Danish Privilege and Responsibility in the Work of Susanne Bier

Meryl Shriver-Rice interprets Brothers, After the Wedding, and In a Better World in terms of the shared trope of the white male sojourner who travels from Denmark to locations that feature non-white, non-Western citizens. This chapter situates the Bier/Jensen trilogy within a wider trend of contemporary Scandinavian narratives of guilt. In assessing potential critiques of the trilogy on postcolonial grounds, Shriver-Rice argues that the “elsewheres” of these films do not ignore geographic location specifics and cultural contexts in order to assert a universalizing morality. Instead, the ethical trajectories of these films are not universal, and the idea that universalist ethics will inevitably fail takes precedence. Shriver-Rice argues that Bier’s drawing from non-industrialized non-Western space has more to do with speaking to the privileged-world guilt in the Danish viewer, and reminding him or her of the world at large beyond Western space.

Beginning with Jewish Survival: Freud’s Leaving Home

“Beginning with Jewish Survival: Freud’s Leaving Home” is a close reading of the complex references to Jewish heritage in Bier’s first feature-length film. Maureen Turim employs a psychological lens to assess the film’s distinct blend of comedy and tragedy, most particularly in its evocations of Freud’s delayed maturation, Rosha’s impending death, and their intense, ambivalent mother-daughter bond. The chapter further situates Freud’s Leaving Home in the context of contemporaneous films by Jewish directors that represent diasporic Jewish families in cultural transition.

Susanne Bier’s Hollywood Experiments: Things We Lost in the Fire and Serena

“Susanne Bier’s Hollywood Experiments: Things We Lost in the Fire and Serena” explores the lackluster responses to Bier’s first English-language productions, often referred to as her ‘Hollywood films’. Author Missy Molloy surveys a variety of sources related to the films’ productions and receptions to reveal the challenges Bier faced transitioning to new production contexts. Moreover, while the films demonstrate Bier’s willingness to experiment with unfamiliar genres and production conditions, they also reaffirm her attractions to specific cinematic subjects, images, and narrative scenarios. Thus, these less successful films provide information relevant to the project of tracing Bier’s authorial influence across a body of extremely varied works. Furthermore, the fact that her authorial influence was somewhat muted in her first ‘Hollywood’ films—due to her signing on late in pre-production as well as complications that arose during post-production— indicates that in Bier’s case, early involvement allows her to affect the characters and narratives to the extent that they reflect career-long preoccupations, which manifested in Things We Lost in the Fire and Serena to a degree that didn’t significantly appeal to either her domestic or international audience. The chapter complements Langkjær’s and Agger’s attentions to more successful films by highlighting that Bier’s approach to genre is expansive, even when it does not produce desirable results. Molloy concludes that less effective elements of Bier’s cinematic strategies are results, at least partly, of bad timing. She further argues that reception prejudices played a role in Things We Lost in the Fire and Serena’s failures to land with audiences.

Susanne Bier’s Boundary-crossing Screen Authorship

The volume introduction contextualizes Susanne Bier’s work in light of Danish cinema’s unprecedented popularity around the turn of the 21st century; outlines the evolution of her career; relates her work to broader questions in cinema studies related to women’s screen authorship, genre and cinema’s social and cultural influences; and previews the book’s structure and chapter foci.

A Conversation with Susanne Bier

Based on an interview conducted in November 2016 in Copenhagen, the volume’s postscript foregrounds the topics covered in the book and touches on provocative readings of Bier’s films advanced by contributors. Bier’s responses to the editors’ questions provide material for future discussion, particularly in the overlaps they reveal between contributors’ interests and Bier’s. The interview also includes Bier’s thoughts on many issues addressed in the volume, thus inviting Bier to collaborate on this first major push to lay down a critical foundation for understanding her as a significant screen author.

The Truth is in the Eyes: Susanne Bier’s Use of Close-ups in The Night Manager

“The Truth Is in the Eyes: Susanne Bier’s Use of Close-ups in The Night Manager” sheds light on aesthetic strategies apparent across Bier’s works. Eva Novrup Redvall points to Bier’s decision to frame and interject eyes as a means of aligning the audience with the visual sensibility of a spy. In her analysis of Bier’s recent and extremely successful foray into serial television drama, Novrup Redvall takes extensive note of Bier’s use of close-ups. Applying theoretical discourses on the close-up and studies of Bier’s stylistic traits in her previous work, she reflects on the “remarkable array” of eyes, as well as Bier’s use of close-ups of objects. She concludes that Bier achieves a high-end mainstream genre production replete with arthouse aesthetics, which forefronts character interiority while highlighting the “complicated tensions” between characters and their circumstances.

Judaism and Danish Directors: The Case of Lars von Trier vs. Susanne Bier

“The Case of Lars von Trier vs. Susanne Bier” focuses on the public conflict between Denmark’s leading international film directors, which has developed almost entirely through von Trier’s defamation of Bier in widely published anti-Semitic statements. In this chapter, Pétur Valsson outlines the history of von Trier’s and Bier’s relationship, which includes personal and professional ties that illustrate the closely knit nature of the Danish film industry. Valsson then questions the role of Jewish identity in each director’s work and professional persona, concluding that Bier’s more direct experience of Jewish culture contrasts with von Trier’s fetishization of Jewishness, which was shattered by his late-in-life discovery that his biological father was not Jewish as he had thought. Valsson suggests that the simultaneity of Bier’s career ascendance and von Trier’s discovery of mistaken identity unfortunately resulted in von Trier’s very public misogynist and anti-Semitic comments, to which Bier refused to respond, characterizing them as ridiculous.

Cinema of the World and Women’s Film Culture: Susanne Bier’s Transnational Cinema

Chapter 11 employs a feminist lens to situate women filmmakers within a wider global context in which all women’s cinema can be considered to be “world cinema,” set apart from local contexts that fail to encompass women’s film practices in terms of resources, space, and mobility. Advocating a perspective advanced by Patricia White in Women’s Cinema, World Cinema, Belinda Smaill proposes that women filmmakers should be viewed within “whole world approaches” that comprehensively address the context of production, circulation, representation, and image of each director. While tracking the mobility of female directors, Smaill points out that while it is difficult for women to achieve employment as feature directors in the U.S., it is even more difficult to gain access to the industry from outside the U.S. Hollywood is an exclusive domain, making Bier’s transnational American work a critical site for investigation. With Serena, Smaill contends, Bier cements her place as a director who takes on the world by lending her authorial signature to a complex manifestation of world cinema.

Vision and Ethics in A Second Chance (En chance til)

Danica van de Velde’s “Vision and Ethics in A Second Chance (En chance til, 2014)” addresses Bier’s aesthetics in depth. Reading A Second Chance as a particularly poignant example because of how it forefronts the “intertwining of image and psychology” so recognizable in Bier’s work, van de Velde argues that Bier’s approach functions as “a visual strategy that, among other things, highlights the dynamic between spectator- ship and ethicsVan de Velde’s analysis also provides thought-provoking insight into Bier’s use of shots resembling photographic stills and the function of literal photographs in the film, demonstrating how they problematize perception. Van de Velde shows that while Bier’s visual strategies compel viewer-attention to the characters’ inner states, they also ultimately both “disrupt the moral equilibrium of right and wrong” and call into question “the very ethics of spectatorship.”

Tracing Affect in Susanne Bier’s Dramas

Mimi Nielsen’s “Tracing Affect in Susanna Bier’s Dramas” proposes two intertwined, extensive themes apparent across much of Bier’s oeuvre stresses particular stylistic and narrative traits that significantly contribute to Bier’s work being both unique and recognizable. Nielsen, in support of her dual argument that Bier’s films evidence a preoccupation with “intensity-as- affect,” draws from four feature films that span much of Bier’s directorial career. Nielsen expounds on the prevalence of attention to affect in Bier’s work, in this instance its role in a character’s self-coherence. She also addresses Bier’s preoccupation with male characters and notes how these two themes coalesce and call into question assumptions of containment and self-sufficiency associated with individualism, especially those allied with concepts of masculinity.