Opening up the Postwar World in Color: 1950s Geopolitics and Spectacular Nordic Colonialism in the Arctic and in Africa

This chapter examines the ‘elsewheres’ that opened up Scandinavian film cultures globally in the 1950s, reflecting international developments in genre, style, and production mode and the increased post-war mobility of people and technologies. This includes access to new shooting locations, lighter cameras and better on-site sound uptake, a motivation to film increasingly in color and in spectacular ‘[Cinema]Scopes’ that could immerse cinema goers in (exotic) scenery. These films were all major investments, designed for global circulation. Constituting an overlooked corpus of Scandinavian ‘elsewheres’ in their portrayal of international or seemingly exotic locations, as well as indigenous populations and practices, these films also tie into period perceptions of Scandinavian politics abroad -- internationalist, pacifist, socialist, and “do-gooder,” spreading around the world the merits of the Scandinavian, especially Swedish, model of the cradle-to-grave welfare state and a Dag Hammarskjöld-inspired notion of a Third/Middle Way of international aid and solidarity. The films can also be seen as reacting specifically against the Cold War opposition between East and West, and illuminating the precarious status of small nation states wedged in between them, whether NATO members (Norway, Denmark, Iceland) or not (Sweden, Finland).

The Transnational Politics of Lars Von Trier’s and Thomas Vinterberg’s “Amerika”

This chapter explores a previously overlooked area in von Trier, Dogma95, and Vinterberg scholarship by investigating the industrial and aesthetic practices, generic elements, and themes that make up their collective “Amerika” elsewhere. Where the two Danish directors’ American references have often been passed off as auteurist provocations, this chapter addresses the tensions and contradictions between the films’ European locations and American settings and the discursive play between Scandinavian and European “art” cinema and American genres (the musical, the western, gangster, horror, and science-fiction/disaster film) to expose a counter-hegemonic transnational politics. Films under discussion, including Dancer in the Dark, Dogville, Manderlay Antichrist, Melancholia, It’s All about Love, Dear Wendy, are all set in an imagined USA, a country von Trier has never visited. Their settings are more often delocalized and blatantly mythical and inspired by a distantiated and critical, Kafkaesque and Brechtian, perspective – of “Amerika.”

Elsewheres of Healing: Trans-Indigenous Spaces in Elle-Máijá Apiniskim Tailfeathers’ Bihttoš

This chapter engages with the short film Bihttoš (Rebel, Canada and Norway, 2014), by the Sámi and Kainai Blackfoot filmmaker Elle-Máijá Apiniskim Tailfeathers, as a cinematic invocation of multiple elsewheres. Set in the three settler states of Norway, the United States, and Canada, this film is not about those states. Instead, it narrates an Indigenous story situated elsewhere from the spheres of mainstream, settler culture that are often the presumed standards. In this sense, Bihttoš is not so much Canadian and Norwegian as it is Sámi and Kainai/First Nations–or, indeed, trans-Indigenous. The film’s vision is divided between one colonized Indigenous space (the Blood Reserve) and a parallel but distinct experience of colonialism elsewhere (Sápmi), and the experimental documentary traces the ways that these geographically disparate experiences inscribe themselves on the same individual: the Sámi/Blackfoot “Elle-Máijá”.

Criminal Undertakings: Nicolas Winding Refn, European Film Aesthetics, and Hollywood Genre Cinema

This chapter explores Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn. Refn’s first feature Pusher (1996) was a local box-office success that helped usher in the era of the Nordic crime film, which includes his own follow-up Bleeders (1998) and two Pusher sequels (2004 and 2005). His American crime and gangster film, Drive (2011), is set in Los Angeles and is indebted to notable American classics of the genre. Reunited with Hollywood star Ryan Gosling, Refn continued to explore the international pedigree of the crime thriller in Only God Forgives (2013), where Gosling plays an American struggling to stay afloat in the Bangkok underworld. In Neon Demon (2016), Refn returns to Los Angeles, this time the world of fashion, where Hollywood gloss and European film aesthetics meet head-on. His three “American” films thus offer a striking blend of Hollywood genre and European art cinema traditions helping to explain their wildly mixed receptions.

The Finnish Cinema Colony in North America, 1938−1941

This chapter addresses how Finnish films were exported and travelled to the United States and Canada between 1938-1941. Although resources were scarce and Finnish films were mainly targeted to domestic audiences, there existed vibrant niche markets for Finnish films among Finnish immigrants, in particularly during the late 1930s and the early 1940s. The chapter explores the distribution and exhibition practices within these diasporic communities, and discusses the significance of the North American niche markets both for the Finnish film industry and for Finnish immigrants. After this promising start was ruptured by the Second World War, the postwar circulation of Finnish films had only a marginal economic influence. Yet Finnish films of this era offered important means for the Finnish diasporic colonies and communities to sustain and negotiate national identities.

I Am Curious (Yellow) as Sex Education in the USA

This chapter explores I Am Curious (Yellow) and the public’s response during its first box office run in the United States. It argues that the film functioned as a non-normative form of sex education, and that the U.S. government wanted to censor it swiftly not because it was pornographic, but precisely because it was deemed not to be. In other words, the film presented itself as a creative pseudo-documentary endeavor while the U.S. interpreted it as obscene and tasteless; the film pushed the definitions of what is and is not documentary and informational film. I place I Am Curious (Yellow) in the historical canon of internationally (in)famous Swedish sex education films, the most notable example being Language of Love (Ur kärlekens språk). I Am Curious (Yellow) was the first of several films that further blurred the line between sex education and pornography on an international scale.

Bridging Places, Media, and Traditions: Lasse Hallström’s Chronotopes

This chapter investigates the career of Swedish-born director Lasse Hallström, whose international breakthrough came with his 1985 adaptation of Reidar Jönsson’s novel Mitt liv som hund/My Life as a Dog. Not surprisingly, many of his American films have also been adaptations, including his remarkable The Cider House Rules and The Shipping News. This study considers several of Hallström’s adaptations from the points of view of the films’ common ground (the focus on the plight of the unwanted child) and the cultural differences or even clashes they represent. In contrast, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen and The Hundred-Foot Journey seem at first to be fairy tales of cultural reconciliation, although they also raise questions about leadership, the culture of everyday life, and adaptation in every sense of the word. Hallström’s adaptations provide us with insights into our own cultures, as well as those of others, while also highlighting the limits of adaptation.

“There is no Elsewhere!”: Stories of Race, Decolonization, and Global Connectivity in Göran Hugo Olsson’s Documentaries

This chapter focuses on interviews with Swedish film maker Göran Hugo Olsson, about his films The Black Power Mixtapes 1967-1975 (2011) and Concerning Violence (2014), framed with an introduction and contextualization. Both films are based on found footage and archival material. The chapter deals with “elsewheres” of Nordic film in a geographical and in a temporal sense: What has today’s Sweden got to do with the histories of the Black Power Movement in the United States, addressed in The Black Power Mixtapes 1967-1975, and with decolonization wars and liberation movements in West, southern and East Africa thematized in Concerning Violence? This interconnectedness in time and space is characteristic for Olsson’s films. The chapter asks in which sense does the re-actualization of archival material contribute to a historicization of contemporary issues of (post-) colonialism and racism? In which sense do the films contribute to, or challenge, narratives of Sweden’s exceptional position in an asymmetrical world order?

Out of the Margins of Feminist Filmmaking: Vibeke Løkkeberg, Norway, and the Film Cultures of 1970s West Berlin

This chapter addresses how 1970s films by Norwegian women filmmakers form an unexplored history of cinematic and feminist “elsewheres,” through their many international connections. In particular, the films by Vibekke Løkkeberg were part of the international women’s film festival circuit at the time. Foregrounding her Women in media (1974), shot while the director was participating at the First International Women’s Film Seminar in West Berlin in 1973, the chapter emphasizes connections to women’s filmmaking in the New German Cinema movement. Women in media is comprised of interviews with French, Italian, British and American women working in film and television who discuss the difficulties of gaining access to production. As a case study, Løkkeberg’s film provides an interesting document about the fight for equality in media in Western Europe, and contextualizing connections between a peripheral feminist national cinema (such as that of Norway at the time), and an emerging international feminist network.

Nordic Noir as a Calling Card: The International Careers of Danish Film and Television Talent in the 2010s

This chapter examines the transnational success of drama serials such as Forbrydelsen/The Killing (2007-2012) and Borgen (2010-2013) and the popularity of a special kind of ’Nordic Noir’ crime drama, the Danish television production landscape enjoyed an unprecedented international interest in the early 2010s. While the series found widespread circulation and sparked new discourses on subtitled content that challenges dominant English-speaking fare, the interest in what was perceived as a highly professional public service production culture simultaneously created new possibilities for Danish talent to launch A-list careers on the global television stage. This study further analyses this new circulation of talent, focusing on how the Danish practitioners have experienced the move to the international production landscape, particularly on what they perceive as similarities and differences between Danish and US production cultures. The chapter also explores what can be regarded as the benefits of this kind of transnational flow of talent; for the international productions as well as for the national series when directors and actors move back and forth between the Nordic region and the rest of the world, creating different kinds of ’Nordic elsewheres’, on screen and behind the screen.