{"title":"JSCA Special Issue: ‘Approaching Race and Ethnicity in Nordic Film Culture’","authors":"Kate Moffat, Zélie Asava","doi":"10.1386/jsca_00059_2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jsca_00059_2","url":null,"abstract":"This Special Issue of the Journal of Scandinavian Cinema focuses on race and ethnicity in Nordic film and TV cultures. The decolonial turn has produced a global shift in the recognition of cinema’s historical relationship to imperialism, colonialism and racism, and emphasized\u0000 the urgency of dismantling structural inequalities through new modes of engagement with minoritized artists and theorists, as well as Indigenous epistemological frameworks and pluriversal approaches ‐ including critical race theory and its specific applications in a Nordic context.\u0000 Consequently, these articles consider representational politics alongside interrelated concerns on practitioner agency and production contexts addressing equality and access in the media industries of these countries. The depth and historical range of the collection speaks to the need for\u0000 an ongoing, critically reflective dialogue on these topics, especially as they remain significantly underrepresented in the field of Nordic media studies.","PeriodicalId":42248,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Scandinavian Cinema","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44634821","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Nordic homonationalism in post-cinematic times: The ‘good ethnic’ and sexual exceptionalism in SKAM","authors":"Jenny Andrine Madsen Evang","doi":"10.1386/jsca_00062_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jsca_00062_1","url":null,"abstract":"This short subject analyses the racialized dynamics of the Norwegian TV series SKAM vis-à-vis its representation of queerness. It argues that the Muslim character Sana stands in for the ‘good ethnic’ who simultaneously represents the ‘backwardness’\u0000 of her religion and the imaginary of Norwegian multiculturalism that can ‘rehabilitate’ her into its image.","PeriodicalId":42248,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Scandinavian Cinema","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44798996","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Constructing Sámi images in Scandinavian television series: Between pessimism and new possibilities","authors":"M. Chacińska, Maria Sibińska","doi":"10.1386/jsca_00065_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jsca_00065_1","url":null,"abstract":"The Sámi are a linguistic, ethnic and cultural Indigenous minority in three Nordic countries, Finland, Norway and Sweden. Much of the perception of this minority comes from the majority media of these countries. Media in general have often been accused of under- and misrepresenting\u0000 the Sámi. Previous research, however, has mainly concerned the news media. The article examines how the Sámi are portrayed in two television series, the Swedish Midnight Sun (2016) and the Norwegian Heartless (2013). Since television is a popular medium, the representation\u0000 of the Sámi in these series can significantly impact the general perception of the group. Drawing on recent migration theory, the article examines how Sámi- and non-Sámi-produced television impacts the perception and apparent authenticity of the Indigenous population.","PeriodicalId":42248,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Scandinavian Cinema","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44156682","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Terror melodrama, race and the nation: Ulaa Salim’s Sons of Denmark","authors":"Amanda Doxtater","doi":"10.1386/jsca_00063_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jsca_00063_1","url":null,"abstract":"Ulaa Salim's 2019 film, Sons of Denmark, employs terror melodrama, an iteration of the melodramatic mode related to 9/11 that represents the nation as innocent and violated. This allows the film to raise questions about masculinity, systemic racism and white innocence in the\u0000 decades-long rise of far-right political parties in Denmark.","PeriodicalId":42248,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Scandinavian Cinema","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47675633","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Swedish racial innocence on film: To be young, queer and Black in Swedish documentary filmmaking","authors":"Benjamin Mier-Cruz","doi":"10.1386/jsca_00060_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jsca_00060_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyses two Swedish documentaries, Broadway Playground (Marklund and Ribbsjö 1977) and Kiki (Jordenö 2016), to interrogate how these ethnographic studies of disinvested Black communities in the United States are presented from the standpoint of\u0000 Swedish racial innocence, a position that implicitly lays claim to neutrality and objectivity by highlighting an imagined national history of ethnic and cultural homogeneity and promoting a perennial myth of race and colour-blindness. In this context, the visual archiving of Black and Brown\u0000 bodies in low-income neighbourhoods interpellates people of colour ‐ inscribed by non-Whiteness, economic disenfranchisement and non-heteronormativity ‐ into vulnerable documentary film subjects. The article also explores how White Swedish filmmakers negotiate their positions\u0000 as ‘objective’ witnesses to Black lives and Black bodies, concluding with a call to decentre Whiteness in (Scandinavian) studies of people of colour.","PeriodicalId":42248,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Scandinavian Cinema","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66735793","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The precariousness of Jewish visibility: Surviving antisemitism in Swedish cinema","authors":"Jonathan Rozenkrantz","doi":"10.1386/jsca_00066_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jsca_00066_1","url":null,"abstract":"The article examines Jewish ‘self-images’ in Swedish post-war film. Before World War II, antisemitic caricatures were prevalent in Swedish film and visual culture. Following the Holocaust, Jews as such were virtually erased from Swedish screens. Written by and starring Marie-Louise\u0000 Ekman, Hallo Baby (Bergenstråhle 1976) was a rare exception, the first Swedish post-war film to explore Swedish-Jewish identity. The 2002 comedy Livet i 8 bitar (Bit by Bit) (Metzger) remains the last of only a handful of films to fit said description. Significantly,\u0000 both films draw heavily on established antisemitic tropes in their figurations of ‘Jewishness’. Through historically contextualized readings of the two films, including their reception, the article thus shows how the tradition of antisemitic caricature that prevailed until World\u0000 War II has continued to condition Jewish self-representation in the post-war era.","PeriodicalId":42248,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Scandinavian Cinema","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49076967","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Elements in the biographical discourse of the documentary Ole Bull","authors":"Tore Helseth","doi":"10.1386/jsca_00058_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jsca_00058_1","url":null,"abstract":"The article discusses how the biographical is represented in the documentary Ole Bull (Aarhus 2006), a film about the world-famous Norwegian composer and violin virtuoso (1810‐80). It focuses on the biographical discourse ‐ that is, by what kind of stylistic devices\u0000 his life story is told and the audio-visual strategies the film employs to make the past present.","PeriodicalId":42248,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Scandinavian Cinema","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49446149","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Being ordinary as a female pop star: Behind the scenes in musical documentary portraits of Jada and Beyoncé","authors":"Helle Kannik Haastrup","doi":"10.1386/jsca_00055_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jsca_00055_1","url":null,"abstract":"By comparing two contemporary musical documentary portraits, the Scandinavian newcomer Jada in Jada ‐ lillebitte kæmpestor (‘Jada ‐ super tiny mega big’) (2019) and the global pop artist Beyoncé in Homecoming: A Film by Beyoncé\u0000 (2019), the article examines how ‘being ordinary’ in behind-the-scenes sequences can be used as a marker of authenticity.","PeriodicalId":42248,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Scandinavian Cinema","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66735760","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dream weaving and sonic metalepsis in Jan Troell’s Land of Dreams","authors":"Alexis Luko","doi":"10.1386/jsca_00051_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jsca_00051_1","url":null,"abstract":"Jan Troell’s Sagolandet (Land of Dreams) (1988) presents itself as a documentary about 1980s Swedish society, but is also a film about filmmaking, the imagination, memory and autobiography. The film has multiple narrative levels: interviews, home movie footage, autobiographical\u0000 anecdotes and imaginative sequences. Commentary and guiding themes are drawn from the theories of psychoanalyst Rollo May. These strata and themes have associated musical motifs and/or sound effects, which, as the film progresses, serve as an ontological bridge between the different strata.\u0000 Land of Dreams is structured as both a multistrand and multiform narrative with the intercutting of multiple stories with multiple protagonists (multistrand) mixed with dream worlds and internal-subjective perspectives of Troell (multiform). The different narrative strata invite metalepsis,\u0000 a type of narrative ‘transgression’ that occurs across the boundaries of distinct narrative worlds. In Land of Dreams, voice, music and sound effects act as metaleptic agents, transgressing different strata through four interrelated techniques: (1) metaleptic ‘i-voices’;\u0000 (2) musical structures made up of ironic and disjunctive musical textures; (3) musical motifs transgressing narrative and ontological boundaries and (4) musical metaleptic warps. Musical metalepsis in Land of Dreams functions in a way that is emblematic of how political decisions and\u0000 public policy infiltrate the private sphere, human consciousness and even dreams of the future.","PeriodicalId":42248,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Scandinavian Cinema","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46098700","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Featuring Monica Zetterlund: Jazz in early Swedish television","authors":"Tytti Soila","doi":"10.1386/jsca_00056_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jsca_00056_1","url":null,"abstract":"Following Miriam Hansen’s writings about the popular cinema, this study presents a hypothesis that the new medium of television in 1960s Sweden may be a form of ‘cultural horizon’ that enables multiple understandings and thus contributes to the popularity of the medium.\u0000 The study focuses on a number of programmes where one of the most popular Swedish artists of the period, the jazz singer Monica Zetterlund, appears in performance. When these programmes are juxtaposed, contradictory features emerge that I suggest are pieces of a cultural horizon described\u0000 by Hansen ‐ high/low, modern/traditional and international/vernacular ‐ that contributed to the evolution of Swedish television.","PeriodicalId":42248,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Scandinavian Cinema","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46257896","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}