Aki Kaurismäki is a Finnish filmmaker, a modern creator and painter of emotional landscapes, and also a natural historian of sensibility, attentive to the duration of changing experiences of existentiality. He has a unique place in Finnish and international film history, media, and communication culture. Jarmo Valkola explores Kaurismäki's significance as a developer of film language: his conceptions of the audiovisual possibilities of cinematic narration, with all their pictorial, aural, editing, compositional, acting, setting, and lighting possibilities.