This thesis work focuses on the transnational modalities between modern French and Finnish cinemas. More precisely, it explores what circulates from the work of Robert Bresson to the one of Aki Kaurismäki, even though these two filmmakers share neither the same spatiotemporality nor the same culture. Our hypothesis is that Aki Kaurismäki has taken up and adapted to his own cultural perspective some of Robert Bresson's film codes and style, in particular the representation of marginality. As Robert Bresson is known to be one of the leading directors and theorists of minimalist modernity in French cinema, this thesis explains how Kaurismäki's minimalist style is a renewal of Bresson's. This similarity implies questioning their relationship, but above all the ways in which these links are articulated between two conceptions of cinema that are at once distinct, yet close. Thus, it raises questions about the socio-cultural relations and the transnational modalities of a minimalist staging of the marginality shared by Bresson and Kaurismäki. To do so, we first explore the intrinsically transnational nature of Aki Kaurismäki's work due to a particular belonging to Finnish cinema, as well as the capital role of the filmic intertextuality of his work, notably the reference to Robert Bresson. In a second step, we analyse the similarities of forms in the light of Bresson’s theory of "cinématographe" and the minimalism shared by the two filmmakers. We then examine the various interpretations proposed for Bresson's work in order to draw out Kaurismäki's, in particular his proposal to consider it in the light of melodrama. This leads us to bring the two filmmakers closer together around both a minimalist aesthetic and an understanding of melodrama as a cinematic mode for engaging the viewer and establishing a function of social criticism in cinema dealing with marginality. It is this last issue that we explore in a third phase. Thus, we analyse how Bresson and Kaurismäki intersect around marginality in modern and contemporary French and Finnish society. Finally, in this last part, we show how Kaurismäki continues and goes beyond the Bressonian perspective on marginality and the possibilities of alternatives.