Fathers and Sons Reunited: Road Movies as Stories of Generational Continuity

This chapter asks what happens to the conventions of the road movie, and in particular its ethos of resistance, when younger and older generations hit the road together in Nordic films of the 2000s. In raising this question I discuss the use of road movie conventions in two Finnish road movies, the fictional Road North (Mika Kaurismäki, 2012) and the documentary Finnish Blood Swedish Heart (Mika Ronkainen, 2012), which both feature stories of father–son pairings driving together towards a new kind of understanding of their roots. The films offer two ways to see how road movies, in essence, work between the national and the transnational. Road North depicts a road journey inside the borders of Finland. Finnish Blood Swedish Heart, in comparison, is profoundly transnational anyway in its subject matter of a father and son duo driving from Finland to their past in Sweden, but film was also financed as a Finnish–Swedish co-production and, before being awarded as the best Finnish documentary of the year, it received the Dragon award for the best Nordic documentary at the Gothenburg International Film Festival 2013.

Stockholm Noir: Neoliberalism and Gangsterism in Easy Money

The gangster story is a warped Horatio Alger tale. Carl Freedman notes that it connects to the mystery of the origins of capitalism in what Karl Marx called ‘primitive accumulation’, the consciously repressed history about how common lands and natural resources were privatised and how companies, backed up by national armed forces, plundered non-European continents of their riches. The greedy and ruthless gangster’s rise to social success is but a small-scale reflection of the genocides and the violent redistribution of wealth that gave birth to modern-day capitalism. Gangsterism is also the ultimate expression of what the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies called Gesellschaft. While his other key concept Gemeinschaft describes the ‘natural’ personal relations and values often found in rural communities, Gesellschaft stands for the ‘constructed’ impersonal relations through business and formal interaction that characterise life in the urban capitalist era. As national identity became a central issue in twentieth-century Europe – Fascism being the most extreme ideological project – gangsters and other social, legal and moral transgressors were often defined in popular culture as an alien intrusion of an otherwise idyllic Gemeinschaft.

Crime Up North: The Case of Norway, Finland and Iceland

In this chapter I hope to account for the international (literary and filmic) origin of recent Norwegian, Finnish and Icelandic crime films and television series as well as their particular local specificity. I will thus not only be assessing them in relation to their Swedish and Danish counterparts, but also to what I will be simply referring to as the international crime film. It is a norm mostly associated with Hollywood (albeit not limited to it) that is, as regards style, form and narrative structure, for the most part devoid of regional or national specificities. My use of the word ‘generic’ is intended to emphasise this dual nature by referring both to the essentials of a particular genre (crime) and a broad universality. Of particular concern is whether one can pinpoint any particular trajectory in the development of contemporary Norwegian, Finnish and Icelandic crime films made with international aspirations during this dramatic rise of Nordic noir – that still shows no sign of abating.

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.

Introduction: Nordic Genre Film and Institutional History

The demand for all areas of Nordic film and television culture outside the borders of the Nordic countries may come as no surprise. The popularity of television shows such as The Killing (Forbrydelsen, 2007) and The Bridge (Bron|Broen, 2011) both domestically and internationally have increased the profile of Nordic media while the crime novels of Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson have penetrated the American market – the barometer for global Commercial ‘relevance’. The Guardian in the UK has published several articles on the craze, noting how the protagonist of the original Danish version of The Killing, detective Sarah Lund, has become an unlikely fashion icon with her knitted sweaters. While a certain type of Nordic film – the existential artistry of a Dreyer, a Bergman or a Kaurismäki – has existed at the periphery of this global consciousness, such perceptions are clearly shifting as the contemporary situation seems to be more characterised by Nordic contributions to global popular culture instead of the more traditional frameworks of artistic or experimental relevance. How did we get to this situation? In short, how did the media products of this small region of the world become part of global popular culture?

A Culture of Reciprocity: The Politics of Cultural Exchange in Contemporary Nordic Genre Film

Tim League, the founder of Austin’s Alamo Drafthouse Cinema chain, and a key figure in distributing genre cinema in the US, outlines several significant developments in the international profile of Nordic film culture. His comments touch on the context where a range of genre films like Iron Sky (Vuorensola, 2012), Død snø/Dead Snow (Wirkola, 2008), The Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre (Kemp, 2010) and Kommandør Treholt og Ninja troppen/Norwegian Ninja (Malling, 2010) have broken the perception of a bleak sense of Nordic miserabilism of the Bergman or the Kaurismaki variety. Instead, cinemas of the Nordic countries are now ‘cool’ and receive blessing from both high-minded arts institutions and geeky fans alike. Furthermore, it seems genre has a substantial role to play here with both producers and creative institutions from the Nordic countries embracing its commercial and creative potential. In addition, League’s comments were published in Wired magazine, a venue for tech-savvy media connoisseurs, which reports on the very latest in the intersection of technology and communications.

Slasher in the Snow: The Rise of the Low-Budget Nordic Horror Film

Arguably, the horror film is the most frowned upon film genre, perhaps only surpassed by the porn film. Historically, the horror film has often been seen by Nordic film critics and film censors since the 1930s as something foreign or as yet another sign of unlawful Americanisation. Although the production of genre films has been prominent among all Nordic film industries ever since the silent film period, these genre films have mostly consisted of comedies and, especially in recent years, crime and detective films. The Nordic horror film in all its shapes and forms has been an anomaly in the Nordic countries, and this argument does not include the somewhat anachronistic genre labelling of films such as The Phantom Chariot (Körkarlen, Victor Sjostrom, 1921) and The Vampire (Vampyr, Carl Theodore Dreyer, 1932).

The Nordic ‘Quirky Feel-Good’

In this chapter I want to propose the ‘quirky feel-good’ as a particular Nordic film genre. What exactly is meant by the term ‘feel-good’ is poorly defined within film studies, and it is often used to dismiss superficial films that lack intellectual or emotional depth. Yet as Mette Hjort suggests in her booklength study of Lone Scherfig’s Italiensk for begyndere (Italian for Beginners, 2000) – itself perhaps the most widely recognised example of what I am calling the Nordic quirky feel-good – a film that makes its viewers feel good does not preclude it from having significant depth. Hjort proposes the term ‘ethical feel-good’ as a genre delineation for Italian for Beginners, but I think such a term underplays the importance of humour. As I see it, generally speaking a ‘feel-good’ is a film that combines drama with comic effects in order to establish emotional connections between viewers and characters, and among characters, rather than simply to generate laughter or for the purposes of ridicule. A feel-good will thus by definition have an ethos that emphasises emotional connections.

Bridges and Tunnels: Negotiating the National in Transnational Television Drama

In a globalised world, the notions of neatly defined, homogeneous ethnies or national identities are difficult to sustain, especially if they are construed as organic features of social organisation and historical development. Instead, the present moment is characterised by hybridisation, multiculturalism and all manners of transnational movement, flux and entanglement. It has even been argued that we are now situated in a postnational condition, where the construction of supranationals, such as the European Union, and the transnational, ‘deregulated’, cross-border movement of capital, cultures and people is indicative of a decline of nations and traditional concepts of the national as key factors. Although the relation between the ‘transnational’ and the ‘postnational’ is not absolutely clear in this line of argument, the terms can be understood as connoting progressive stages in the decline of the national in the face of the challenges of globalisation. In this chapter, I will discuss the Swedish/Danish television series Bron|Broen (The Bridge, 2011–) as a transnational media phenomenon, where conceptions of nation are thematised. I will argue, against the backdrop briefly introduced above, that the discourse of nation in Bron|Broen is a vital part of its adaptability.

Sibelius and the Re-emergence of the Great Man Biopic

The aim of this chapter is to consider Sibelius as a popular historical narrative, discussing it in relation to the mechanisms of historical explanation as well as the mode of argument and address used in the film. As reference points I shall discuss certain other Nordic biopics made during the last few years. Biopic seems to be one of the prominent genres in Scandinavia in the 2000s. Monica Z (2013), for example, has been a huge success in Sweden, and Kon-Tiki (2012) – on the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl – broke into international markets and became a Norwegian Academy Award nominee. As a genre, biopic seems to be both culturally specific and universal at the same time. While addressing a predominantly national audience, Sibelius also shares many, if not most, of the generic characteristics analysed by George F. Custen (1992) in his classic study of the genre, even if Custen is talking about Hollywood films. And indeed, Hollywood has also produced countless biopics about non-Americans, including Scandinavians like the author Hans Christian Andersen (1952) or the composer Edvard Grieg (Song of Norway, 1970).