Journal of Scandinavian Cinema - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2013

The recent Swedish documentary The Sarnos: A Life in Dirty Movies (Eriksson, 2013) evokes questions about historiography and nationality. This article discusses the documentary’s focus on Joe Sarno’s reluctance to do hardcore, on his wife, Peggy, as well as the couple’s relationship to Sweden.

This article focuses on the central importance of issues of sexuality, gender and the body in Danish homeland cinema. It demonstrates how the characters’ physical and emotional bond with the land and the livestock has a significant physical component which, considered in connection with a libidinal crisis of the films’ young couples, may be taken to harbour a sexual potential. Many of the films illustrate crises of procreative heterosexuality that threaten the rural heritage. The article posits marked sexual overtones in the aesthetic interdependence of virtue and villainy and the way moral encounters are staged. Sexually aggressive characters who threaten a passive couple may function as necessary sexual activators. Likewise, natural forces that provoke intense physical and emotional reactions are examined for their sexual associations. Apart from dangerous forces and characters, homeland cinema features many positively portrayed queer characters and relationships, which include male homoerotic relationships involving the hero.

The article discusses three feature films produced in Denmark and Sweden in the 1990s: Kajs fødselsdag/The Birthday Trip (Scherfig, 1990), Torsk på Tallinn/Screwed in Tallinn (Alfredson, 1999) and You Can’t Eat Fishing (Windfeld, 1999). All of them, applying various genre conventions, take up the subject of encounters between Scandinavians and ‘East Europeans’ from neighbouring countries. The point of departure for the analysis is the notion of the ‘periphery’, understood as a culturally constructed and relative concept. As the analysis demonstrates, the binary centre/periphery relation is challenged in the films through an active reflection on their own cultures. A recurring motif is the critique of the Scandinavian welfare state and its consequences for the individual, which can be perceived as a particularly Scandinavian feature of the films that highlight neighbouring ex-communist countries.

In 1947, Thor Heyerdahl and five crewmembers accomplished a 6900-km sea voyage on a reconstructed balsa wood raft to prove that Peruvian Indians could have settled in Polynesia. This short subject addresses the meanings of authenticity, enactment and cultural memory in relation to the expedition film by Heyerdahl and Nordemar, Kon-Tiki (1950). The film’s production history and its international success are part of a post-war media event, in itself a trans-Atlantic adventure that has only recently been the subject of scholarly attention.

Newly restored documentaries about the polar expeditions of Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen make it possible to re-examine and discuss the importance of these early travelogues. This article presents the Amundsen documentaries, films that have been inaccessible to researchers as well as the general public, but now are available on DVD in Norway in both Norwegian and English versions.

The aim of this Student short subject is to establish that Henning Carlsen in Sult/Hunger (1966) attempts to express the emotional state and mental condition of the protagonist and thereby continues the tendency of the European cinema to transcend the limitations of the film medium.

Authors and silent films were in many regards an odd couple, even when it came to portraying authors in film. This article explores the genre of the portrait film of an author, predominantly constituted in the 1910s and encompassing at least 32 films in the silent period in Scandinavia, in spite of the pronounced iconokinetophobia of many authors. The continuity and discontinuity in the enactment of authors in contrast to the photographic portrait of the author is investigated in relation to status marking through insignia of writing, spatialization and the topos of media competition.