Journal of Scandinavian Cinema - Volume 2, Issue 3, 2012

This article gives a short introduction to the distinctly different wartime experiences of the film industries in the Nordic countries during World War II.

The rescue of the Danish Jews during the German occupation of Denmark is well known. This short article details how the recent find of an old home movie filmed by a convicted Danish Nazi perpetrator helps shed light on the much less familiar details of the Holocaust in Denmark.

This article examines the production and content of Swedish state propaganda films designed to foster public support for the country's refugee rescue and assistance actions in the latter half of World War II. It argues that these films produced an exceptionalist image of Sweden, in which neutrality came to symbolize unique national values that endowed Sweden with an ethical responsibility to offer help to those in occupied neighbouring countries. This depiction departed from earlier state-produced narratives of Swedish neutrality that characterized the country as under immediate foreign threat.

This article discusses key concepts for the study of war film and collective memory. As a leading medium of memory, war films create and shape images and narratives of war experience. Their impact, however, is dependent on their positioning in 'plurimedial constellations' of memory culture.

This article analyses Norwegian occupation dramas from 1946 to 2009. Tracing the history of the genre, it highlights ways in which the uses, interpretations and representations of war experiences have shifted from a focus on trauma to a cult of heroism. This discussion of a distinct genre in Norwegian cinema is linked to theories of communicative and cultural memory that are used to explain changes in the representation of the war years.

The only Icelandic film focusing on World War II and the war years in Iceland is Reynir Oddsson's two-part documentary Hernámsárin 1940-1945/The Occupation Years 1940-1945 (1967-1968). Here it is interpreted as a comment on the reluctance in Iceland to take the war into account as an integral part the national narrative, or an attempt to remind Icelanders of the importance of the war for the development of Icelandic society.

In the 1930s military comedy became a popular film genre in several Nordic countries. Themes and generic conventions usually travelled from one country to another, but as the case of Varuskunnan pikku morsian/The Little Bride of the Garrison (Levä, 1943) illustrates, wartime complicated matters.

This article analyses Nazi Germany's film export policy towards Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway and Sweden) during World War II. The German film industry (Ufa, Tobis and others), steered by the German ministry of propaganda, took advantage of the military successes achieved by the Wehrmacht and tried to become a dominant supplier of films, hoping to take over the leading position of the American film industry. However, each film market presented its own series of problems, created by the local industry, by local political organizations or by other German organizations (occupation authorities) with agendas of their own. One of the side effects of Germany's aggressive film policy was, ironically, increased domestic production, enthusiastically embraced by film-goers eager to avoid German films.

This article is by and large based on archival documents, consulted in the German Federal Archives, the Danish National Archives, the Danish Film Institute, the National Archives of Norway, the Swedish Film Institute and the Swedish National Archives. The article does not aspire to provide a definitive, in-depth analysis of German-Scandinavian film relations during the war, but rather sketches an international framework that leaves room for amendments, corrections and future scholarship.

Important insights on the film history of the Nordic countries are to be found in the Federal Archives of Germany, not least with regard to World War II. This short subject introduces the holdings of the Federal Archives of Germany especially the material of interest to the study of Scandinavian cinema.

The German newsreel company Deutsche Wochenschau spearheaded the cultural invasion following military takeover in most German-occupied European countries. But where in Scandinavia was Germany most successful in disseminating newsreel propaganda? In oppressively occupied Norway, collaborating Denmark, or in neutral Sweden, where Nazi newsreels were also distributed? This article proposes that German propaganda aspirations followed a European master plan, namely to integrate local, German and international items in a seamless unity, and that an important criterion for success was to insert German newsreels as smoothly as possible into the Nordic countries. This set certain requirements pertaining to what material localized newsreels exposed, how this content was presented, and finally, the manner in which Nazi newsreels were introduced in the respective countries.

The article explores the cycle of six feature-length fiction films made in Hollywood during World War II that represented on-screen the Nazi occupation of Norway between 1940 and 1945. These six features in order of release are Spencer Gordon Bennett's They Raid by Night (1942), John Farrow's Commandos Strike at Dawn (1942), Lewis Milestone's Edge of Darkness (1943), Irving Pichel's The Moon is Down (1943), Dorothy Arzner's First Comes Courage (1943) and Sylvan Simon's Son of Lassie (1945). While several scholarly surveys of Hollywood war films from this period have paid some limited attention to this subgenre, this article offers a more comprehensive, deep-focused examination, paying special attention to the material specificity of the six films and differentiations among them. The analysis investigates how differences in Hollywood studios and house styles, budgetary concerns, production conditions, casting choices, music scores, uses of location shooting in synthesizing a Norwegian landscape, marketing campaigns and other factors all contributed to differentiated final products in each case.

The article presents a short history of the Finnish experience during World War II and discusses the peculiar problems it has presented to Finnish memory politics. The author maintains that reflections of these problems are highly visible in present-day historical controversies arising from interpretations of the war experience.

This article deals with the Finnish war novel Tuntematon sotilas/The Unknown Soldier (1954), by Väinö Linna (1920-1992), and the two film adaptations that premiered in 1955 and 1985, directed by Edvin Laine (1905-1989) and Rauni Mollberg (1931-2007), respectively. A third point of comparison is the theatre performance directed by Kristian Smeds (b. 1970) for the National Theatre in Helsinki (2007). Discussion focuses on the general unifying and differing features of the novel and the film adaptations. The basic argument is that the novel, the film adaptations and the theatre performance share a particular 'cinematic world-view' that recreates modernist ways of telling and showing. This is established through an analysis of the aesthetics of the landscape in the novel and the film adaptations, as well as through a comparison with the western genre, in particular the films of Anthony Mann, whose films of the1950s differ stylistically from the 'classical western' in the same ways The Unknown Soldier diverges from more traditional war stories.

Having spent most of her professional life in Berlin, the Danish silent cinema actress Asta Nielsen's relationship with Germany was both emotionally close and politically complicated, the latter due in large part to the ascendance of the NSDAP in the 1930s, several years before Nielsen returned permanently to Denmark. Both before and after World War II, Nielsen faced accusations of harbouring Nazi sympathies, which she consistently and publicly denied, but her private letters to close friends in Germany reveal a more nuanced picture of her conflicted ties to the land she called her 'second homeland'.

This article deals with the reception of German film star Kristina Söderbaum in her native Sweden. Söderbaum reached the heights of superstardom, becoming one of Germany's top box office stars of all time. Until 1945 she appeared exclusively in films directed by her husband, Veit Harlan. The Swedish press closely monitored Söderbaum's career, though her most infamous film Jud Süss/Jew Süss (1940) was banned by Swedish censors. After the war, she tried unsuccessfully to resume her career, among other places in Sweden. Taking into consideration her close collaboration with Joseph Goebbels, the Swedish press, though negative, treated her surprisingly gently. In fact, Söderbaum's role in Germany during the war was never really discussed in Sweden. This article suggests several reasons for this relative silence.