Journal of Scandinavian Cinema - Volume 8, Issue 1, 2018

The article examines the constructions of space in Maunu Kurkvaara’s 1962 film Open Secret. This early Finnish New Wave film was the first to explicitly deal with the newly emerging suburban landscape around Helsinki. The theme of architecture and design, however, is not only a superficial one, but one that resonates throughout the film’s cinematic style. Kurkvaara explores the leap from architectural planned space to a physical built environment by rendering the cinematic screen into a two-dimensional canvas. The way the film plays with dimensions, shadows and uses the screen as canvas creates a painterly flatness to the film, accentuating the planned quality of the cinematic spaces. This article examines the way Open Secret uses the screen as an intersection of drawn canvas, built environment and cinematic space.

This short subject identifies twelve Bergman films in which the Swedish director wryly and playfully includes Hitchcockian cameo appearances of himself. Nine of these cameos appear in films Bergman made between 1946 and 1955, before the director’s international breakthrough and during a period when the writer-director was making genre pictures inside the Swedish studio system for several different studios. The present study argues that Bergman self-consciously exploits these early cameos, à la Hitchcock, as a clever, subversive means of including his authorial presence and visual signature within his film texts. He thus operates as a hidden auteur within an industrial Hollywood-like studio factory system before emerging as ‘Bergman’ the brand name in international art house cinema after the late 1950s.

This article argues that the film Återträffen (The Reunion) (Odell, 2013) offers an ethical event of reconfiguring the partition of the sensible as distributing boundaries between the factual and the fictive, what the author calls an event of realing. By turning the tables of expectations and context, this film, marketed as a feature fiction film, is seen to cause disruption to the spectatorial practice of parting the sensible through a contraction of foreknowledge, instead ushering the viewing subject into a missing contract, which is to say, making possible a responsible embrace of the act of viewing as an ethico-onto-epistemological practice.

For the last several years, there has been a tradition at the Kraków Film Festival, which focuses primarily on documentaries, that one section is dedicated to films from a given country. In 2016, the country chosen was Sweden. This short subject discusses the main aspects of that event. The Focus on Sweden section consisted of sixteen films, mostly documentaries, the oldest from 2014. The festival’s catalogue emphasized the vibrancy and diversity of Swedish film production, which raises the question of whether one can trace any patterns among these diverse films. Discussion of documentaries like The Swedish Theory of Love (Gandini, 2016), Filip & Fredrik presenterar trevligt folk (Nice People) (Helgeson and af Klintberg, 2015) and Flickan som räddade mitt liv (The Girl Who Saved My Life) (Hirori, 2016) demonstrates the ways in which they challenge viewers’ opinions of Scandinavia and the world.

Aki Kaurismäki is often considered as an auteur delivering a structured filmic discourse about modern society. This article aims to better understand his work by proposing an interpretation of his filmic representation of marginal spaces as corresponding to the Foucauldian concept of heterotopia. After providing a definition of heterotopia as it manifests itself in Kaurismäki’s work, the article analyses examples of liminal spaces that illustrate the concept and help the spectator better come to grips with the structure of Kaurismäki’s filmic discourse on social struggles and his point of view on the contemporary world.