Journal of Scandinavian Cinema - Current Issue

The editorial outlines our main reasons for bringing scholarly attention to the theme of Scandinavian art cinema and screen cultures in transition at this moment. It provides brief summaries of the issue’s five feature articles and presents some suggestions for further research on the topic. We stress the importance of taking gender into account in future studies and call for a closer dialogue and more mutual engagement between scholars of art cinema and scholars of digital media.

This article explores the new production strategies for reaching audiences currently being put into practice in the Danish screen industry. Building on studies and theories of the changed audience–industry relation following the breakthrough of streaming, this qualitative case study investigates how audience research was implemented in the production framework behind the Danish youth film Smuk (Pretty Young Thing) (Harkamp 2022b) to increase the film’s relevance with young audiences. The analysis highlights the differences between traditional story research and audience research as well as the challenges and opportunities of involving audience feedback in the early stages of the creative process. Finally, I discuss the implications of this new approach for classical European film industries that consider film a cultural good rather than a strictly commercial product.

Critics tend to consider art cinema a serious and challenging form of cinema. Contemporary Nordic art cinema nevertheless includes many films by internationally recognized art film directors that use (dark) comedy as an expressive mode. The article examines the diverse ways that art cinema can merge with comedy. After outlining the concept of art cinema, emphasizing the films’ challenging style, ambiguity and gravity, I present approaches to humour, demonstrating how art film comedy challenges several premises of comedy. Analyses of three films, Lars von Trier’s The Boss of It All (2006), Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure (2014) and Grímur Hákonarson’s Rams (2015), highlight their comic aspects, but illustrate that they are comic in varying, ambiguous and challenging ways that violate genre expectations.

Symbolic criticism is easily reduced to an act of translating meaning, remote from the style of rich narratives. Drawing on David Bordwell’s distinction between broad, overlapping functions of style, I argue that we can examine symbolic purposes as secondary to decorative and expressive purposes. I show how a theory on conceptual cognition proposed by psychologist Lawrence Barsalou can let the critic transcend firm distinctions between abstract and concrete features of a narrative. This proves especially helpful when narrative purposes are downplayed, for example in the resonant elements of art cinema, affecting how we construct and experience the storylines. I posit a framework for the analysis of symbolic purposes based on general mechanisms of memory and attentional guidance, letting us see continuity with critics such as Bordwell and Victor F. Perkins. This approach enables the critic to distinguish between degrees of symbolic power in Ruben Östlund’s The Square.

The article discusses strategies adopted in Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s feature-length animated documentary Flee (2021) for crossing the cultural and emotional distance between audiences and the refugee protagonist Amin. Focus is on a central scene in which a group of Afghans sailing across the Baltic Sea in the early 1990s encounters a cruise ship from Norway, the crew of which reports the refugees to the authorities. Juxtaposing the scene with a historical cornerstone of non-fiction animation, The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918), and drawing on theories developed within the blue humanities, I argue that Flee attempts to remind today’s White western audiences that their position as ‘dry’ subjects – safely elevated above sea level, socially privileged and seemingly self-sufficient – is not a given. While destabilizing the targeted audiences’ assumptions of safety and encouraging (a politics of) listening, Flee seeks to serve as a ‘safe vessel’ for Amin. It does so through the dialogic treatment of its documentary subject and its drifting storytelling, and by offering an audio-visual alternative to the dominant contemporary media depictions of people fleeing across the Mediterranean.