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- Volume 3, Issue 1, 2013
Journal of Scandinavian Cinema - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2013
Volume 3, Issue 1, 2013
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A transnational history of Finnish cinema – rethinking the study of a small nation cinema
By Henry BaconThe notion of the transnational has challenged ideas about the nation and national cinema. The article outlines revisionist issues in a research project on transnationalism and Finnish cinema. Finnish cinema is an exemplary transnational object of study as a small nation cinema with a relatively small number of films, which have been documented through exhaustive archival work.
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Antichrist, misogyny and witch burning: The Nordic cultural contexts
By Linda BadleyIn the controversy surrounding Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (2009), the film’s rich Nordic cultural heritage has been largely overlooked. Often labelled misogynistic, the film challenges audiences with an issue that Judeo Christian and contemporary post-feminist culture alike disavow: fear of the chthonic feminine. With this issue in mind, I explore the film’s reflection of a conflicted obsession with the unruly feminine, witch trials and pagan recidivism exemplified in a number of key texts by Trier’s Scandinavian antecedents, including August Strindberg, Benjamin Christensen, Carl Th. Dreyer and Ingmar Bergman, as well as Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky’s ‘Swedish’ film Offret/The Sacrifice (1986) and Trier’s own Medea (1988), based on a Dreyer script. The films specifically explore a residual tension between modern Christian/secular and pagan beliefs and a commingled fear of and desire for the return of the repressed pagan code while often empathizing with the (female) witch’s point of view. Both echoing and upending this cinematic tradition, Antichrist is an open acknowledgement of Trier’s Scandinavian roots.
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The ‘road of life’ in the film trailers of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries
More LessThe aim of this Student short subject is to determine whether or not the film trailers of Ingmar Bergman’s Det sjunde inseglet/The Seventh Seal (Bergman, 1957) and Smultronstället/ Wild Strawberries (Bergman, 1957) highlight the six characteristic themes outlined in Jesse Kalin’s book The Films of Ingmar Bergman (2003).
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‘When to push stop or play’: The Swedish reception of Ruben Östlund’s Play (2011)
More LessThis article provides an overview of the polemics surrounding the politics of representation in Ruben Östlund’s film Play (2011). It contextualizes the media debate, which focused on the film’s depiction of black children, and analyses its significance within the context of Swedish contemporary film culture and criticism.
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Documentary imagination: The disappeared, the clue and the photograph
More LessThe article discusses the ways in which photographs are approached and framed in the Finnish documentary film Kaksi enoa/Two Uncles (1991) by Kanerva Cederström. The documentary’s point of departure is a photograph of the film-maker’s uncle who went missing in World War II. With the photograph, the documentary invites the viewer into the mystery surrounding the disappearance. The article follows the different positions given to the photograph over the course of the film and argues for the documentary’s capacity to imagine in the face of the wartime loss that beset the film-maker’s family.
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An uncle too many: Uncle Paavo as spectre from the past
By Bill NicholsThis short subject discusses the personal impact of the memories of Uncle Paavo, the absent war victim in Kanerva Cederström’s documentary Kaksi enoa/Two Uncles (1991). The short subject is a companion piece to Ilona Hongisto’s article on the same film, published in this issue.
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Terje Vigen, naturbilder and the natural history of film in Sweden
More LessVictor Sjöström’s Terje Vigen/A Man There Was (1917) has often been credited with introducing a new era of film production in Sweden and initiating a ‘golden age’. Reading the film only as a break with the past, however, obscures other important continuities that stretch back to the earliest days of film-making. In particular, I argue, the film drew heavily on the actuality film tradition of naturbilder/nature pictures that invited audiences to sense a shared space with the cinematic image, understood to be an extension of the spectators’ world. Additionally, both Terje Vigen and the mythology surrounding the film’s origins highlight the characters’ and actors’ supposed embeddedness in place and work to construct an image of landscape that presents itself as given and organic. By drawing upon an imaginary in which the subject is inextricably connected with and constructed by place, Terje Vigen invites a reconsideration of the boundaries of subjectivity and the means by which identity was formed.
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Reflections in the mirror of melancholia – on the narrative and male heritage in Napapiirin sankarit/Lapland Odyssey (Karukoski, 2010)
By Tytti SoilaThe article argues that Dome Karukoski’s Napapiirin sankarit/Lapland Odyssey (2010) inflects the journey narrative with irony and melancholy to reflect critically but comically on Finnish models of masculinity.
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