Journal of Scandinavian Cinema - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2012

This article offers a condensed account of Asta Nielsen's interaction with the Swedish National Censorship Board in 1911 after the banning of her film In dem großen Augenblick/The Great Moment for screening in Sweden. Her strategy, publishing open letters and inviting representatives from the press to non-public screenings, set the standard for other film companies dissatisfied with the slew of bans issued by the Board. A Nielsen letter to young movie fans, published in facsimile in a Swedish fan magazine in 1920, is translated to illustrate a different type of press interaction a decade later.

This article analyses the phenomenon of the discursive Germanization of the Danish silent film star Asta Nielsen in the Danish press of the early 1920s, emblematized by the increasing use of the value-laden moniker 'die Asta', in order to illustrate the symbolic implications for the Danish economy and culture of Nielsen's professional success in post-World War I Germany. By contrasting Nielsen with her rival Henny Porten, who represents an ideal of traditional Germanic womanhood, I demonstrate how Nielsen's reception in Germany as quintessentially Nordic runs counter to a widespread Danish perception of her as having abandoned her homeland in favour of a German national identity. While the rejection of Nielsen in Denmark can be interpreted as the result of a peculiarly Danish narrow-mindedness, the discrepancy between Nielsen's early popularity in Denmark and her reception in the late 1910s and the early 1920s also offers evidence of the significance of economic and political factors.

This short subject concerns a memo from June 1916 discovered in an attic at Nordisk Film's studios in Valby, Copenhagen, written by General Manager Ole Olsen of Nordisk Films Kompagni to the company's directors. The memo is a dressing-down of the directors; contrary to the assumption that the company was blind to the quality of its films, the memo demonstrates Ole Olsen and the management's concern that quality has declined.

The focus of this article is on the many Scandinavian films produced in the last decade that address religious topics. The main thesis of the study is that insights from the field of sociology of religion can help contextualize contemporary Scandinavian films dealing with religion, deepening our understanding of both the inspiration for these films and their reception. Five common ways of representing religion are presented, illustrated by five films. Discussion focuses on the ways in which religion is both criticized and affirmed; the depiction of specific kinds of religion; and three theories of religious and cultural change - secularization, detraditionalization and post-secularization - that can illuminate the cinematic representation of religion.

This article analyses the aesthetics of two Trier prologues using cognitive psychology. It focuses on how the films evoke anxiety and panic, and how the panic is contained by means of providing visual and musical aesthetic order to the dynamic emotional forces; by providing ambiguous reality indicators; and by cueing sublime submission to fate.

This article investigates the role of photography in the Swedish auteur Jan Troell's film Maria Larssons eviga ögonblick/Everlasting Moments (2008) in the light of different perspectives on medium specificity, photography and adaptation. We argue that Jan Troell, by way of cinema, discusses key characteristics and functions of photography. In so doing, the film, in addition to telling the tale of a historical female photographer, raises a number of questions concerning media theory, media ontology and history. We introduce the term 'fleeting still moments' in order to account for Troell's particular cinematic strategy, negotiating movement and stills. Accordingly, the central questions in our study are as follows: what are the differences and similarities between cinema and photography? And to what degree can the differences be framed within the traditional divide between cinema's movement and photography's stillness?

The Workers' Trilogy (or Proletarian Trilogy) directed by the Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki includes the films Shadows in Paradise (1986), Ariel (1988) and The Match Factory Girl (1990). Commentators and researchers on these films have tended to concentrate mainly on topics such as nationality, intertextual references and the style of the auteur, and not, for example, on the identities of the workers, their gender or their age. In this article I focus on gender, looking especially at the female characters depicted in the trilogy in relation to social class, and considering in particular the articulation of gender and poverty in Finland in the late 1980s/early 1990s. I examine The Match Factory Girl in more detail; it is the only Kaurismäki film with a female protagonist, Iris Rukka. In my analysis I borrow ideas from sociology, cultural studies and women's studies. I also discuss the contradictory reactions that may be evoked by these films.