Journal of Scandinavian Cinema - Volume 5, Issue 2, 2015

Norrtullsligan/The Norrtull Gang (1923) departs from Hollywood’s representations of flamboyant city girls and succeeds in developing a decidedly female perspective on femininity, city life, sexuality and work in 1920s Sweden. Based on a novel by Elin Wägner (1908), it explores the microeconomics of power and intimacy in the relationship between bodies and spaces.

The article studies the international distribution of the Finnish film Hilja maitotyttö/The Milkmaid (Särkkä, 1953) and how the idea of ‘Nordic eroticism’, made famous by Swedish films, was utilized in the film and its marketing. In addition, it discusses how the film was received internationally.

In his films of the late 1960s and the early 1970s, Jörn Donner, a Swedish-speaking Finnish author, critic and film director, employed his body and popular media image as a contemporary celebrity for narrative and marketing purposes. Focusing on the film Naisenkuvia/Portraits of Women (1970), a metanarrative about the alliance of art cinema and pornography in the 1960s and a parody of Donner’s public persona, this article investigates Donner’s ‘authoring practices’ and gestures of authorial ‘self-projection’ amidst the mediatized sexual revolution of the 1960s. Portraits of Women reveals Donner’s appropriation and analysis of a newly sexualized public sphere, but the film also reads as a crisis point. While capitalizing on his public persona by casting himself as the male lead, Donner was forced to acknowledge that self-fashioning in the sphere of public sex escapes authorial control.

Spanish film censors from the 1960s praised Ingmar Bergman for his religious films. However, they were not able to overlook his depictions of female sexuality, which were considered unacceptable and submitted to what Stephen Greenblatt terms ‘cultural blockage’. This short piece presents two examples of how Bergman’s filmography was manipulated accordingly.

This article addresses John Lamb’s Sexual Freedom in Denmark (Von Hellen, 1970), an American film that explored the liberalization of censorship in Denmark in the late 1960s while advocating for similar changes in the United States. Lamb used explicit sexual imagery with educational material to promote enlightened attitudes. The film was a box office success and became a popular tool with teachers while paving the way for hardcore movies on American screens.

Distributing sexual content has historically been more strictly regulated in Finland than in Denmark or Sweden. Airing Emmanuelle (1974), a French softcore erotic film by Jaeckin, on Finnish television in 1987 was shocking and front-page news. The article discusses the public reception of Emmanuelle in 1987 in the context of the commercialization of television in Finland.

This article discusses three unique films emanating from the lesbian and gay liberation movement in Sweden in the 1970s: Bögjävlar/Damned Queers, directed by a group of gay men who lived communally in Stockholm; Kvinnan i ditt liv är du/‘The Woman in Your Life Is You’, directed by Lesbisk Front/Lesbian Front, also based in Stockholm; and Eva & Maria, directed by three women in Göteborg. Based on archival research and interviews, I discuss how the three films’ different production and reception histories offer insight into the relationship between Swedish politics around sexuality and LGBTQ issues. These largely unknown films are crucial examples of self-presentation. They offer salient critiques of the ways that homosexuality was viewed and represented in 1970s Sweden. Formally, they range from parody to realism. By shedding light on these films, the article problematizes the standardized narrative of Swedish sexual freedom and progressiveness.

This article examines white heterosexual men in five recent Norwegian films that expose them as anxious and immature. These films mirror wider trends in the evaluation of white male failure and inadequacy across western cinemas since the mid-2000s. Extending critical discourses on ‘crises of masculinity’, especially in US film, this article finds in these films the ambivalent legacy of enforced gender politics in Norway over the last four decades. More specifically, they focus on Norwegian male complaints and ambivalence towards societal developments in favour of gender equality. Male characters exploit the opportunities of sexual liberation. They simultaneously objectify and neurotically fear women. A multitude of mental and physical ‘ailments’ establishes the men as victims. In an attempt to reclaim destabilized masculinities, parents and sexualized women are demonized. Ultimately, however, the desire to contain female sexuality and the transition into (hetero)sexual maturity is frustrated, and male anxieties remain unrelieved and unresolved.

In 2002, Norwegian film-maker Even Benestad’s documentary Alt om min far/All About My Father (2002), featuring Benestad together with his transvestite father, premiered at several film festivals. The film soon won several awards, and was nominated for many more. It can be classified as a foundational piece within a Scandinavian context: it blazed the way for other more genuine, more serious, representations of transgender issues on film. Investigating the trans cinema that has come out of Scandinavia in the aftermath of Benestad’s film, this article relates this cinema to the New Queer Cinema and to recent social changes regarding political, medical and legal discourses and possibilities for transgender individuals. The films discussed include Alt om min far/All About My Father (Benestad, 2002); En soap/A soap (Christensen, 2006); Ångrarna/Regretters (Lindeen, 2010); Pojktanten/She Male Snails (Bergsmark, 2012); Ta av mig/Undress me (Lindgren, 2013); and Nånting måste gå sönder/Something Must Break (Bergsmark, 2014).

Sweden and Denmark have a history of explicit cinema. In the later 1990s Lars von Trier’s Zentropa became the first mainstream film company to produce female audience-centred explicit movies under the ‘Puzzy Power Manifesto’. Following Puzzy Power, Scandinavian women directors continue to avoid male-centred perspectives while probing the boundaries of explicit imagery that remains empowering for women.

Lars von Trier’s most ‘literary’ and broadly allusive film, Nymph()maniac (2013, 2014) is a throwback of sorts: its characters, formal elements and controversies resemble those of the successfully exported Scandinavian erotic cinema of the 1950s–1970s. I explore Nymph()maniac’s ‘blue’ heritage in terms of three subgenres: the female erotic coming-of-age narrative (as in Sommaren med Monika/Summer with Monika [Bergman, 1953] and Jeg – en kvinde/I, a Woman [Ahlberg, 1965]), the topical/socio-political erotic film (Jag är nyfiken – gul/blåt/I Am Curious (Yellow) and (Blue) [Sjöman, 1967/1968]) and the sex-ed/sexploitation film (the Ur kärlekens språk/Language of Love tetralogy [Wickman, 1969–1972] and Anita – ur en tonårsflickas dagbok/Anita: Swedish Nymphet [Wickman, 1973]). Like these films, Nymph()maniac is an outrageous, experimental and conflicted hybrid. Radically divided – as signalled by the shift from nostalgia and light comedy in Volume I to the dark cynicism of Volume II – it is ultimately propelled by Trier’s desire to restage controversies surrounding sex and female agency.