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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Wiley Blackwell Companions to National Cinemas
- Sprache: Englisch
A Companion to Nordic Cinema presents a collection of original essays that explore one of the world’s oldest regional cinemas from its origins to the present day.
- Offers a comprehensive, transnational and regional account of Nordic cinema from its origins to the present day
- Features original contributions from more than two dozen international film scholars based in the Nordic countries, the United States, Canada, Scotland, and Hong Kong
- Covers a wide range of topics on the distinctive evolution of Nordic cinema including the silent Golden Age, Nordic film policy models and their influence, audiences and cinephilia, Nordic film training, and indigenous Sámi cinema.
- Considers Nordic cinema’s engagement with global audiences through coverage of such topics as Dogme 95, the avant-garde filmmaking movement begun by Danish directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, and the global marketing and distribution of Nordic horror and Nordic noir
- Offers fresh investigations of the work of global auteurs such as Carl Th. Dreyer, Ingmar Bergman, Lars von Trier, Aki Kaurismäki, and Roy Andersson.
- Includes essays on Danish and Swedish television dramas, Finland’s eco-documentary film production, the emerging tradition of Icelandic cinema, the changing dynamics of Scandinavian porn, and many more
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction
References
Part I: States of Cinema
Introduction
References
1 Regional and Global Dimensions of Danish Film Culture and Film Policy
The Birth of a Modern, National Film Culture
Changing the Game, Breaking Borders
A Transnational Film Culture?
Zentropa and the Transnational Challenge
The Transnational World of Lars von Trier and Susanne Bier
Small Nation, Strong Transnational Profile: Concluding Perspectives
References
Further Reading
Filmography
2 Developing a Bhutanese Film Sector in the Intersection between Gross National Happiness and Danish Guidance
Taking Happiness Seriously as a National Development Goal
GNH, the Development of an Audiovisual Culture and Policy Initiatives
The Stakeholders in the Local Film Industry
The Bhutanese–Danish Film Sector Collaboration
Small Nations, Symmetrical Relations, and the Pursuit of Happiness
Collaboration through Milieu Building, Cosmopolitan Networks, and Affinity-based Partnerships
References
Interviews conducted by Nis Grøn
Further Reading
Filmography
3 Cinema in the Welfare State
Brief Notes on the Institutional History of Swedish Film
Policy Formation and the Cultural Turn
Experiences with Film Policy
Transnational Support, the Regional Turn, and the Significance of Urban and Social Policy
Conclusion
References
Further Reading
Filmography
4 “Education, Enlightenment, and General Propaganda”
Dansk Kulturfilm as “Useful Cinema”
1920s–1930s: Culture Wars and the Classroom
1930s–1940s: Putting the “Dansk” in “Kulturfilm”
Dreyer’s Films for Dansk Kulturfilm
“Cultural Content” on the Postwar International Scene
Conclusion
References
Further Reading
Filmography
Part II: Making Filmmakers
Introduction
References
5 How to Train a Director—Film Schools in the Nordic Countries
Denmark—Film Training: A Matter of Cultural Affairs
Norway—Training Filmmakers within an Academic Institution
Finland—The Training of Film Directors: Teaching a Craft or an Art?
Iceland—The Question of the State’s Involvement in Film Training
Sweden—From Film Reform to Institutional Mergers
Gothenburg—A Case Study
Conclusion
References
Filmography
6 Non-Fiction Film Culture in Sweden circa 1920–1960
Introduction
Educational Film
Advertising Film
Election Film
Newsreel
Amateur Film
Conclusion
References
Further Reading
7 Crossing Borders
DOX:LAB and the De-nationalizing of Talent Development
The DOX:LAB Set-up and Selected Films
Partnerships and Networks: The DOX:LAB Approach
The Dynamics of Access
Two Directors, One Film: Co-direction as Talent Development
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
References
Interviews conducted by Mette Hjort
Further Reading
Filmography
TV Series
Part III: Reeling ’Em In
Introduction
References
8 The Rise and Fall of Norwegian Municipal Cinemas
The Film Theaters’ Act of 1913: Censorship and Municipal Cinemas
The Municipal Takeover
Why Municipal Cinemas?
The Golden Age of the Municipal Cinemas
From Public Service Cinema to Privatization
A New National Film Policy
Scandinavian Cinema Markets in Transition
References
Further Reading
Filmography
9 The “Capital of Scandinavia?” Imaginary Cityscapes and the Art of Creating an Appetite for Nordic Cinematic Spaces
Stockholm: “That Dangerous and Sad City of the Imagination”
‘Venice of the North’ Crumbling into the Sea
Cityscape and Landscape: (Lucrative) Sites for Contested Notions of Nationhood
Television Noir, Copenhagen Style
Armchair Travel: Anglo-America Made Strange
Further Touristic Excursions: Norwegian Wood(s), Fjords, and Cityscapes
Conclusion
References
Further Reading
Filmography
TV Series
10 Jörn Donner and the Emergence of a New Film Culture in Postwar Scandinavia
Year Zero
Film Activism
Filmmaking and Celebrity
Politics
References
Further Reading
Filmography
11 The Formation of a Cinema Audience in Sweden, 1915–1929
The History of Institutionalization
School Cinema
Industry Strategies for Audience Control and Communication
The Audience’s Own Thoughts and Reactions
The Emergence and Function of Film Stars
Conclusion
References
Further Reading
Filmography
Part IV: Reinventing the Reel
Introduction
References
12 Searching for Art’s Promised Land
A Sea-Change
Literary Ventures
Art as Business Strategy
Importing Nationalism
Conclusion
References
Further Reading
Filmography
13 Aki Kaurismäki—From Punk to Social Democracy
No Future
Kaurismäki’s Contrarian Style
Authorship and its Sources
Participation and Withdrawal
Ambivalent Communities
Work and Love as Moral Compensation
Anarchy, Contrarianism, and Exile
References
Further Reading
Filmography
Television Film
14 Swedish Cinema of the 1940s, a New Wave
Politics and Culture
Cinema before 1940
The Swedish New Wave
Ekman and Bergman
Other Major Filmmakers
The End of an Era
References
Further Reading
Filmography
15 Between Art and Genre
A New Genre in Nordic Cinema
Norwegian Horror: Rethinking Landscape and Gender Through Genre
An Icelandic Carnival of Gore
Von Trier’s Danish Art-Horror
History and Horror in Finnish Cinema
Swedish Horror: Vampires in the Welfare State
Nordic Horror between Art and Genre
References
Filmography
16 A Tradition of Torturing Women
Woman, Interrogated—or, Her Master’s Voice
Shutting Our Eyes
References
Further Reading
Filmography
Television Series
Part V: Connecting Points
Introduction
References
17 Memories of Cultural Dismemberment
Narratives of Memory and Dismemberment
Nils Gaup: From Cultural Revitalization to Visual Sovereignty
References
Further Reading
Filmography
18 The Scandinavian Colonies of Silent-Era Hollywood
The Swedes
The Danes
Norwegians
Icelanders
Others
References
Further Reading
Filmography
19 Films into Uniform
Cinephilia, Death, and Nostalgia
Rules Weren’t Made to be Broken: The Dogme 95 Manifesto and Rule Following
Participatory Filmmaking and Practitioner’s Agency
Dogme 95 and International Cinemas
Von Trier and Post-Dogme 95 Manifestos
Dogme 95, Cinéma Direct and Digitality
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
References
Further Reading
Filmography
20 Nordic Remakes in Hollywood
Introduction
The Film Remake at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century: Rethinking the Dynamics of Original and Copy
Remaking the Industry: Transnational Content and Practitioner Mobility
Remaking Culture: Transculturation, Genre, Appropriation, and Immersion
Nordic Noir Remakes: Globalizing Scandinavian Crime
Remaking Global Conflicts: From Internal to External in
Brødre
and
Brothers
Remaking Attractions to Horror and the Cold War:
Let the Right One In
and
Let Me In
Concluding Remarks
Acknowledgments
References
Further Reading
Filmography
Television Series
21 The Global Distribution of Swedish Silent Film
Learning from Pathé Frères
Taking Advantage of the War
Teaming up with Nordisk
The War and the Beginning of the Golden Age
Building “Swedish Film” as a Brand
Translating Swedish Films into New Contexts
Complaints about Swedish Films
Trying to Make “International” Films
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
References
Further Reading
Filmography
Part VI: The Eye of Industry
Introduction
References
22 The Writing of Television Drama
Introduction
Writing as Creative Collaboration
Writers’ Rooms as Thought Communities
One Vision and Questions of Authorship
The Creative Collaborations behind
Borgen
Collaborative Writing with One Vision
Family Collaborations and Integrative Partnerships
Concluding Remarks and Cliffhangers
References
Interviews Conducted by Eva Novrup Redvall
Further Reading
Television Series
23 Universal Aspirations and Ecocosmopolitan Rhetoric
Introduction
The Finnish Ecodocumentary
Finnish Documentary Production Infrastructure
Producing Documentaries in Small Markets
International Connections
Canned Dreams
The Finnish Ecodocumentary in an Ecocosmopolitan Context:
The Red Forest Hotel
The Global Ecodocumentary and Finnish Film Politics
References
Interviews Conducted by Pietari Kääpä
Further Reading
Filmography
24 The Emergence of a Tradition in Icelandic Cinema
Children of Nature
and Tradition
Zik Zak and Diversification
Conclusion
References
Interviews Conducted by Björn Nordfjörd
Further Reading
Filmography
25 The Art of Not Telling Stories in Nordic Fiction Films
Diverging from Dogme
Financing Avant-garde Cinema
Slow Cinema, Nordic Humor, and Other Non-sequiturs
References
Interviews Conducted by Ursula Lindqvist
Further Reading
Filmography
26 The Death of Porn? An Autopsy of “Scandinavian Sin” in the Twenty-first Century
The Legalization of Pornography and the Anti-Porn Movement
“The Death of Porn”
Feminist Pornography
Mainstream Pornography
The Dialectics of Pornography
References
Interviews Conducted by Mariah Larsson
Further Reading
Filmography
Appendix:
Declaration of Development
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 01
Table 1.1 Top 10 Danish films 2000–2012: National, Nordic, European, and US cinema tickets
Table 1.2 Key data for film production in Scandinavia 2003–2008, average pr. year (cinema data)
Table 1.3 Audience for Lars Von Trier’s films 1996–2011, regional shares, ranked by total audience
Table 1.4 Audience for Susanne Bier’s films 1996–2011, regional shares, ranked in terms of total audience numbers
Chapter 20
Table 20.1 Recent Remakes: From the Nordic Region to Hollywood
List of Illustrations
Chapter 08
Figure 8.1
Fante-Anne
(Gipsy Anne, 1920) is played by Asta Nielsen portraying a young orphaned girl working as a milkmaid in the summer mountain pasture (framegrab).
Figure 8.2 Soria Moria Kino, which opened in 1928, was owned and run by Oslo municipal cinemas (Photo: Åsgeir Valldal / Norsk folkemuseum).
Chapter 09
Figure 9.1 The Öresund Bridge showcases the Scandinavian modern design aesthetic—and serves as the location for a gruesome murder that opens the television crime drama
The Bridge
(public domain).
Figure 9.2 The Turning Torso is another visible landmark and televisualized tourist attraction located on the strait between Sweden and Denmark (public domain).
Chapter 10
Figure 10.1 Empty space between characters in
Adventure Starts Here
(1965): Matti Oravisto and Harriet Andersson.
Figure 10.2 A scene originally censored from
Portraits of Women
(1970): Jörn Donner and Marianne Holmström in sauna.
Chapter 11
Figure 11.1 The first-run cinema Röda Kvarn in Stockholm, 1921.
Figure 11.2 A film fan’s wall of fame with Douglas Fairbanks centered in the middle and Gösta Ekman to the far right, 1921.
Chapter 12
Figure 12.1 Production still of the final scene of Skandia’s
A Dangerous Wooing
(1919) directed by Rune Carlsten. The image is intended to resemble Tidemand and Gude’s painting “The Bridal Party in Hardanger.” As a production still, the image would have been used to promote the film.
Figure 12.2 A Danish forest in Carl Th. Dreyer’s
Once Upon a Time
(Sophus Madsen Film, 1922).
Chapter 13
Figure 13.1 Koistinen (Janne Hyytiäinen) at home, awaiting the arrival of his date. The apartment’s furnishings date to the 1960s, and also include traditional Finnish arts and crafts, such as the Ryijy rug which hangs on a wall in the apartment (framegrab,
Lights in the Dusk
).
Figure 13.2 The publication date of the
Le Havre – Libre
newspaper shown in close-up dates the diegesis of
Le Havre
to Monday March 15, 2007. Other newspapers and televised news reports add further historical specificity (framegrab,
Le Havre
).
Chapter 14
Figure 14.1 Kim (Hasse Ekman) and Inga (Sonja Wigert) spending the night at a hotel.
Changing Trains
(1943), directed by Hasse Ekman, produced by Terra.
Figure 14.2 Miss Julie (Anita Björk) remembering her childhood, with herself as a child seen behind her, in the same shot.
Miss Julie
(1951), directed by Alf Sjöberg, produced by Sandrew.
Chapter 15
Figure 15.1 Viktoria Winge as Ingunn, the First and not the Final Girl in
Fritt vilt
(
Cold Prey
, Roar Uthaug, 2006).
Figure 15.2 In
Fritt vilt
(
Cold Prey
, Roar Uthaug, 2006), hikers trudge through the mythic Norwegian landscape of Jotunheimen en route to an abandoned hotel that harbors violence and death.
Figure 15.3 Gunnar Hansen, the Reykjavik-born Texan who played Leatherface in
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
(Tobe Hooper, 1974) as Captain Pétur who welcomes whale watchers on his boat
Póseidon
in
Harpoon: The Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre
(Júlíus Kemp, 2009).
Chapter 16
Figure 16.1 “Suffering always means ennoblement.”
The Passion of Joan of Arc
, Carl Th. Dryer. Joan’s (Maria Falconetti’s) hair is shorn so close to the scalp that it bleeds (frame grab).
Figure 16.2 The witch burning.
The Seventh Seal
, Ingmar Bergman (frame grab).
Figure 16.3 Bess praying.
Breaking the Waves
, Lars von Trier (framegrab).
Chapter 17
Figure 17.1 In the film’s opening scene, a Sámi boy watches in horror as two of his relatives are executed for their part in the Kautokeino Rebellion of 1852
Figure 17.2 Aigin (Mikkel Gaup) receives the drum as the Sámi sit around the fire. Note the repeated circle imagery
Chapter 18
Figure 18.1 Swedes in Hollywood. From left to right: director Victor Sjöström, actress Karin Molander, her husband actor Lars Hanson, and director Mauritz Stiller; the Molanders have just arrived in Los Angeles by train, ca. 1926. Photo from the author’s private collection.
Figure 18.2 The nucleus of Hollywood’s Danish colony is shown in a candid 1929 shot here of good friends. From left to right: Otto Matiesen, Torben Meyer, Anders Randolf, and Jean Hersholt. Photo from the author’s private collection.
Figure 18.3 February 1926
Photoplay
spread, “The Swedish Invasion,” p. 76.
Chapter 20
Figure 20.1 The poster for Danish Niels Arden Oplev’s Swedish
Män som hatar kvinnor
(
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
, 2009).
Chapter 21
Figure 21.1 Where Nordisk sent Svenska Bio’s feature films between 1915–1918, based on Svenska Bio distribution log. Map by Rebecca Bartlett.
Figure 21.2 The promise of Swedish cinema to French critics.
Figure 21.3 Marketing Swedish films to Swedish-American communities.
Chapter 22
Figure 22.1 Three is regarded as the “magic” number in terms of how many writers there should be in a DR writers’ room. Here the
Borgen
headwriter Adam Price (on the right) and episode writers Jeppe Gjervig Gram (in the middle) and Jannik Tai Mosholt (on the left) are storylining episodes for the third season of
Borgen
in November 2011.
Chapter 23
Figure 23.1 Lawyer Yang Zaixin and the eucalyptus forests (
The Red Forest Hotel
).
Figure 23.2 A demonstration outside Stora Enso’s Helsinki headquarters (
The Red Forest Hotel
).
Chapter 24
Figure 24.1 The diegetic film audience in
Mamma Gógó
watches a scene from
Children of Nature
.
Figure 24.2 Landscape takes center stage with
Either Way’s
two main protagonists framed hard at work in an extreme long shot.
Figure 24.3 A stylistic split screen heightens tension in the narrative climax of
Black’s Game
.
Chapter 25
Figure 25.1 Salesman Jonathan (Holger Andersson) demonstrates a set of vampire teeth, one of the novelty items he and his partner, Sam (Nils Westblom), are pitching to a potential customer, the owner of a store called PARTY.
Figure 25.2 Andreas (Trond Fausa) enters the atrium of a modern office building on his first day of work in a city that seems too perfect to be real—yet uncannily resembles modern-day Oslo. (Framegrab).
Figure 25.3 In order to showcase the powered interactions among the boys, Ruben Östlund kept his camera at a measured distance, sometimes even shooting through windows and doorways, giving the film a ‘docufictional’ quality. (Framegrab).
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Wiley Blackwell Companions to National Cinemas
The Wiley Blackwell Companions to National Cinemas showcase the rich film heritages of various countries across the globe. Each volume sets the agenda for what is now known as world cinema whilst challenging Hollywood’s lock on the popular and scholarly imagination. Whether exploring Spanish, German or Chinese film, or the broader traditions of Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, and Latin America, the 20–25 newly commissioned essays comprising each volume include coverage of the dominant themes of canonical, controversial, and contemporary films; stars, directors, and writers; key influences; reception; and historiography and scholarship. Written in a sophisticated and authoritative style by leading experts they will appeal to an international audience of scholars, students, and general readers.
A Companion to German Cinema, edited by Terri Ginsberg and Andrea Mensch
A Companion to Chinese Cinema, edited by Yingjin Zhang
A Companion to East European Cinemas, edited by Anikó Imre
A Companion to Spanish Cinema, edited by Jo Labanyi and Tatjana Pavlović
A Companion to Contemporary French Cinema, edited by Raphaëlle Moine, Hilary Radner, Alistair Fox and Michel Marie
A Companion to Hong Kong Cinema, edited by Esther M.K. Cheung, Gina Marchetti, and Esther C.M. Yau
A Companion to Russian Cinema, edited by Birgit Beumers
A Companion to Nordic Cinema, edited by Mette Hjort and Ursula Lindqvist
A Companion to Nordic Cinema
Edited by
Mette Hjort and Ursula Lindqvist
This edition first published 2016© 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hjort, Mette, editor. | Lindqvist, Ursula.Title: A companion to Nordic cinema / edited by Mette Hjort and Ursula Lindqvist.Description: Chichester, West Sussex ; Malden, MA : John Wiley & Sons Inc., 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2015047256 (print) | LCCN 2015048298 (ebook) | ISBN 9781118475256 (cloth) | ISBN 9781118475270 (Adobe PDF) | ISBN 9781118475287 (ePub)Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures–Scandinavia–History and criticism.Classification: LCC PN1993.5.S2 C57 2016 (print) | LCC PN1993.5.S2 (ebook) | DDC 791.430948–dc23LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015047256
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Cover image: Image from Tomas Alfredson’s “Låt den rätte komma in” / “Let the Right One In.” Reproduced with permission of John Nordling, EFTI AB.
Notes on Contributors
Ib Bondebjerg is an Emeritus Professor at the Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen. He was chairman of the Danish Film Institute (1997–2000) and is co-director of the European research project Mediating Cultural Encounters Through European Screens (2013–2016), and co-editor of the Palgrave European Film and Media Studies book series. Most recent book publications include Engaging with Reality. Documentary and Globalization (2014) and European Cinema and Television. Cultural Policy and Everyday Life (2015, co-ed. with Eva Novrup Redvall and Andrew Higson).
Nis Grøn is a PhD candidate at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, where he is researching the institutional and organizational development of cinema cultures and film industries in small countries in the Asian region.
Fredrik Gustafsson received his PhD in Film Studies from the University of St Andrews in 2013 and teaches film history at Örebro University. He has recently been published in Film Festival Yearbook and Filosofisk tidskrift. He is on the editorial staff for the film journal La Furia Umana and is a regular contributor. He works at the Swedish Film Institute’s library.
Tommy Gustafsson holds a PhD in History and is Professor of Film Studies at Linnæus University, Sweden. He has previously published Masculinity in the Golden Age of Swedish Cinema: A Cultural Analysis of 1920s Films (2014) and the anthology (with Pietari Kääpä) Nordic Genre Film: Small Nation Film Cultures in the Global Marketplace (2015).
Olof Hedling is Associate Professor in Film Studies at Lund University, Sweden and has published extensively on European film policy and regional film and television production. He is the co-author and co-editor of Historical Dictionary of Scandinavian Cinema (2012) and Regional Aesthetics: Locating Swedish Media (2010).
Mette Hjort is Chair Professor of Visual Studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong; Adjunct Professor at the Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen; and Affiliate Professor of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her publications include The Strategy of Letters; Small Nation, Global Cinema; Lone Scherfig’s ‘Italian for Beginners’; and the interview books, The Danish Directors (with Ib Bondebjerg, 2001), The Danish Directors 2 (with Eva Jørholt and Eva Novrup Redvall, 2010), and The Danish Directors 3 (with Ib Bondebjerg and Eva Novrup Redvall, 2014).
Laura Horak is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Carleton University. She is the author of Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema 1908–1934 (2016) and co-editor of Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space (2014). She is currently writing a book titled Cinema's Oscar Wilde: Mauritz Stiller and the Production of Modern Sexuality.
Gunnar Iversen is Professor of Film Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and visiting scholar at Carleton University, Ottawa. His writings have appeared in Film History, Early Popular Visual Culture, and Journal of Scandinavian Cinema. He has written several books in Norwegian. In 2010 he co-edited Beyond the Visual – Sound and Image in Ethnographic and Documentary Film, and in 2012 he co-wrote Historical Dictionary of Scandinavian Cinema.
Mats Jönsson is Associate Professor of Cultural Sciences at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He has written three monographs and co-edited six interdisciplinary anthologies (e.g., Media and Monarchy in Sweden and Regional Aesthetics: Locating Swedish Media). He has contributed to numerous international periodicals and anthologies, and also initiated two international research networks: “The Newsreel Network” and “Scandinavian Media Culture 1814–2014.”
Pietari Kääpä is a lecturer in Media and Communications at the University of Stirling. He has published widely on Nordic cinema and ecocriticism and he is currently working on a project on environmental media management in the Nordic creative industries. His latest books are Ecology and Contemporary Nordic Cinema (2014) and Nordic Genre Film: Small Nation Film Culture in the Global Marketplace (with Tommy Gustafsson, 2015).
Maaret Koskinen is Professor of Cinema Studies at Stockholm University, and also currently on the Board of the Swedish Film Institute. Her publications include Ingmar Bergman Revisited. Cinema, Performance and the Arts (editor, 2008) and Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence. Pictures in the Typewriter, Writings on the Screen (2010). Recent publications focus on Swedish feature film in a transnational context.
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 and a number of articles on film history. His ongoing research seeks ways to analyze film style with awareness of contextual factors.
Mariah Larsson is Associate Professor at Malmö University, where she teaches in the Master’s Program in Sexology. Her research deals with film and sexuality, pornography, national and transnational cinema, and popular culture.
Ursula Lindqvist is Assistant Professor of Scandinavian Studies and affiliated faculty in Film and Media Studies at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota. She is the author of Roy Andersson’s Songs from the Second Floor: Contemplating the Art of Existence (2016) and co-editor, with Jenny Björklund, of New Dimensions of Diversity in Nordic Culture and Society (2016).
Arne Lunde is Associate Professor in the Scandinavian Section at UCLA and is the author of Nordic Exposures: Scandinavian Identities in Classical Hollywood Cinema (2010). He is currently working on a book about Ingmar Bergman’s early films inside the Swedish studio system, 1944–1960.
Scott MacKenzie teaches film and media at Queen’s University, Canada. His books include Cinema and Nation (with Mette Hjort, 2000), Purity and Provocation: Dogma '95 (with Mette Hjort, 2003), Screening Québec: Québécois Moving Images, National Identity and the Public Sphere (2004), The Perils of Pedagogy: The Works of John Greyson (with Brenda Longfellow and Thomas Waugh, 2013), Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures (2014), Films on Ice: Cinemas of the Arctic (with Anna Stenport, 2014), and The Cinema, too, Must be Destroyed: The Films of Guy Debord (forthcoming).
Andrew Nestingen is Professor of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Washington. His books include The Cinema of Aki Kaurismäki: Contrarian Stories (2013) and Crime and Fantasy in Scandinavia: Fiction, Film, and Social Change (2008). He co-edited a special issue of the Finnish film journal Lähikuva on Aki Kaurismäki (February 2010).
Björn Nordfjörd is a Visiting Associate Professor at St. Olaf College, Minnesota. He has edited a volume on world cinema in Icelandic, and is the author of a monograph on Nói the Albino in English. His Icelandic translation of Rudolf Arnheim’s Film as Art was published in 2013.
Wendy Gay Pearson is Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and Feminist Research at the University of Western Ontario. She is the co-editor (with Susan Knabe) of Reverse Shots: Indigenous Film and Media in an International Context (2014) She is also the director of the Indigenous film database project.
Linda Haverty Rugg is a Professor in the Scandinavian Department at the University of California, Berkeley. She has published Picturing Ourselves: Photography and Autobiography (1997) and Self-Projection: The Director’s Image in Art Cinema (2014). Currently she is working in ecocriticism and whiteness studies.
Eva Novrup Redvall is Associate Professor in Film and Media Studies at the University of Copenhagen. She has published numerous articles on different aspects of Nordic cinema in books and journals. Her latest book is Writing and Producing Television Drama in Denmark: From The Kingdom to The Killing (2013).
Ove Solum is Professor in the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Oslo. He has researched and published on a wide range of subjects such as Norwegian film history, Norwegian and Scandinavian cinema, film and cultural policy, film theory and film analysis.
Anna Westerståhl Stenport is Professor of Scandinavian Studies and Media and Cinema Studies, and Director of the European Union Center, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
C. Claire Thomson is Senior Lecturer in Scandinavian Film at University College London. She is the author of Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen (The Celebration) (2013), and has published widely on Danish cinema, especially Carl Th. Dreyer, the kulturfilm and short film forms, multisensory cinema, and on literature and national identity.
Casper Tybjerg is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the Department of Media, Cognition, and Communication at the University of Copenhagen. He has published extensively on Danish silent cinema and the films of Carl Th. Dreyer. He is completing a book on the historiography of filmmaking focused on Dreyer's work.
Astrid Söderbergh Widding is a Professor of Cinema Studies and, since 2013, President of Stockholm University. Her research has largely been devoted to European film culture and aesthetics, as well as minor cinemas. Publications include A History of Swedish Experimental Film Culture: From Early Animation to Video Art (2010, with Lars Gustaf Andersson and John Sundholm), Moving Images: From Edison to the Webcam (2000, edited, with John Fullerton), and Nordic National Cinemas (1998, with Tytti Soila and Gunnar Iversen).
Acknowledgments
In the course of preparing A Companion to Nordic Cinema, we have received a great deal of support from many people, some of them anonymous, many of them very well known to us. Jayne Fargnoli, Executive Editor at Wiley Blackwell, was supportive throughout and brought considerable energy and inspiration to the project—which she kindly initiated—from the very beginning. Six anonymous readers’ reports, brimming with generosity, constructive thoughts, and careful, detailed comments, provided guidance of the most motivating and enabling kind at a time when it was helpful to receive it. To these six readers: We are immensely grateful to you and wish the veil of anonymity could be lifted, allowing us to say so far more directly! Commissioned for the Companion, all twenty-six chapters represent new research undertaken specifically for it. Our contributors, without whom there would be no Companion, have in every way been a delight to work with. We are immensely grateful to them for having been so committed to the project. Designed to emphasize practitioner’s agency where possible, the volume reflects the generosity of filmmakers, film producers, and festival organizers, among many other practitioners. The willingness of many practitioners to make time for in-depth conversations with our authors is very much appreciated and has, we believe, brought a very important dimension to the thinking about Nordic cinema that the Companion presents. Finally, for responsive and enthusiastic professionalism, we thank the Wiley Blackwell team, including Allison Kostka, Julia Kirk, Mary Hall, Anandan Bommen, Tessa Hanford, and Roshna Mohan.
Mette Hjort wishes to thank the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China, for research support (RGC Ref. No. 340612/CB 1384), and Ursula Lindqvist wishes to thank Harvard University and Gustavus Adolphus College for financial and logistical support and Elizabeth Lutz ’15 for her meticulous copyediting of quite a few chapters.
Introduction: Nordic Cinema: Breaking New Waves since the Dawn of Film
Mette Hjort and Ursula Lindqvist
The Nordic region’s contributions to world cinema have been significant and span the entire history of the medium. Nordisk Film in Denmark, founded in 1906, is one of the oldest production companies in the world, and several filmmakers of the Silent Golden Age—Victor Sjöström of Sweden, Mauritz Stiller of Sweden/Finland (who “discovered” Greta Garbo), and Benjamin Christensen of Denmark—were all recruited by Hollywood studios in the 1920s based on the global successes of their films, now silent classics of the Nordic cinema (Horak and Lunde, this volume). Boxed DVD sets with the films of global auteurs such as Carl Theodor Dreyer (commonly known as Carl Th. Dreyer) and Lars von Trier of Denmark, Ingmar Bergman of Sweden, and Aki Kaurismäki of Finland have been released by the New York-based distribution company The Criterion Collection in special editions that purport to bring “defining moments of world cinema” to wider audiences. Films by these directors are frequently included in film scholarship and taught in film courses worldwide—and not only those devoted to Nordic or European cinema. The Nordic region has also produced a remarkable number of global film stars, from cinema’s Silent Golden Age to today: Asta Nielsen, Greta Garbo, Sonja Henie, Ingrid Bergman, Liv Ullmann, Max von Sydow, Mads Mikkelsen, Pernilla August, Lena Olin, Noomi Rapace, Alicia Vikander, Mikael Persbrandt, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Stellan Skarsgård, Alexander Skarsgård, and even the famous Icelandic singer Björk, who won the Best Actress Award at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival for her role in von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark.
All told, in the 60-year history of the U.S.-based Academy Awards, Nordic films have been nominated 29 times, with Swedish and Danish films garnering more nominations and wins than most countries; only Italy, France, and Spain have had more (The Official Academy Awards Database). In 2010, Danish director Susanne Bier’s In A Better World (Hævnen) won both an Oscar and a Golden Globe Award, and in 2012, two Nordic films were nominated for Oscars in a single year: Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg’s Kon-Tiki (Norway) and Nikolaj Arcel’s A Royal Affair (En kongelig affære, Denmark). While an Oscar nod clearly is not a universal marker of a film’s quality, the fact that Nordic films have been selected in increasing numbers by the giant of Hollywood film institutions, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, through the years is a reflection of global visibility and interest, a sign that Nordic films are understood and appreciated by influential film practitioners outside the region. Nordic films have also performed remarkably well at international festivals; for example, the Sundance Film Festival, which since its inception in 1985 has represented an edgy alternative for both American directors and those from around the world, honored Swedish filmmaker Jens Jonsson’s film The King of Ping Pong (Ping pong-kingen, 2008) with the Grand Jury Prize for best dramatic film. In 2010, Torben Bech and Otto Rosing’s A Person from Nuuk (Nuummioq, 2009), the first Greenlandic feature film to be submitted for the Academy’s Best Foreign Language Award, was also nominated for the prestigious Sundance prize.
While critics, film scholars, and cinephiles the world over have embraced the work of individual Nordic practitioners or distinctive genres, film scholars outside the region have typically studied these as exceptional, contained phenomena, and not in the context of their domestic film cultures and socio-political realities. Examples of such auteurist studies (which are many) include David Bordwell’s The Films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer (1981) and Hubert I. Cohen’s Ingmar Bergman: The Art of Confession (1993). While such studies have done much to advance film scholarship and cinephilia, their global influence becomes problematic when familiarity with the work of singular Nordic auteurs is recast as essentialized knowledge about Nordic cinema as a whole. For example, when Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson—whose recent work could hardly be more different from Bergman’s in style and content, aside from jointly belonging to the category of art cinema—released his comeback film Songs from the Second Floor (Sånger från andra våningen, 2000), critics abroad nonetheless drew comparisons to the quintessential Swedish filmmaker whose films they knew all too well. New York’s Village Voice reviewer called the film “slapstick Ingmar Bergman” and Toronto’s Globe and Mail reviewer wrote that “The film is like an Ingmar Bergman film as realized by Monty Python” (Hoberman 2002; Lacey 2002). Such reviews imply the general expectation that Swedish films are necessarily depressing and humorless—a skewed characterization of a domestic film market where comedies have long constituted the lion’s share of film production (Gustafsson and Kääpä 2015, 2). Once Dreyer’s films—melodramatic, weighty, and preoccupied with spiritual themes—are added to the mix from which a putative Nordic norm is extracted, it is easier to understand why global audiences have been quick to accept what is seen as a “Nordic” take on certain genres – film noir and horror, for example. By contrast, films belonging to genres targeting a quite different set of emotions—“quirky feel-good” films, for example—tend to be met with bemused bewilderment and confusion regarding their Nordic provenance. As Ellen Rees has noted, such films combine “drama with comic effects in order to establish emotional connections between viewers and characters” (2015, 147). The Nordic “quirky feel-good” films also tend to play on well-known social stereotypes within the Nordic region, for example: the emotionally suppressed blue collar worker in Kaurismäki’s The Man Without a Past (Mies vailla menneisyyttä, 2002); Copenhagen thugs stuck in the Danish provinces in Anders Thomas Jensen’s Flickering Lights (Blinkende lygter, 2000); the crochety old Norwegian bachelor in Bent Hamer’s Kitchen Stories (Salmer fra kjøkkenet, 2003); and the oddly nationalistic and bohemian taxi driver of Friðrik Þór Friðriksson’s Cold Fever (Á köldum klaka, 1995). Many of these films offer up important social critiques—related to small-nation anxieties in the face of globalization—that are easily overlooked in the absence of nuanced film scholarship providing the necessary historical, cultural, and political contexts (Nestingen 2008). The films’ complexities in this regard, and departure from a well-established “Nordic” norm based on familiarity with a small number of auteurs, create a clear role for Nordic film scholars with a fine-grained understanding of developments within the Nordic region, both within and outside the sphere of cinema. Many of the contributions to the Companion are in fact a matter of nuancing or even challenging some of the “standard” conceptions of Nordic cinema, by encouraging wider and deeper forms of engagement with the cinematic material and its contexts, or by pinpointing changes in the region as the Nordic countries redefine themselves in light of various globalizations.
It is heartening to note that the Nordic presence in world cinema has grown substantially in recent decades, and has also become far more diverse. Nordic feature films, documentaries, and short films now regularly win top awards at international film festivals ranging from Cannes to Sundance, just as they find distributors in markets worldwide. Regional television dramas and films marketed as “Nordic noir” (Koskinen, this volume) and “Nordic horror” (Iversen, this volume) have avid fanbases well outside the Nordic region, both through DVD distribution and via online streaming services, and a significant number of these works have inspired remakes (Stenport, this volume). Today, widely respected Nordic filmmakers—Lars von Trier of Denmark, Liv Ullmann of Norway, and Roy Andersson of Sweden, for example—have assumed active roles in global conversations about the future of the film medium or otherwise served on international film panels or juries.
The best-known example of the region’s contribution to these global conversations is Denmark’s much-debated Dogme 95 movement. It may have been officially short-lived, kicking off in 1995 when von Trier infamously threw red pamphlets imprinted with its manifesto into the audience at a film conference in Paris, and ending in 2005, with yet another official declaration penned by von Trier. Yet the Dogme movement not only raised the global profile of Danish film, it also sparked global conversations about how to make meaningful films outside of Hollywood’s dictates—particularly in small cinema markets where filmmakers operate with modest budgets and infrastructure—and resulted in dozens of filmmakers worldwide making Dogme films. A number of these went on to be screened at festivals and to win prizes; indeed, the fact that Dogme #1, The Celebration (Festen, 1998; see Thomson 2014), directed by Thomas Vinterberg (one of the original four Dogme 95 “brethren”), won the Jury Prize at the prestigious Cannes International Film Festival—along with 31 other film prizes—gave legitimacy to what initially appeared to be a mere publicity stunt. This legitimacy was further reinforced when Dogme #3, Mifune’s Last Song (Mifunes sidste sang, 1999), directed by another of the “brethren,” Søren Kragh-Jacobsen, won the Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival.
Directors around the world have been able to make good use of the mix that Dogme provides—of its brand, platform, momentum as a movement, philosophy of creativity, and conception of filmmaking. In Hong Kong, for example, Vincent Chui, an untiring proponent of Chinese independent cinema, used the Dogme rules and label as a marketing strategy when making Leaving in Sorrow (Youyou chouchou de zou le, 2001; Hjort 2003, 154–5), linking his film to the manifesto-based movement in press releases and interviews. On the Chinese mainland, filmmakers affiliated with the Sixth Generation—Jia Zhangke, Lou Yue, Zhang Ming, Ah Nian, Wang Quan’an, Lu Xuechang, Zhang Yuan, Wang Xiaoshuai, and Shi Runjiu, for example—see themselves as strongly aligned with central aspects of the Dogme approach, exploring contemporary Chinese realities through film, the here and now of China, as it is shaped by globalization, urbanization, and state capitalism. Even in cases where obstacles to making a Dogme film have seemed insurmountable, the inspiration provided by the initiative has been powerful. Ning Ying, a Fifth Generation figure in terms of age and training, yet often grouped with the Sixth Generation filmmakers on account of urban and contemporary emphases in her films, insists that she wished to make the last film in her Beijing trilogy, I Love Beijing (Xiari nuanyangyang, 2001) as a Dogme film, but pulled back, as this would have entailed an “underground” status for the work and thus blocked access to official distribution channels in China. Yet, as far as Ning Ying is concerned, the idea, when making I Love Beijing, was to produce a film that was consistent with the ethos of Dogme, in spite of being unable to follow the rules, on account of state regulations (Hjort 2008, 485).
One of the main goals of this Companion is to situate the award-winning films and practices of well-known film practitioners in relation to the larger institutional landscapes that provide the enabling conditions for central Nordic achievements in the area of film. Those landscapes have a specificity that is well worth capturing, for in many instances they are shaped by models and concepts that work well, are fueled by values that warrant affirmation, and have the potential to “travel” well beyond the boundaries of the region. Transferable models, and conversations between practitioners and policymakers in the Nordic region and those outside it, are also central foci for the Companion (Hjort and Grøn, this volume).
To understand the region’s contributions, it is crucial to examine the policy-based regional cooperation that has helped to sustain “small-nation” cinema in the North. While the Scandinavian capitals of Stockholm, Copenhagen, and Oslo certainly retain their appeal as film cities (Koskinen, this volume), regional film funds based in the provinces have changed the landscape of Nordic film production in recent years (Hedling 2008; Hedling 2010). In Sweden, where three major regional film funds have been set up since the 1990s—Film i Skåne in Ystad, Filmpool Nord in Luleå, and Film i Väst in Trollhättan—this initiative has transformed the southwestern city of Trollhättan, aka “Trollywood,” from a moribund industrial town to a regional film production center serving filmmakers from throughout the Nordic region. Trollywood has achieved fame through films such as Lukas Moodysson’s Show Me Love (Fucking Åmål, 1998; Stenport 2012), Vinterberg’s The Hunt (Jagten, 2012), and von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (2000), Dogville (2003), and Melancholia (2011). Indeed, the reinvented town of Trollhättan has attracted such international stars as Nicole Kidman, Lauren Bacall, Kirsten Dunst, Kiefer Sutherland, and Charlotte Gainsbourg to Sweden, through the efforts of canny producers at Zentropa Entertainments in Denmark and Memfis Film in Sweden, in association with the regional film fund Film Väst (literally, “Film West”).
The institutional perspective is also critically important in connection with film training, capacity building, and talent development. Thanks to film reforms undertaken in the latter part of the twentieth century throughout the Nordic region, there is a certain cohesion to the methods and institutional support for training Nordic filmmakers today, although there is also a degree of differentiation (Söderbergh Widding, this volume). Two institutional sites in particular, one in Denmark and the other in Sweden, help to make the point that the achievements of the region are partly anchored in film pedagogies and the institutional environments that support them. Widely regarded as one of the most effective conservatoire-style film schools in the world, the National Film School of Denmark, founded in 1966, has played a decisive role in the region, especially in the wake of rethinking initiated by Henning Camre in 1975. The school’s efficacy is reflected in its ability to attract film talent from across the Nordic region, in its influence on the development of film pedagogies in the North (Philipsen 2004; Philipsen forthcoming), and in the remarkable achievements of its graduates, including Lars von Trier, Lone Scherfig, Thomas Vinterberg, Susanne Bier, Mikala Krogh, Phie Ambo, Per Fly, Sami Saif, Christoffer Boe, Anthony Dod Mantle, and Dagur Kári (Petrie & Stoneman 2014, 37–39; Redvall 2010). A far more recent initiative, the University of Gothenburg’s film program, in western Sweden, has established itself as another key institutional site, having at this point trained many of Sweden’s globally acclaimed directors of the new century, such as Ruben Östlund (The Involuntary/De ofrivilliga, 2008; Play, 2011; Force Majeure/Turist, 2014) and Gabriela Pichler (Eat, Sleep, Die/Äta, Sova, Dö, 2012). With its film training initiative, the University of Gothenburg’s Valand Academy has brought diversity to the sector and further energy to regional endeavors. Indeed, it has effectively challenged the dominance of Stockholm, where Sweden’s first film school was founded in 1964 with Bergman as its managing director (Stenport 2013). In sum, the point of including detailed discussions of film policy and film training in the Companion is to clarify the extent to which filmmaking in the Nordic region is rooted in distinctive institutional arrangements.
Despite the longstanding global visibility of cinema from the Nordic region, “Nordic cinema” as a category has, until recently, remained elusive and enigmatic, with the majority of published scholarship on the subject treating the region as a collection of distinct national cinemas (for example Hardy 1952; Cowie 1992; Soila, Söderbergh Widding & Iversen, 1998; Soila 2000; and Sundholm, Thorsen, Andersson, Hedling, Iversen, & Møller 2012). There are some compelling reasons for this. First, Nordic film scholars have understandably been reluctant to construct an overly broad or essentializing account of a diverse array of film cultures and histories. The Nordic region is, after all, home to five nation-states as well as four distinct territories—Sápmi, the homeland of the indigenous Sámi; Greenland, which adopted self-rule in 2009 following a long colonial relationship with Denmark; the Faroe Islands, self-governing islands in the North Atlantic; and Åland, Swedish-speaking islands off the coast of Finland. There is also remarkable linguistic diversity; while the Danish, Norwegian and Swedish languages are similar enough to be mutually comprehensible (with some effort), Greenlandic, Finnish, and the Sámi languages are not even part of the Indo-European language family, while modern Icelandic and Faroese are closest to Old Norse, the language spoken by the Vikings. Given the high levels of education and literacy in the region, as well as significant waves of immigration to Denmark, Norway, and especially Sweden since the 1990s, English often becomes the default language for transnational communication. This region’s diversity extends, as well, to its film cultures, which—as this volume demonstrates—have developed at vastly different paces and in different ways. Jon Woronoff, editor of a book series that includes the Historical Dictionary of Scandinavian Cinema (Sundholm et al. 2012), explains in the book’s foreword that it is the heterogeneity of Nordic national film histories and cultures that necessitated the volume having six authors. “Scandinavian cinema does not exist,” he wrote, “at least not yet, and what we remain interested in is the cinema of five Scandinavian countries” (x).
This Companion to Nordic Cinema asserts not only that Nordic cinema does indeed exist, but also that its heterogeneity is a vital asset for the region’s film production, exhibition, and distribution in the globally networked, media-saturated environments of today. Nordic cinema today is thriving—no small feat for a geographically peripheral region with a combined population of around 20 million people and a combined GDP of about $1.3 trillion (2014 est.; comparatively, Germany was at $3.6 trillion and the United States $17.5 trillion in 2014 [CIA World Factbook]). It is our view that a transnational approach provides the necessary framework for pinpointing the specificities of Nordic cinema, from its manifest achievements to its cultural and institutional conditions. We are not alone in this. Indeed, the past decade has seen the publication of several edited anthologies on Nordic cinema, all of them with a genuinely transnational focus: Transnational Cinema in a Global North (Nestingen & Elkington 2005), Northern Constellations: New Readings in Nordic Cinema (Thomson 2006), and Nordic Genre Film: Small Nation Film Cultures in the Global Marketplace (Gustafsson & Kääpä 2015). While these represent important contributions to the field, each limits its scope either to contemporary cinema or to a particular mode of filmmaking. Films on Ice: Cinemas of the Arctic (Stenport & MacKenzie 2015) provides an ambitious survey of cinematic works from, about, and filmed in the Arctic, much of which lies within the Nordic region. An academic journal devoted to the study of film throughout the region, the Journal of Scandinavian Cinema, was founded in 2011, with editors based in the Nordic region and in North America, and a 2010 issue of the journal Scandinavian-Canadian Studies devoted to Nordic cinema was reprinted in book form in 2012 as Evaluating the Achievement of One Hundred Years of Scandinavian Cinema (Tucker 2012). Yet, what has remained absent is a comprehensive scholarly volume that not only provides a rich history of the Nordic cinematic traditions, from their origins to the new millennium, but also links already well-known names and titles to the practices and forms of institutional creativity that facilitated their emergence and success. The time is thus ripe for this Companion to Nordic Cinema, a collection of 26 original chapters by Nordic cinema scholars from around the world. Together, the chapters bring into sharp relief some of the essential historical, cultural, and political contexts for what might otherwise appear to be a series of disconnected—although striking—successes from one of the world’s earliest film-producing regions.
The academic study of Nordic cinema has increased greatly since the turn of the new millennium, and we have designed this Companion with the needs of the classroom, as well as the interests of film scholars, cinephiles, and practitioners, in mind. Whereas in the past, Nordic cinema has been taught piecemeal in university film courses, often through the work of select auteurs such as Dreyer or Bergman, today American and European universities increasingly offer courses on Nordic or Scandinavian cinema as such; and at universities on the Chinese mainland—Fudan University in Shanghai, for example—there is similarly considerable interest in the cinematic output of the region in the context of teaching. Yet existing scholarship on the subject has been fragmented, which not only diffuses its influence and impact but also makes it difficult to adopt for a film course. Another historical issue is that relevant research on Nordic cinema has typically been exclusive in its orientation, speaking more to Scandinavian specialists than to film scholars and students more generally. The chapters in this volume speak to both, bringing together the work of established and promising young Nordic cinema scholars for the kind of comprehensive treatment this field so richly deserves.
Our contributors demonstrate a strong commitment to anchoring discussions of central issues—policies, institution building, traditions, movements, genres, and style, among many others—in concrete examples of specific films, just as they are mindful of the importance of providing fruitful references to global cinematic contexts or developments outside the Nordic region. A clear commitment when designing the Companion was to foreground practitioner’s agency. The point was to encourage scholarly discussions reflecting carefully focused exchanges with, for example, directors, producers, policymakers, festival organizers, and film commissioners about the constraints, opportunities, values, and strategies that underwrite developments within the broad domain of Nordic cinema. A significant number of our contributors have made excellent use of the access that they have to the milieus of practice in the North, working in a collaborative way with the filmmakers through a series of practitioner interviews or observations of their filmmaking techniques over a period of time. With its emphasis on practitioner’s agency, the Companion offers a model of scholarship relevant not only to Nordic cinema but to Film Studies generally.
This Companion is divided into six distinct sections, each with its own introduction to provide additional context for the phenomena under study in the relevant chapters. The first section, “States of Cinema: Nordic Film Policy,” sheds light on regional (in both the sub-national and supra-national sense of “region”) developments in the North. Attention is given to Nordic film’s institutional underpinnings, with contributors analyzing the factors that have allowed for innovation, as well as stability, and for a potent embedding of notions of public value in many of the spheres of cinematic activity. The region’s engagement with other parts of the world well beyond the North are also brought into play, through accounts of collaborative endeavors made possible by global conceptions of the Nordic region as having demonstrated, through its policy work with film, a compelling commitment to the idea that film and film culture are important pillars in the construction of a good society. That commitment is explored in great detail and depth, through a case study focusing on a specific national initiative, Dansk Kulturfilm.
