Sounding Funny - Sound and Comedy Cinema - Mark Evans
Sound, Comedy and Cinematic Modernism: Kaasua, komisario Palmu!
Sounding Funny - Sound and Comedy Cinema - Mark Evans
Kimmo Laine [+]
University of Oulu
Kimmo Laine is a collegium researcher at the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies (TIAS) and a lecturer of Film Studies at the University of Oulu. He has published two books (in Finnish) and a number of articles (in Finnish and English) on film and genre history, as well as co-edited a series of anthologies on Finnish film makers Valentin Vaala (2004), Hannu Leminen (2008) and Matti Kassila (2013). His ongoing research seeks ways to analyze film style with awareness of contextual factors.
Description
Matti Kassila’s Kaasua, komisario Palmu! (1961) is a Finnish detective film combining moods of suspense, horror and comedy. Besides mixing genres the film also blurs the boundaries of popular film and cinematic modernism, especially by its imaginative use of sound. Concentrating on both spatial and temporal transgressions in music, dialogue and sound effects, the chapter examines how different collisions between sound and image or between different musical styles, as well as various patterns of repetition or asynchrony, contribute to the film’s popular-modernist aesthetics.