Sets, Scenes and Environments: Aki Kaurismaki's 'The Match Factory Girl

Here are some stills from one of Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki's wonderful films, 'The Match Factory Girl'.  Like most of Kaurismaki's films, it focuses on an outsider - here a woman, Iris, who is isolated and unhappy.  She works in a match factory, and lives with her parents.  Kaurismaki's mise-en-scene is richly coloured and composed.

Bleak browns, blues and greys infuse daily life - the flowered patterns are cheap, old and autumnal, but they suggest the possibility of hope.  Iris' pink headband tying back her greasy hair is an assertive note, perhaps an expression of her strength and individuality.

Iris meets a man.  The pink that was confined to her hairband finds full expression in the dress she buys for her date - colour enters her life.

The protagonist's bleak life is turned around when she falls pregnant after the one-night stand.  There is the possibility of a new life, and she prepares to meet her lover to tell him the news.  He brutally rejects her.  Note the baby-clothes colours and bottle of pop with a straw, and how the change in her hair subtly suggests her feelings.

The drama unfolds into a tale of revenge, told with great black humour. Poison is involved.

Here is the compelling opening scene of a match factory production line:

There's an excellent article on Kaurismaki on the Senses of Cinema website here.

Sets, Scenes and Environments: Carl Th. Dreyer's 'Le Passion de Jeanne d'Arc' (1928)

The expressionistic yet minimalist set for Carl Th. Dreyer's silent 1928 film 'Le Passion de Jeanne d'Arc' was designed by Hermann Warm (1889-1976).


Regarded as a key figure in set design for expressionistic film, Warm also created groundbreaking sets for films such as 'Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari' (Robert Wiene, 1919) and 'Die Spinnen [The Spiders]' (Fritz Lang, 1919-20).


Here are a couple of photos of the original set models for the film.  There are many more fascinating photos of them here (click on the image that says SET MODELS).

These stills give an idea of how the minimalist set is used to create feeling of maximum intensity:

The film itself was lost for decades.  A fire has destroyed the original negative and there were no extant copies.  However, a full copy was discovered in the early '80s in a janitor's cupboard in a mental institute in Oslo. 


As well as the stunning sets, the film itself is also characterised by intensely emotional acting by the lead, Renee Jeanne Falconetti.  She suffered greatly during the shooting of the film, as Dreyer made her enact scenes dozens of times and suppress her feelings to create the emotional temperature he wanted on screen. The camera's focus on her face throughout the film reveals an amazing performance:

The film is extraordinary, and worth watching in full.  Here's a few minutes of it:

Sets, Scenes and Environments: Yasujiro Ozu

Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963) is one of the world's great filmmakers.


Ozu was a master of composition.  His films, particularly his postwar films, are renowned for shots which linger on 'empty spaces' for a while, in between the action - so-called 'pillow shots' - they mark time, but also allow the viewer to savour a reflective moment.  These shots are stunning compositions of balance and harmony, and here are a few:

The great historian and critic of Japense film Donald Richie called Ozu a modernist:

"There's this idea of cutting down, of restriction, of making things coherent by making them less, an avoidance of any redundancy and this great ability to make the continuity without all the links, leaving the audience the option, or the necessity to do this. In most Ozu pictures, for example, the wedding is left out. This idea of leaving out these links and testing your audience to make the links with you, or build the bridge halfway to you, these are all attributes of modernism as a literary form. And so, for these reasons, plus a tremendous influence of European photography, that is still photography, or art photography, on Ozu who would use these still lives to make something like he'd already seen in photographic magazines, all of this gives a modernist tinge to everything he did. So there are two things; he's a traditional artist and a traditional aesthetician, because he knew Japanese aesthetics. At the same time he was a real modernist.'

You can read the rest of this interview in Midnight Eye, an interesting online journal about Japanese film, here.

In his excellent current TV series 'The Story of Film', Mark Cousins calls Ozu 'perhaps the greatest director to ever have lived', and I'm inclined to agree.  Here's a great 11-minute introduction to Ozu from the 'The Story of Film':

And a clip (the final scene) from Ozu's last film, 'An Autmun Afternoon' (1962), in which a drunk, upset father realises his own loneliness.  It's a beautiful, melancholy four minutes, with some great 'pillow shots':