasm and greater expectations in the taken prisoner. During the few minutes he former “dark” parts. However, the transition comes into focus, he is shown proudly mute, to a market economy and western-style remaining an exemplary background actor, democracy proved to shed little light on a part that is ultimately played by the entire these regions and came to be considered Red Army in this fi lm. There are also a cou- defective by a large part of Eastern Euro- ple of shots of the adversary soldiers’ life- peans. However, at the same time, large less bodies, which suggest that the fright- numbers of Western Europeans developed ening enemy could be looked at only if cap- anxious and hostile feelings towards the tive or dead. immigrants coming from the poorer Eastern In the fi lm’s generally coldly respectful European countries. The sad truth, accord- attitude to the “Russkies”, a positive con- ing to Wolff, has been that, although the Iron trast is struck by a scene of aesthetic and Curtain is gone, its shadow persists in the emotional fascination that focuses on a mind maps of Europeans (1994: 3).