Evaluating the Achievement of One Hundred Years of Scandinavian Cinema: Dreyer, Bergman, Von Trier, and Others

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Pages:480
ISBN:0-7734-2595-0
978-0-7734-2595-8
Price:$279.95 + shipping
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This collection of twelve articles and one interview probes the historical evolution and cultural diversity of cinema from the Nordic countries: Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland. The studies variously address cinematic schools and national traditions on one hand or individual films or filmmakers on the other. Cinematic modernism, censorship, and globalization are among the themes explored; the collection also addresses the aesthetic, moral, and social preoccupations of the great northern filmmakers from revered figures like Carl Th. Dreyer and Ingmar Bergman, to iconoclast contemporaries like Lars Von Trier, Roy Andersson and Aki Kaurismäki. The authors, all specialists in the field, include both emerging and established voices. Together their multiple perspectives provide a fresh and comprehensive consideration of an influential and admired cinematic tradition.

Reviews

"This volume succeeds in bringing together Scandinavian as well as non-Scandinavian researchers, young and promising scholars like Isak Thorsen and Morten Egholm writing competently about issues related to [the] field of Scandinavian Studies like Marilyn Johns Blackwell,Paul Coates or Bjorn Ægir Nor?jör?. This volume encompasses a very broad range of topics in 'Scandinavian cinema'."

-- Prof. Stephan Michael Schröder, Universität zu Köln

"I really do think this book is a great achievement - Wisely-selected, gracefully edited and a genuinely useful contribution to the field of (Scandinavian) film scholarship."

- Prof. Maureen Thomas,
Senior Research Fellow, Churchill College,
Cambridge

Table of Contents

Introduction: John Tucker

Adapting a Literary Nation to Film: National Identity, Neoromanticism and anxiety of influence
Björn Ægir Nor?för?

Land og synir: An Interview with Ágúst Gu?mundsson
Ágúst Gu?mundsson

Op med hodet: Tancred Ibsen’s 1933 Experiment with Cinematic Modernism
Arne Lunde

Liv Ullmann’s Handling of Religious Themes in Her Adaptation of Sigrid Undset’s The Wreath
Peter G. Christensen

Norwave: Norwegian Cinema 1997-2006
Ellen Rees

“We had to be careful.”: The Self-Imposed Regulations, Alterations, and Censorship Strategies of Nordisk Films of Kompagni 1911-1928
Isak Thorsen

From Working Class Drama to Academic Showdown: On Carl Th. Dreyer’s Use of His Literary Source in Två Människor [Two People] (1945)
Morten Egholm

Behind Idealism: The Discrepancy Between Philosophy and Reality in The Cinema of Lars von Trier
Mads Bunch

Modes of Representation in Ingmar Bergman’s Gycklarnus afton
Marilyn Johns Blackwell

Doubling and Redoubling Bergman: Notes on the Dialetic of Disgrace and Disappearance
Paul Coates

Roy Andersson’s Cinematic Poetry and the Spectre of César Vallejo
Ursula Lindqvist

Readymades, Rejects and the Ready-to-Hand: Found Objects in the Films of Aki Kaurismäki
Lawrence D. Smith

Imaginaries of a Global Finland—Patterns of Globalization in Finnish National Cinema
Pietari Kääpä

Contributors

Index of Key Words

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