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

In a cycle of new Finnish documentaries, male confessional talk abounds. Beyond the successful Miesten vuoro/Steam of Life (Joonas Berghäll and Mika Hotakainen, 2010), several recent documentaries propose to give voice to ordinary Finnish men who reveal their true feelings to other men. In this article, Steam of Life is discussed as a case of intimate documentary, drawing on both the political aesthetics of feminist documentary and the transnational, late modern rhetoric of confession.Employing the complex affective legacies of the talking head, the film engages in performative politics of gender and nation. It mobilizes a discourse on the nation as a male network, and importantly evokes nation as a sentimental community, a community based on feeling. In so doing, however, it de-individualizes the speaking subjects. While purporting to give voice to the male protagonists, the film makes them anonymous soldiers of the nation, thereby denying them their own voices.

The timely subject of revolutionary struggle and the exotic record of films intended for a Swedish TV audience propelled the recent success of The Black Power Mixtape 1967–1975 by Göran Hugo Olsson (2011). The film exemplifies the processes of selection and re-enactment that are immanent to compilation aesthetics, while drawing attention to the overlooked archive memory of public television.

This article presents the work of Swedish film-maker and independent producer Carl Slättne (b. 1937) and analyses his film Urskogen eller kulturen!/‘Wilderness or Civilization!’ (1985). The film is discussed in relation to the concept of the essay film as it has been developed in recent writings by Laura Rascaroli and Timothy Corrigan. The formal devices of Slättne’s film are analysed and put into a cultural context, where the œuvre of the film-maker is discussed as well as the Swedish political documentary since the 1970s. In focus for the formal analysis is the use of contrastive editing. The voice-over – an important device for Slättne – is further discussed in order to put the authorial voice of the film in context. Slättne is compared to contemporaries like Eric M. Nilsson.

This article discusses how the largest film festival in the Nordic countries, the Göteborg International Film Festival (GIFF), is much more than a setting for bringing quality films to local audiences.With retrospectives, an extensive programme of seminars and master classes, a film lab for upcoming talent, a film market as well as a television industry day, and recent initiatives such as co-organizing a university course on Swedish film policy and publishing a Ph.D. thesis as part of the festival’s line of publications, the festival is an important link not only between film-makers and audiences, but also between the industry, policy-makers and scholars.

The Council of Europe’s fund for the co-production of cinematographic works, Eurimages, has since its inception in 1989 provided nearly half a billion euros towards the funding of European films. Several films originating in the Nordic countries have been the recipients of this supra-national funding. Drawing on his experience as a national representative to the Board of Management of Eurimages over the last dozen years, the author attempts – with a particular emphasis on the last five years – to identify the motives of Nordic film producers and film-makers that have successfully applied for support from the fund, and to correlate their strategies with the aims and operating procedures of Eurimages.

Scandinavian crime fiction has received intense popular attention since the English-language publication of Stieg Larsson’s Män som hatar kvinnor/Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005/2008).Scholarship on film, television and literary crime fiction in Scandinavia has been prolific at the same time. Cultural studies and film studies methods have shown how revisions of genre, character and the representation of place have contributed to debates about globalization,the welfare state and gender.

The vast majority of original negatives of Swedish silent and early sound films are lost, meaning that what remains of the early Swedish fiction film heritage has survived primarily in the form of relatively worn nitrate prints. The article discusses differences in past and present duplication policies in terms of aspect ratio alterations and the preservation of from 1929. The industry shift towards digital capture and digital projection will affect not only the possibility of preserving and restoring films in original formats, but also how the film heritage will be accessed in the future.

The film ‘Konstgjorda Svensson’/‘Artificial Svensson’ (Edgren, 1929) has recently been restored with its original soundtrack by the Swedish Film Institute. The restoration shows how film production companies in Sweden tried to connect the new medium of sound film to other sound technologies like radio and gramophone. Using the case study of early sound film production at the company Svensk Filmindustri,this article examines how gramophonic recordings of music facilitated the assimilation of sound and dialogue within the diegesis, making for a smooth conversion to sound. A distinguishing feature during the first sound years was that dialogue and sound created a heightened media-sensitivity. Music that adheres more to the demands of the narrative than to the image per se facilitated this process, masking the technical construction of the film medium.