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Authorial self-fashioning in Jörn Donner’s Portraits of Women
- Source: Journal of Scandinavian Cinema, Volume 5, Issue 2, Jun 2015, p. 93 - 108
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- 01 Jun 2015
Abstract
In his films of the late 1960s and the early 1970s, Jörn Donner, a Swedish-speaking Finnish author, critic and film director, employed his body and popular media image as a contemporary celebrity for narrative and marketing purposes. Focusing on the film Naisenkuvia/Portraits of Women (1970), a metanarrative about the alliance of art cinema and pornography in the 1960s and a parody of Donner’s public persona, this article investigates Donner’s ‘authoring practices’ and gestures of authorial ‘self-projection’ amidst the mediatized sexual revolution of the 1960s. Portraits of Women reveals Donner’s appropriation and analysis of a newly sexualized public sphere, but the film also reads as a crisis point. While capitalizing on his public persona by casting himself as the male lead, Donner was forced to acknowledge that self-fashioning in the sphere of public sex escapes authorial control.