AKI KAURISMAKI & DUSAN MAKAVEJEV, Toronto film festival, Sept. 1988
Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki had just emerged from his partnership with his older brother Mika when he arrived at the Toronto film festival in 1988 with Ariel, the second film in his "Proletarian Trilogy", and just a year before he made a splash with his road movie Leningrad Cowboys Go America. Film festivals were once reliant on directors like Kaurismaki, who made stark, deadpan pictures in the tradition of early Wim Wenders, and much like peers such as Jim Jarmusch. The festival circuit gave their careers an international scope, and Kaurismaki would soon leave Finland for Portugal. (His brother went on to work largely in another Portuguese-speaking country, Brazil.) I'm not sure film festivals nurture these kinds of careers any more.
Director Aki Kaurismaki was the very image of the hip independent movie director when I photographed him in a suite at the old Four Seasons Yorkville (now a condominium) in 1988, either pensively smoking or fixing my camera with an intense, vaguely mocking stare. (Imagine the days when you could smoke in a hotel room!) I used the lighting trick I'd been taught by Anton Corbijn for the shoot - boosting the speed of my Tri-X and shooting in flat light at the back of the room. I have no idea who I was working for when I got accredited to shoot at the 1988 Toronto film festival, but this shoot ended up being an important one for me, when I sold one of these shots to the Village Voice in New York - the beginning of a relationship that lasted through most of the '90s.
Dusan Makavejev was another example of the kind of director who once thrived on the film festival circuit when I photographed him at the Toronto film festival in 1988. He was here with his latest film Manifesto (which is almost impossible to see these days), but he was famous as the nominal leader of the "Black Wave" of Yugoslav cinema in the '60s and '70s. He made himself a rather infamous reputation with W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) and Sweet Movie (1974), two very avant garde and provocative films that got him exiled from his country and unemployable as a director in a rather efficient one-two punch. He made a comeback with Montenegro (1981) and then Coca-Cola Kid (1985), his most commercial film, starring Eric Roberts and Greta Scacchi. He performed for my camera, giving me playful and serious poses in the room at the old Four Seasons Yorkville where I did this shoot.
In a couple of years Yugoslavia would disintegrate and Makavejev would become a Serbian director, and not long after that people started looking at directors like Makavejev (and Emir Kusturica) for an explanation of what turned the former Yugoslavia into the most notorious and intractable war zone of the 1990s. (I'm not sure Makavejev was ever going to provide them with much of an explanation. His movies are more about private than political matters.) I can't help but think of all those people who lived their whole lives as Yugoslavs, only to have their country go extinct as it joined the list of the 20th centuries mistakes.
