Symmetry of Bodies and Movements: The Audiovisual Design in Aki Kaurismäki’s Films Jarmo Valkola ABSTRACT Aki Kaurismäki is arguably the best-known Finnish filmmaker, owing largely to his feature films such as Crime and Punishment (Rikos ja rangaistus, Finland, 1983), Calamari Union (Finland, 1985), Shadows in Paradise (Varjoja paratiisissa, Finland, 1986), Hamlet Goes Business (Hamlet liikemaailmassa, Finland, 1987), Ariel (Finland, 1988), The Match Factory Girl (Tulitikkutehtaan tyttö, Finland, 1990), I Hired a Contract Killer (Finland/ Sweden, 1990), La vie de bohéme (Finland/France/ Sweden/Germany, 1992), Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatiana (Pidä huivista kiinni, Tatjana, Finland/Germany, 1994), Drifting Clouds (Kauas pilvet karkaavat, Finland, 1996), Juha (Finland, 1999), The Man Without a Past (Mies vailla menneisyyttä, Finland, 2002), Lights in the Dusk (Laitakaupungin valot, Finland, 2006) Le Havre (Finland/France, 2011), and The Other Side of Hope (Toivon tuolla puolen, Finland, Germany, 2017). A large body of his work has been made in Finland, but also in countries like France and Great Britain. Besides feature films, he has also made documentaries and short films, as well as musical films with the group Leningrad Cowboys. In a broader context, Kaurismäki has a unique place in Finnish and international film history, as well as in media and communication culture. Kaurismäki’s cultural context includes elements that have been turned into national and transnational symbols of social communication and narrative interaction by his stylisation. The director’s cinematic strategy investigates and makes choices evoki ng a social understanding of characters that has special communicative value. Kaurismäki’s films have been scrutinised for over thirty years. INTRODUCTION The Finnish (and international) landscape, urban feelings, time, movements and nostalgic images are bound together in Aki Kaurismäki’s films. The article focuses on the pictorial narration of his works and the attentive duration of the filmic experience that works together with his stylistic and compositional features. Attention is paid to the way Kaurismäki achieves specific pictorial states through his audiovisual design, which enables the viewers to access the visuality of the shots in a phenomenological way. The method that I employ is ‘cognitive mapping’, which usually means a combination of individual and collective perceptions. Cinema can establish a common perception since it expresses the point of view and style of the filmmaker that is then offered to the audience. Afterwards, the audiences interpret it both literally, differently, and complementarily, changing and contrasting the meanings that have emerged. The elements of balance and symmetry are essential ingredients of Kaurismäki’s pictorial stylization. These forces of equilibrium are even highlighted in the narrative images of Kaurismäki’s latest film The Other Side of Hope (2017). In the new film, the logic of the image-structure has a specific philosophy of form that is specifically concentrated to balance the depicted situations and create a symmetrical vision connecting the characters and the milieu. According to Julian Hochberg, the viewer’s construction of the edited space can be compared to cognitive mapping, since a filmmaker’s task is to have the viewers pose visual questions which they answer (Hochberg 1978: 208). In cognitive mapping, individual and social perceptions are combined. Furthermore, cognitive mapping enables the viewer to practice distinct perceptual and cognitive activities.