Journal of Scandinavian Cinema - Volume 4, Issue 3, 2014

Mauritz Stiller’s Thomas Graals bästa film/Thomas Graal’s Best Film (1917) is a self-reflexive romantic comedy and has been called ‘one of the cleverest films about film-making made in the silent era’ (Bordwell and Thompson 2003: 66). This article investigates the film’s correlations between love and metafiction and discusses some of the most striking differences between the Swedish and the American versions of the film. As in many silent comedies, the sight gag plays a dominant role. The article argues that in this film the sight gag is elaborated in an extended fashion more akin to romantic irony or what Friedrich Schlegel would call a ‘permanent parabasis’.

In the 1910s, the Finnish-Swedish film-maker Mauritz Stiller directed a series of comedies that took up suffrage, women in the workplace, eugenics, dress reform and womanliness as masquerade. I argue that these films, and Thomas Graal�s Best Child in particular, used comedy to contest the melodramatic tenor of these debates by modelling a light-hearted, cosmopolitan attitude towards social change.

Fyrtaarnet og Bivognen was an exceedingly popular Danish comedy duo during the inter-war years, and not only in their homeland. This short article focuses on their successful transnational career, in particular the German-language market where they soon became known as Pat and Patachon.

In the article, the goal is to interrogate the cultural politics of parody in the context of Finnish Western films in relation to the framework of ‘multicultural Finland’. The analysis focuses on the films’ music, in order to accentuate specific audio-visual interpretive competences and to challenge the visual epistemologies that dominate film studies. Parody is approached as an interpretive strategy and linked to six dimensions of film parody: reiteration, inversion, misdirection, literalization, extraneous inclusion and exaggeration. This entails examining the films’ musical scenes in relation to the actors’ public personae, the musical conventions of the Western film genre and the representations of the ethnic Other. In conclusion, it is maintained that the parodic joking as an interpretive activity rests significantly on features that are deeply implicated in the construction of irrefutable ethnic differences, musically and otherwise.

The article analyses Ingmar Bergman�s Smiles of a Summer Night and Lars von Trier�s The Kingdom. By means of evolution-and neurology-based humour theory it shows how the two directors � who ordinarily make dark and tragic films � use humour mechanisms from mainstream entertainment to transform tragic and painful situations into a social ritual of mirth.

This article explores comedy and comedic aspects in the Ingmar Bergman canon. Much of the focus is on films made between 1952 and 1964 that can be considered comedic in overall design and execution: the third section of Kvinnors väntan/Waiting Women (1952), En lektion i kärlek/A Lesson in Love (1954), Sommarnattens leende/Smiles of a Summer Night (1955b), Djävulens öga/The Devil'’s Eye (1960b) and För inte tala om alla dessa kvinnor/Now About These Women (1964). Against the grain of Bergman’s international reputation as a dark, brooding and humourless existentialist, these films collectively reveal that he was in fact a master of the sophisticated comedy genre. In addition, comedic elements and devices such as animation, trick effects, parody, pastiche and meta-cinematic play are found in other films, and including some of his most interesting experiments.

This article examines the role of political comedy in Jón Gnarr'’s work for Icelandic television and his use of comic elements during his time as the mayor of Reykjavík 2010 to 2014. In applying Kenneth Burke’s theory of the comic frame on the first episode of the series The Night Shift and Jón Gnarr'’s political career, the article analyses the parallels in his work as a politician and a comedian.

Adam’s Apples is a remarkable and sophisticated comedy despite incorporating a very severe disability. This condition is represented in an unusual manner, contrary to the fact that, theoretically and historically, comedy and disability share a common ground. In the context of this film, disability is not the target or focus of comedy but rather is entirely excepted from it.

Historically, disability in comedy has taken the form of joking at the expense of disabled persons. In modern times, it is first and foremost through media that the public is exposed to representations of disability, and media is considered society’s most far-reaching (re)producer of cultural values. This degrading ridicule in combination with the pervasiveness of media has made disability and humour a controversial combination. Through discourse analysis this article analyses three contemporary mainstream cinema comedies about disability with the overall aim to contribute to enhanced knowledge of how different articulations promote or challenge hegemonic presumptions about disability. The analysis shows that empowering images and stereotypes of disability exist simultaneously as competing discourses in media representations. The conclusion is that aware decisions about how to represent disability are indispensable for film-makers due to the major role of media in forming public perceptions.

Boy meets girl, the couple goes through a series of obstacles, they split, they reunite and there is a happy ending. This formula has reached international success in the genre of romantic comedy. Two immigrant Scandinavian writer-directors of non-western ethnic background, Josef Fares (Lebanese-Swedish) and Khalid Hussain (Pakistani-Norwegian), both employ this romantic comedy formula to engage their audiences with the multicultural issues second-generation Scandinavian ethnics face when falling in love with native Scandinavians. The Swedish film Jalla! Jalla! (Fares, 2000) and the Norwegian Import-eksport/Import-Export (Hussain, 2005), confront and expose stereotypes of immigrant identities in Scandinavia and explore the complexities of inter-ethnic romance. Both films also subversively reverse the hegemonic �insider/outsider� positions common to most Scandinavian film representations of the ethnic/racial outsider. In this article, I discuss how both director-writers approach multiculturalism, a relatively new phenomenon in Scandinavia, by adapting and personalizing the romantic comedy genre to reveal the unique experiences of immigrants in a way that audiences can understand. Additionally, I analyse ways in which the two films satirize the multiple stereotypes of immigrants and native Scandinavians to pose the question of what it means to be an immigrant or a Scandinavian, and sometimes both.

This article addresses the highly popular Danish Zodiac films, a series of six films made between 1973 and 1978. What was extraordinary about the films was their combination of traditional popular comedy and hard-core porn. Analysing the films� combination of comedy and pornography from a historical perspective, the article demonstrates how the series evolved through the six instalments. Two developments are identified: first, the disappearance of the anti-authoritarian, open-minded view of sex that characterized the earlier films; and second, the degeneration of narrative coherence, which was weak even initially. The Zodiac films are seen in the context of the historical period, when pornography became fashionable, and also with regard to the overall development of Danish comedy.