Through Scandinavia, Darkly: A Criminological Critique of Nordic Noir

2020 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Keith J Hayward ◽  
Steve Hall
Keyword(s):  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Television Drama ◽  
Cultural Criminology ◽  
Cultural Expression ◽  
Narrative Style ◽  
Perspective Drawing ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Complex Characterization ◽  
Late Modern ◽  
International Phenomenon

Abstract Nordic noir is a popular crime genre associated with a region (Scandinavia), a narrative style (unpretentious/socially critical) and a particular aesthetic look (dark/foreboding). Renowned for its psychologically complex characterization and gloomy Mise-en-scène, and spanning best-selling crime fiction, film, and globally successful television drama, Nordic noir has mushroomed from regional niche market to international phenomenon in little more than a decade. A review of both popular and academic accounts of the genre suggest that much of Nordic noir’s appeal comes from its supposed ‘gritty’ or ‘realist’ account of Scandinavian society. This paper, however, adopts a different perspective. Drawing on cultural criminology, ultra-realism and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, we argue that, rather than accurately reflecting the complex social and political problems currently confronting late modern Scandinavian welfare societies, Nordic noir has lost its grip on realism and any meaningful association with actual/established Scandinavian values. Instead, Nordic noir is now functioning as a displacement narrative, a form of cultural expression that allows artists, producers and their audiences to push the region’s social problems outside the realm even of the Imaginary.

Louis XIII, Richard I, and the Duchess of Devonshire: Nineteenth-Century Jews in Fancy Dress Costume

Images ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Michele Klein
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Cultural Expression ◽  
Self Image ◽  
Family Photographs ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Formed Part ◽  
Social Messages ◽  
Material Record

Abstract In the nineteenth century, fancy dress activities and their material record formed part of the mise-en-scène of the Jewish elite’s self-fashioning. Family photographs and press reports of Jews in costume cast new light on the visualization of wealthy Jews. These Jews actively participated in the fancy dress culture of the elites, a popular form of cultural expression that was deemed a powerful way to convey social messages. In the British Empire, Europe, and North America, affluent Jews negotiated their feelings of solidarity and difference among non-Jews. They explored and articulated their self-image and group identity by appropriating others’ history and culture in public and private dressing-up amusements. Fancy dress, this article argues, enabled Jews to question who they wanted to be and communicate their desires to their Jewish and non-Jewish peers.

scholarly journals Fictional Crimes/Historical Crimes: Genre and Character in Philip Kerr’s Berlin Noir Trilogy

Genealogy ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 60
Author(s):  
Laura Major
Keyword(s):  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
Nazi Party ◽  
Narrative Style ◽  
Good Story ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Detective Stories

This paper will explore Philip Kerr’s Berlin Noir trilogy, composed of March Violets (1989), The Pale Criminal (1990), and A German Requiem (1991), discussing the overlap and blurring of generic boundaries in these novels and the ability of this form to reckon with the Holocaust. These detective stories are not directly about the Holocaust, and although the crimes investigated by the mordant Bernie Gunther are fictional, they are interweaved with the greater crimes committed daily by the Nazi Party. The novels are brutally realistic, violent, bleak, and harsh, in a narrative style highly appropriate for crime novels set in Nazi Germany. Indeed, with our knowledge of the enormity of the Nazi crimes, the violence in the novels seems not gratuitous but reflective of the era. Bernie Gunther himself, who is both hard-boiled protagonist and narrator, is a deeply flawed human, even an anti-hero, but in Berlin, which is “alive” as a character in these novels, his insights, cloaked in irony and sarcasm, highlight the struggle to resist, even passively, even just inside one’s own mind, the current of Nazism. Although many representations of the Holocaust in popular fiction strive towards the “feel good” story within the story, Kerr’s morally and generically ambiguous novels never give in to this urge, and the solution of the crime is never redemptive. The darkness of these novels, paired with the popularity of crime fiction, make for a significant vehicle for representing the milieu in which the Holocaust was able to occur.

scholarly journals Don Taylor, the ‘Old-Fashioned Populist’? The Theban Plays (1986) and Iphigenia at Aulis (1990): Production Choices and Audience Responses

2018 ◽  
pp. 123-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynn Fotheringham
Keyword(s):  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Multiple Cameras ◽  
Television Drama ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Audience Responses ◽  
Television Audience ◽  
Ancient Drama ◽  
As If ◽  
Iphigenia At Aulis

This chapter explores the production contexts for and audience responses to The Theban Plays (BBC, 1986), a trilogy of plays by Sophocles, and Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis (BBC, 1990), the last productions of Greek tragedy that would be broadcast on British television for twenty years. These four plays were directed by Don Taylor at the end of a long career in television from 1960. Taylor’s commitment to studio-bound drama, shot as if live on multiple cameras, could be seen as old-fashioned by the mid-1980s, as could his ‘Reithian’ commitment to democratizing works from the dramatic canon via television. Nevertheless these productions garnered enthusiastic as well as critical comments from both newspaper reviewers and the audience sample surveyed by the BBC. This chapter demonstrates how various features of the productions, including an anti-realistic mise-en-scène and the uses made of the multiple cameras, align with and reflect Taylor’s published views on television drama. Close analysis of the wide variety of opinions expressed by those watching underline the complex social, political and aesthetic issues involved in judging attempts to put ancient drama before a modern television audience.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Tulloch ◽  
Belinda Middleweek
Keyword(s):  
Textual Analysis ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Mutual Understanding ◽  
Critical Geography ◽  
Interdisciplinary Perspective ◽  
Perspective Drawing ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Cinematic Experience

This book has provided a new reading of the transformation of intimacy that can be found in real sex films using an interdisciplinary perspective drawing on new risk sociology; feminist critical geography; and literary and film studies concepts such as structure of feeling, narrative, genre, stardom, social audience, spectatorship, and mise en scène. In this pursuit the book has incorporated a bricoleur methodology of social audience and textual analysis and devised a “soft ethnography” to explore the different authorial signatures on a filmic text. By viewing real sex cinema through a variety of theoretical, empirical, sociohistorical, and reflexive lenses, it has suggested ways that readers can bring to the cinematic experience their own search for a mutual understanding of ideas and perspectives and yet also, like our social audience groups in their discussions with one another, a sense of critical extension as well.

Carceral horror: Punishment and control in Silent Hill

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-287 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin F Steinmetz
Keyword(s):  
Content Analysis ◽  
Video Games ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Cultural Criminology ◽  
Entertainment Media ◽  
Modern Media ◽  
And Control ◽  
Public Imagination ◽  
Late Modern

Prisons have become regular fixtures in late modern media. Despite this ubiquity, little research has been conducted examining representations of prisons and punishment within one of the most popular forms of contemporary entertainment media: video games. Drawing from cultural criminology and Gothic criminology, the current study examines punitive and carceral elements in the horror video game franchise of Silent Hill. Eight games within the series are analyzed through a combination of ethnographic content analysis and autoethnography to reveal two dominant themes evident throughout the series: retribution and confinement. As argued in this study, Silent Hill—like many horror productions—revels in ambiguity and expresses cultural anxieties stemming from the paradoxical vertiginous sentiments of insecurity amidst increasing securitization and prisonization of society and everyday life. Survival horror, including Silent Hill, is a product of both Japanese and American cultural formations. This analysis therefore argues that Silent Hill reveals an American-Japanese public imagination that clamors for respite from insecurity while also becoming horrified by the carceral apparatus it created.

Ingvar Ambjørnsens hytte-noir

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 234-249 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen Rees
Keyword(s):  
Recent Trend ◽  
Film Noir ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Forest Landscape ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
Femme Fatale ◽  
Late Modern

Abstract This article considers links between contemporary Norwegian writer Ingvar Ambjørnsen’s novel Natten drømmer om dagen (2012; The night dreams of the day) and the concept of noir, both in relation to more traditional film noir, to classic hard-boiled crime fiction, and to the recent trend in crime fiction and television known popularly as “Nordic noir”. The author argues that Ambjørnsen reworks key elements of noir aesthetics and thematics, for example relocating the setting from the more typical “urban jungle” to an equally dark and brooding forest landscape. Ambjørnsen simultaneously activates and dismantles tropes associated with both Norwegian identity (nature, the vacation cabin) and with noir (the anti-hero, the femme fatale) to create a complex social critique of late modern Norwegian society.

scholarly journals “almost invisible until now”

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-154
Author(s):  
Kristina Hagström-Ståhl
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Feminine Subjectivity ◽  
Anne Carson ◽  
Perspective Drawing ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Relationship

This essay discusses Sophocles’ Antigone in relation to its Hegelian legacy, engaging with the play from a directorial perspective. Drawing on the work of Judith Butler, Anne Carson , Bonnie Honig, Peggy Phelan and Cecilia Sjöholm, I attempt to envision a contemporary mise en scène that repositions feminine subjectivity within the dramaturgy of tragedy. Centering on the relationship between Antigone and Ismene, as well as on the possibility of revaluing Ismene’s position in terms of political and dramaturgical agency, I hope to challenge dramaturgical conventions that assume binary, heteronormative relations as the primary framework of interpretation for female characters, and death and destruction as the only possible outcome for what is positioned as feminine. This resituated reading of the drama examines the function of embodied performance in processes of meaning-making, and offers dramaturgical structure as a site for strategies of resistance.

scholarly journals Homicide in Television Drama Series

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Penny Crofts
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Television Drama ◽  
Media Portrayals ◽  
System P ◽  
Crime Dramas ◽  
Criminal Legal System ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Analytical Frameworks

This chapter analyzes the representation of homicide in contemporary television drama series. The chapter draws upon critical analysis from the fields of criminal law, criminology, law and literature, and cultural studies to provide various analytical frameworks and perspectives through which to understand and critique specific dramas and the portrayal of homicide drama generally. If criminology is an effort to understand crime and criminals, then crime dramas including homicide television dramas can be considered a form of popular criminology that can and should be analyzed in terms of cultural representations of crime and criminal justice. Theorists have proposed that crime fiction can be categorized as mystery, detective fiction, or crime fiction. This framework provides a means for analyzing homicide drama, including the possibility of resolution and justice, geographic and temporal settings, the portrayal of the murder, and the construction of the three stock characters of crime fiction (the victim, the detective, and the murderer). The chapter concludes with a presentation of theories about the impact of media portrayals of crime upon public beliefs about crime, criminality, and the criminal legal system.

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