The Nordic noir brand

Editing the volume Nordic Noir, Adaptation, Appropriation with Linda Badley and Jaakko Seppälä made evident historical changes in the role of adaptation in Nordic audio-visual culture. An earlier generation of auteurs such as Aki Kaurismäki used adaptation to align themselves with aesthetic and philosophical bodies of texts, what we might call ‘networks of similarity’, following Luis M. García Mainar. In the rise of Nordic noir since the millennium, Nordic cinema and television’s networks of similarity change. The auteurs used adaptation to establish modernist originality of vision. In the current moment, this quality has diminished, and adaptation increasingly figures in broader, more densely cross-referential networks of similarity, of which Nordic noir is arguably an instantiation. These are defined by aesthetic and sociopolitical associations, more so than originality. These associations figure in practitioners’ and textual consumers’ use of response to and replication of the noir texts and their networks in a variety of media. This activity can be understood as a type of branding that aligns with attempts at national and regional branding.

Teaching Nordic cinema: Perspectives and possibilities

For the tenth anniversary issue of Journal of Scandinavian Cinema (JSCA), C. Claire Thomson reflects on fifteen years of teaching Nordic cinema at University College London (UCL). The article outlines the teaching and learning contexts in which the subject is taught, and how teaching has been transformed by developments in scholarship in the field and online resources. The constraints and opportunities offered by the pivot to remote teaching during the 2020 pandemic are also considered. Three extracts from essays by students are offered as illustrations of how students from different disciplinary backgrounds and different parts of the world engage with Nordic cinema.

Faroese cinema and transnational nation-building

In addition to providing a brief history of Faroese cinema in a broad perspective, this article examines the juxtaposition of the transnationalism of Nordic cinema and what could be called a Faroese cinema, which has previously not been the focus of scholarly attention within Nordic cinema studies. This article presents the case for Faroese cinema as a nation-building practice within a transnational funding, production and distribution context. By expanding the notion of Faroese cinema to include films containing various national and transnational markers, it aims to provide a deeper and broader understanding of the development of a distinct film industry on the Faroe Islands. Extending from previous work in transnationalism and globalization in Nordic cinema, this article argues that Faroese cinema is inherently transnational and that recent institutional establishments and feature film productions are not starting points for Faroese cinema, but rather milestones in its development.

The Cinematic Kon-Tiki Expeditions: Realism, Spectacle, and the Migration of Nordic Cinema

This chapter investigates cinematic strategies used to depict Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki expedition of 1947 on screen. The critical discourse surrounding Heyerdahl’s 1950 documentary film has centered on the ontology of its images, which film history’s most influential theorist of realism, André Bazin, famously praised in Kon-Tiki. Despite Bazin’s enthusiasm, both expedition and documentary were highly mediated and staged promotional events from the beginning. The only reason a film could be cobbled together at all from the waterlogged 16mm film that Heyerdahl brought home with him was because of the intervention of a Swedish film technician who resized and repaired the badly damaged sequences. In 2013, Norwegian directors Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg turned to Heyerdahl’s expedition for their own film. In their take, the sedate source material of the documentary has given way to spectacular visual effects and scenes of peril on the high seas. All the absent scenes of danger in the original take center stage in the latter film. Subtext has become text, as Rønning and Sandberg transform the source material into cinematic spectacle.

Introduction: Nordic Film Cultures and Cinemas of Elsewhere

Nordic Film Cultures rethinks and reformulates the images, legacies, and impacts of Nordic cinemas within dynamic and multi-directional global contexts. The book engages with lacunae of transnational, extra-territorial history of Scandinavian and Nordic filmmaking from its early phases up to the present moment. The volume’s quest is to re-imagine Nordic cinema outside the confines of national and even regional cinema brackets to an even further new degree and in locations often least expected. Departing from what may be, to an international audience (and partially also to domestic spectators), obvious “traditions” of the Nordic region, the authors read against the grain of “the national” and reveal how significantly Scandinavian films and filmmakers transcend and transgress these national boundaries on myriad levels.

Voices from the Past – Recent Nordic Historical Films

Nordic cinema since the 2000s has turned to history to a greater degree than before, employing historical subject matter and settings to entertain, show off costumes and tell stories, but also to contribute with images and sounds to what historian Robert A. Rosenstone calls ‘that larger History . . . that web of connections to the past that holds a culture together, that tells us not only where we have been but also suggests where we are going’. This chapter discusses the connections to the past made by the genre of the historical film. By historical film I mean films that create stories that take place in the past and not the present. The main questions are: How do Nordic filmmakers interpret and construct Nordic history? How do Nordic filmmakers engage with the past? And, what constitutes history for current filmmakers in the Nordic countries? I discuss four different feature films, from four different countries, in order to show the scope of the new Nordic historical film and different varieties of engagement with the past.

Nordic Genre Film

Nordic Genre Film offers a transnational approach to studying contemporary genre production in Nordic cinema. It discusses a range of internationally renowned examples, from Nordic noir such as the television show The Bridge and films like Insomnia (1997) to high concept ‘video generation’ productions such as Iron Sky (2012). Yet, genre, at least in this context, indicates both a complex strategy for domestic and international competition as well as an analytical means to identify the Nordic film cultures’ relationships to international trends. Conceptualizing Nordic genre film as an industrial and cultural phenomenon, other contributions focus on road movies, the horror film, autobiographical films, the quirky comedy, musicals, historical epics and pornography. These are contextualized by discussion of their place in their respective national film and media histories as well as their influence on other Nordic countries and beyond. By highlighting similarities and differences between the countries, as well as the often diverse production modes of each country, as well as the connections that have historically existed, the book works at the intersections of film and cultural studies and combines industrial perspectives and in depth discussion of specific films, while also offering historical perspectives on each genre as it comes to production, distribution and reception of popular contemporary genre film.

Powered by Music: Contemporary Film Musicals, Nordic Style

When thinking about Nordic cinema, the musical is not the first genre to come to mind. This holds true for the global audiences as well as for Nordic ones, nowadays and in retrospect. The film musical, in some kind of down-to-earth classical generic sense, is for a Western audience most probably associated with Hollywood films from the 1930s and onwards, with an obvious decline after the successful productions Mary Poppins (1964) and The Sound of Music (1965). Some European musicals are probably also well-known to the nonspecialist public, such as Jacques Demy’s Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, 1964) and Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (The Young Girls of Rochefort, 1967). Since then musicals have changed or transformed. Even if some characteristics usually connected with the genre are still in use, they are now often utilised in an excessive or transformed way (Altman 1987; Grant 2012).