Journal of Scandinavian Cinema - Volume 8, Issue 2, 2018

One of a growing group of television series that can be classified as climate fiction, Occupied takes as its premise a hostile political response to Norway’s sudden move towards energy transition. Occupied draws on the long tradition of the Norwegian occupation drama, while also resonating with contemporary tensions between Russia and its neighbours. Mobilizing familiar structures of feeling common to many cli-fi texts as well as recent news cycles, Occupied brings together the genre conventions of political thrillers, occupation dramas and extreme weather/disaster films. With its ensemble cast that explores the conflicting loyalties and personal stakes involved in the emerging crisis, the series portrays the complexities of its fictional petropolitics as a layered accumulation of historical and recent memory shot through with personal and political investments of every conceivable kind that premediate possible futures in the Anthropocene.

As Europe’s only recognized Indigenous peoples, the Sámi rely on a variety of media in pursuit of social, political and environmental activism. Sámi musicians have used popular music to discuss twenty-first-century concerns and reach broader Scandinavian and global audiences, often messaging through their iconic vocal genre of joik and imagery of their homeland, Sápmi. Artists employ music videos to enhance the activist impact of their music, showing and telling rather than just explaining. These videos illustrate an Indigenous Sámi ecocritical approach to the sociopolitical issues discussed in the lyrics. Through such combined media expression, artists discuss their connection to the land, sense of place and the effects of climate change in the Arctic. They furthermore render visible and audible the years of colonial erasure and silencing of Sámi presence in northern Fenno-Scandinavia. The article concludes that these videos present an emerging ecocritical activism profile specific to the Sámi experience.

This article focuses on the experimental ecocinema of Swedish Sami filmmaker Liselotte Wajstedt, director of Kiruna – Rymdvägen (Kiruna: Space Road) (2013) and the sequel-in-progress, Kiruna – Ortdrivaren (‘Kiruna: The drift block’). The films engage with the effects of mining and extraction on the psyche of citizens in Wajstedt’s home town of Kiruna, in Arctic northern Sweden. Wajstedt’s work contributes to the emerging fields of critical Arctic studies, ecocinema and energy humanities and considers the power of moving images that respond to extractive industry practices and state/corporate storylines within the Fenno-Scandinavian region known as Sápmi.

This article draws on the rich ecocritical scholarship that has burgeoned in the twenty-first century to posit that queer representations of the environment that blur Romantic human/non-human dualism can challenge and nuance our discussion of the present ecological crisis. Lars von Trier’s infamous film Antichrist, I argue, presents the viewer with such a queer vision of dark ecology. This is not a harmonious and peaceful vision of Romantic nature, but the environment as a mesh, a place where the very division between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ is consistently undermined. ‘Nature’ in von Trier’s cinematic world represents all the invasive aspects of our biological surroundings that humans have sought to flee for millennia by producing shelter and culture. Antichrist has been called a psychological thriller or horror film, but it can also, I argue, be appropriately defined as a primary and genre-defining artwork of dark ecology.

This article examines Lars von Trier’s The Element of Crime (1984), Antichrist (2009) and Melancholia (2011) from the perspective of ecological theories that seek to go beyond the green ecological paradigm. The three films depict the environment as fraught with a sense of unease, bound up with a melancholia that may be caused by either too little or too much intimacy with the non-human. The article shows that Trier’s despair and irony, anchored in a modernist distrust of reason, may be attuned to the conditions of the Anthropocene. Examining Trier’s allusions to pre-modern forms of knowledge reveals that his depictions of hypnosis and depression evoke privileged forms of knowledge that extend the environmental disaster to cosmic proportions. Turning to notions of dark ecology, the article argues that Trier’s black sensibility holds the seeds of a positive ecological awareness of interconnectedness and interdependence of humans with the surrounding world.

This article develops an ecocritical perspective on the ways Nordic film and television has addressed ethnic and racial diversity. Here we develop the term ‘ecotone’, a concept originating in environmental studies that characterizes the transitional space linking separate ecological communities. Focusing on the popular noir series Bron/Broen (The Bridge) (2011–18), Hannes Holm’s Swedish comedy En man som heter Ove (A Man Called Ove) (2015), the Norwegian teen drama Skam (Shame) (2015–17) and Ruben Östlund’s controversial film Play (2011), we claim that the ecotone, when adopted as a form of mediated intervention, allows us to interrogate the taken-for-granted ideological foundations of Nordic societies. This involves unpacking the representations of material culture and spatial interconnectedness that define immigrant Others in relation to their environment.