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- Volume 4, Issue 2, 2014
Journal of Scandinavian Cinema - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2014
Volume 4, Issue 2, 2014
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The transnational remake: Crossing borders with Contraband
More LessAbstractThis short subject compares the Hollywood action film Contraband (2012) by Kormákur and the Icelandic ‘original’ Reykjavík Rotterdam (2008) by Jónasson, leading to a critical reassessment of remakes and the perceived differences between Hollywood and Icelandic cinema.
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Nordic practices and Nordic sensibilities in Finnish–Swedish co-productions: The case of Klaus Härö and Jarkko T. Laine
By Henry BaconAbstractIn Swedish and Danish cinema’s subtle variations of light, director Klaus Härö and cinematographer Jarkko Laine found initial inspiration for cinematic treatment of people in relation to their Nordic environment. While making their first three feature films in Sweden, the two Finns became acquainted with Swedish professional practices deriving from a long tradition of film-making. These differed in many ways from Finnish practices. While imposing certain limits, the Swedish system was also supportive in a way that the Finnish system was not. In Finland, a major break in tradition occurred following the fall of the studio system; there continues to be lower volume of film production. However, particularly in making their first two films Elina – som om jag inte fanns/Elina: As If I Wasn’t There (2002) and Äideistä parhain/Mother of Mine (2005) Härö and Laine were able to unite Finnish and Swedish creative talent and produce award-winning films.
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Between the poles of Eisensteinian aesthetics: Editing patterns in Peter Watkins’ biographical films
More LessAbstractThe ‘Brechtianisms’ of editing in Peter Watkins’ films have largely escaped critical attention, doubtless as a result of their medium-specific nature, whereby the links between those formal elements and Brecht – as primarily a stage practitioner – are obscured. This article employs the ideas of Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, who shares Brecht’s indebtedness to Marxist dialectics and Russian formalism, to reveal and investigate both the convergences and divergences between the two artists and Watkins. I argue that Watkins’ biographic films Edvard Munch (1974) and Fritänkaren/The Freethinker (1994) illustrate the trajectory that has led Watkins from Eisensteinian montage of attractions to the Soviet practitioner and theorist’s intellectual montage as a dominant structural method. The article further points out that the strong affinities of The Freethinker’s formal operations with those of Brecht’s own works for the stage and screen are attributable broadly to the film’s refusal to subsume its stylistic unorthodoxies to the logic of psychological realism.
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Urban, ethnic, provincial: Anticipations of audience preferences in Danish film funding and production
More LessAbstractThis article explores how professional and public stakeholders in the development of film projects negotiate economic and symbolic risk related to representation of minorities and geographical peripheries in Denmark, and situates these negotiations within the Danish public sphere and the contemporary subsidy and production system. The main argument is, on the one hand, that the national cinema potentially works as an arena for social inclusion; on the other, that anxiety related to economic and symbolic risk, which promotes industry myths and postulates about target groups, puts constraints on expressions. The identified reluctance to risk-taking is not only relevant to the question of sociocultural representation behind and in front of the camera, but also to the question of the state’s ability to create a space for creative autonomy.
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Ingmar Bergman, archivist
By Jan HolmbergAbstractIn his autobiographical writings, Ingmar Bergman dismissed the value of collecting and saving materials from his personal and professional life. Yet he saved an enormous amount of personal and professional material, which was collected in a room in his island home on Fårö, Sweden. The material was transferred to the Swedish Film Institute and catalogued in the Ingmar Bergman Archives. The article suggests that Bergman’s archiving project served as a response to his own mortality, a theme also evident in his late films and autobiographical writings.
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Reception material in the Ingmar Bergman Archives: Letters, essays, drawings
More LessAbstractThis article considers documents relating to two different sections of the Ingmar Bergman Archives, emphasizing some of the social and cultural characteristics of the material. Analysis of letters from ordinary film spectators constitutes one portion. Another concerns Bergman’s employment as manager and director of the municipal children’s theatre Sagoteatern (The Fairy-Tale Theatre) in Stockholm (1941–1942). In both cases, the auteur archive becomes a site for examining the spectator rather than the auteur. The article examines how the chosen material may convey knowledge about spectatorship, and specific social and personal experiences of cinema and theatre, by making visible a range of cultural practices seldom associated with auteurism or ‘film art’, which nonetheless can be incorporated in an auteur archive.
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Ingmar Bergman’s screenwriting
More LessAbstractVia a combination of screenwriting theory and theories on literary manuscripts, this article approaches Ingmar Bergman’s screenwriting as process, from notebooks to script drafts and finished screenplays. It particularly emphasizes the playful dimensions in the early stages of the screenwriting process and the way the writing negotiates fiction and reality.
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