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Crime and Punishment (Rikos ja Rangaistus) | Russian Film Series: Literary Adaptations on Screen

Event time: 
Wednesday, October 2, 2019 - 7:00pm to 9:00pm
Location: 
Whitney Humanities Center (WALL53), Auditorium See map
53 Wall Street
New Haven, CT 06511
Speaker/Performer: 
Presented by Chloe Papadopoulos, Yale
Event description: 

“Kaurismäki launched his career with this terse, elliptical, and gripping updating of the Dostoevsky novel to contemporary Helsinki, set to the music of German composer Paul Hindemith. While Kaurismäki remains semi-faithful to the novel, he makes some notable changes to the scenario: the film’s Raskolnikov, an ex–law student who works in a slaughterhouse, sets out to rob and murder a businessman who killed his fiancée in a drunken hit-and-run, rather than an old moneylender whose death he justifies by virtue of his Nietzschean “superiority.” Ultimately, the world of the film is less that of Dostoevsky than that of the nihilistic late films of Robert Bresson (who had himself refashioned Crime and Punishment as Pickpocket): one hears echoes of Le Diable probablement and L’Argent in Kaurismäki’s statement that his debut is, “first and foremost, a film about the final desperate rebellion of a young man against society. The society that — as we know — is a merciless machine.” Description by the Toronto International Film Festival
Print courtesy of the Suomen Elokuvasäätiö/The Finnish Film Foundation
1h 33min | 1983
Directed by Aki Kaurismäki
free and open to the public
Sponsors:
Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund, Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies Program, European Studies Council at the MacMillan Center, Film and Media Studies Program, Slavic Film Colloquium, the Yale Film Archive, and Films at the Whitney, supported by the Barbakow Fund for Innovative Film Programs at Yale