Journal of Scandinavian Cinema - Volume 13, Issue 2, 2023

This editorial introduces the issue of Journal of Scandinavian Cinema (JSCA), which focuses on representations of various social identities in diverse historical and cultural contexts. The issue includes articles on race and post-colonialism, gender and sexuality, and class and nation in Nordic films. The editorial summarizes main arguments and contributions of each article and highlights the relevance and importance of studying cinematic representation in the Nordic countries.

The article sketches an overview of the impersonation of Black and Sámi Others in Finnish cinema and visual culture. How and why have Finnish cultural producers used blackface performance or ‘fake’ Sámi garments in their films? By connecting several historically and aesthetically disparate texts, the article makes evident an underpinning structure of racial Othering. The structure is obscured, however, by commentators who argue such Other performance is innocent and not intended to ridicule or harm. This defence maintains that it is White Finns’s power to define what counts as racism. By combining analysis of disparate examples of racial impersonation in cinema and cultural texts with critiques and defences of it, the article traces how structural racism is maintained. Study of cinema history contributes to understanding the history of structural racism.

This introduction to the In Focus section ‘Cross-dressing and queer representations on Nordic screens’ provides background and context for the contributions.

Framed within studies of whiteness in film, this article investigates the positioning and performance of the female lead in Norwegian silent cinema. Richard Dyer’s arguments on the importance of staging, not least lighting, of the Hollywood heroine to convey ethereal and moral aspects of ‘superior’ whiteness, are central to the analysis. The question is how the heroines are positioned as white: aesthetically, narratively and intersectionally in regard to class, gender and ethnicity. Complex or unstable class and ethnicity performances in the 1910s give way to a more indisputably white heroine in the late 1920s. In conclusion, the analysis supports the claim that whiteness encompasses most of the heroines, if not always according to the conventions of lighting.