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- Volume 12, Issue 3, 2022
Journal of Scandinavian Cinema - Volume 12, Issue 3, 2022
Volume 12, Issue 3, 2022
- Editorial
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- Articles
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Understanding Gardar Sahlberg with neural nets: On algorithmic reuse of the Swedish SF archive
Authors: Maria Eriksson, Tomas Skotare and Pelle SnickarsIn this article, we re-trace the history of the Swedish SF archive and reflect on how this collection of historic newsreels has been reappropriated and remixed throughout more recent media history. In particular, we focus on the work of director and film historian Gardar Sahlberg, who made extensive use of the SF archive, first in a series of documentary films, then in a number of historical TV programmes. We are interested in how historic film footage travels and circulates through time, but foremost we explore how algorithms can help identify instances of audio-visual reuse in large datasets. Hence the article discusses algorithmic ways of examining archival film reuse, introducing a method for mapping video reuse with the help of artificial intelligence or more precisely machine learning that uses so-called convolutional neural nets. The article presents the Video Reuse Detector (VRD), a tool that uses machine learning to identify visual similarities within a given audio-visual database such as the SF archive.
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Cultural populism in the Uuno Turhapuro films of the 1990s
More LessThis article examines the cultural meanings given to the comedy character Uuno Turhapuro, in particular during the early 1990s. Focusing on two films, Uuno Turhapuro herra Helsingin herra (‘Uuno Turhapuro, Mr Bigwig of Helsinki’) (1991) and Uuno Turhapuro Suomen tasavallan herra presidentti (‘Uuno Turhapuro, Mr President of the Republic of Finland’) (1992), I discuss the way this unemployed, idle but resourceful character belongs to the tradition of Finnish audio-visual popular culture and analyse the cultural populism related to the authorship of Pertti ‘Spede’ Pasanen. The figure of Uuno is also a presidential parody that reflects the changing attitude in Finland towards those in power after the long administration of President Urho Kekkonen. As a historian, I have endeavoured to illustrate the ways comedy relates to the time period in which it was made.
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Mainstreaming migrant experience: Examining authorship, commercialism and political engagement in Finnish migrant cinema
More LessIn many European nations, there have been a significant number of cinematic explorations of the experiences of migrants, a trend often called migrant cinema. By contrast, in Finland, where large-scale immigration is a relatively new phenomenon, there have historically been very few mainstream films that include migrant characters and practically none that explore the circumstances of migrant protagonists. Since the late 2010s, that has slowly begun to change, primarily due to filmmakers of migrant backgrounds who have drawn from their autobiographical experiences when making mainstream migrant cinema in Finland. Their films are important as cinema has a key role in representing divergent social groups and providing spaces for their political engagement. However, in other European countries, mainstream migrant cinema has drawn criticism – even when made by migrant filmmakers – since commercialism is seen to lead to depoliticization and representations that are counterproductive to migrant emancipation. By examining two Finnish examples where the creative impetus came from filmmakers of migrant backgrounds, and taking into account publicly available interviews with them, this article provides more nuance to the discussion of authorship, commercialism and political engagement in migrant cinema.
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Trauma, queer sexuality and symbolic storytelling in Joachim Trier’s Thelma
By Tarja LaineThis article analyses Joachim Trier’s Thelma (2017) through the concept of trauma, brought on by the title character’s perception of her sexuality as ‘deviant’ and reinforced by her rigidly religious parents’ efforts to tame it by force. Their symbolic enactment of bad parenting manifests itself in a form of Foucauldian biopower on the father’s part and as a Kristevan monstrous-feminine attitude on the mother’s. To heal from trauma, Thelma must free herself from parental control. By focalizing the narrative through Thelma’s mental subjectivity and with religious and supernatural imagery, the film expresses this process symbolically rather than figuratively.
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