Nordic Film Cultures and Cinemas of Elsewhere

The seminar is open to all and organized by Anna Westerstahl Stenport, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Eva Novrup Redvall, Section for Film Studies and Creative Media Industries, Dept. of Communication, at the University of Copenhagen.

The seminar will begin with a brief introduction of the book Nordic Film Cultures and Cinemas of Elsewhere  (Edinburgh University Press, 2019) by editors Anna Stenport and Arne Lunde, followed by presentations by:

  • Julie Allen, Brigham Young UniversityPatrick Wen, UCLA
  • Annie Fee, University of Oslo
  • Casper Tybjerg, University of Copenhagen
  • Anna Stenport, Georgia Institute of Technology
  • Emil Stjernholm, Lund University
  • Scott MacKenzie, Queen’s University, Canada
  • Ib Bondebjerg, University of Copenhagen
  • Eva Novrup Redvall, University of Copenhagen

The seminar includes Q&A and conversation. There will be a reception after the seminar.

More on the book and the seminar programme

Seminar programme

5-minute presentations followed by conversation

  • Introduction: Nordic Film Cultures and Cinemas of Elsewhere
    Anna Stenport, Georgia Institute of Technology
  • Mapping Cinema Ghosts: Reconstructing the Circulation of Nordic Silent Film in Australia
    Julie Allen, Brigham Young University
  • Carin Fock-Göring’s Gravestone: Tracing the Legacy of the Swedish First Lady of the Third Reich
    Patrick Wen, UCLA
  • Paris Looks to the North: Swedish Silent Film and the Emergence of Cinephilia
  • Annie Fee, University of Oslo
  • Dreyer’s Jeanne d’Arc at the Cinéma d’Essai: Cinephiliac and Political Passions in 1950s Paris
    Casper Tybjerg, University of Copenhagen
  • Opening up the Postwar World in Color: 1950s Geopolitics and Spectacular Nordic Colonialism in the Arctic and in Africa
    Anna Stenport, Georgia Institute of Technology
  • Mobility and Marginalization: Arne Sucksdorff’s Documentary Authorship in India and Brazil
    Emil Stjernholm, Lund University
  • The Beatles, (the Other) Bergman, and Swedish Elsewheres in Anglo-America
    Scott MacKenzie, Queen’s University, Canada
  • The Globalization of the Danish Documentary: Creative Collaboration and Modes of Global Documentaries
    Ib Bondebjerg, University of Copenhagen
  • Nordic Noir as a Calling Card: The International Careers of Danish Film and Television Talent in the 2010s
    Eva Novrup Redvall, University of Copenhagen

Seminar Description

Nordic Film Cultures and Cinemas of Elsewhere introduces a new concept to Nordic film studies as well as to other small national, transnational, and world cinema traditions. Examining overlooked “elsewheres,” the book presents Nordic cinemas as international, cosmopolitan, diasporic, and geographically dispersed from their beginnings in the early silent period to their present 21st-century dynamics. Nordic Film Cultures examines both canonical works and a wide range of unknown, repressed, and overlooked stories that include narratives of movement, mobility, interaction, synthesis, resistance, loss, multi-lingualism, colonialism, and reclamation. The book offers a new model of inquiry into a multi-varied Scandinavian cultural lineage and into small nation and pan-regional world cinemas.

The book advocates for the significance of an extra-national heterogeneity of film production, distribution, circulation, and reception, one parallel to and inscribed within multivalent migrations to -- and periodic repatriations from -- Nordic cinemas of elsewhere. The “elsewheres” of moving image cultural historiography addressed in the book include Brazil, France, Congo, India, Iran, Germany, Oceania, the UK, the circumpolar Arctic and Antarctic, Palestine and the Middle East, Hollywood, Russia and the Baltic, Nigeria, and North America.

Key Features

  • Introduces the concept of “Elsewheres” and “Cinemas of Elsewhere” of value for many small national film cultures
  • Promotes an understanding of Scandinavian cinemas as world cinemas
  • Examines overlooked and little-known aspects of how Nordic cinemas have been funded, produced, circulated, received, appropriated, and re-imagined outside of Scandinavia
  • Addresses cinemas of exile, diaspora, migration, emigration, and immigration
  • Integrates examples of early and silent cinema, popular cinema, art cinema, documentary, shorts, experimental film, expanded media, the avant-garde, video art, music videos, ethnography, television, and digital representation
  • Engages with questions of colonialism, gender, multi-lingualism, inter- and cross-cultural representation, film practice in the diaspora, and visual anthropology
  • Engages with Indigenous cinemas of the North

Case Studies

  • Ingmar Bergman
  • Scandinavian Silent Cinema
  • Carl Th. Dreyer
  • Lars von Trier
  • Mai Zetterling
  • Arne Sucksdorff
  • Ingrid Bergman
  • Nils Gaup
  • Scandinavian Indigenous Cinemas
  • Anita Ekberg
  • The Gothenburg International Exile Film Festival
  • Aki Kaurismäki
  • Nordic Noir and Scandinavian Crime Series
  • Thomas Vinterberg
  • Lasse Hallström
  • Nicholas Winding Refn
  • Göran Hugo Olsson