In spring 2003, Finland's first female Prime Minister was inaugurated. The leader of the Centre Party, Anneli Jaatteenmaki, led her party to an electoral victory by challenging the ruling Social Democratic Party and its leader, Paavo Lipponen. In election debates, Jaatteenmaki accused Lipponen of pulling Finland into the US-led alliance against Iraq, basing her information on the so-called Iraq memorandum compiled by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. However, it was revealed that the Iraq memorandum was a classified report. The advisor of the President, Martti Manninen, who had faxed the information to Jäätteenmaki, was accused of violating official secrets. Manninen was dismissed from his post, and, only a couple of months into her appointment, Jäätteenmaki was forced to resign from the premiership. After six years, this political scandal re-emerged in public when the Finnish Broadcast Company (YLE) screened a dramatised account of the incident, Pääministeri (‘The Prime Minister’, Finland, 2009). Although the drama did not further inflame political disputes, it attracted the public's attention. It was estimated that the drama reached nearly 700,000 viewers, which is a substantial figure in Finland (Anonymous 2009).

In autumn 2012, an even more dramatic true story was screened in cinemas throughout Sweden. The documentary Palme (Sweden, 2012) tells the life story of the famous Swedish politician and former Prime Minister Olof Palme. The film deals with the traumatic national memories that have lingered in Sweden since the assassination of Palme in the winter of 1986. The assassination shocked Swedish society and is still an unsolved crime. Interest in Palme may partly explain why the film Palme attracted an unusually large audience for a documentary – over 240,000 cinema admissions in autumn 2012 (Swedish Film Institute 2013: 7, 9).

Palme and Pääministeri can be considered exceptional films in their respective national contexts. Politics and public figures have not been a typical subject for contemporary feature films in Sweden or in Finland, although similar topics have thrived in Anglo-American media culture. Films like The Deal (UK, 2003), Looking for Fidel (USA, Brazil, 2004), The Queen (UK, France, Italy, 2006) and Margaret (UK, 2009) have depicted the political past and present by portraying the experiences or actions of known politicians in different generic modes, such as documentary dramas, documentaries and fictional biographical films.

Young punks go from rags to riches, enjoy a brief time in the sun before their downfall in a hail storm of bullets. So goes the classical dark tale of gangsters such as Rico in Little Caesar (novel 1929, film 1931). The American motion picture code's specification that there should be no sympathy for the criminals suggested that there was a dangerous aspect in the attraction to these films (Black 1994: 108). It could very well be that the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) president Will H. Hayes was averse from seeing the harsh social realities of the 1930s Depression depicted on the screen, including a corrupt legal system, but a danger of the gangster film was also its disturbing allegory on the daring entrepreneur that capitalism held up as a social ideal.

In essence, the gangster story is a warped Horatio Alger tale. Carl Freedman notes in his book Versions of Hollywood Crime Cinema (2013: 15–45) that it connects to the mystery of the origins of capitalism in what Karl Marx called ‘primitive accumulation’, the consciously repressed history about how common lands and natural resources were privatised and how companies, backed up by national armed forces, plundered non-European continents of their riches. The greedy and ruthless gangster's rise to social success is but a small-scale reflection of the genocides and the violent redistribution of wealth that gave birth to modern-day capitalism.

Gangsterism is also the ultimate expression of what the German sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies called Gesellschaft. While his other key concept Gemeinschaft describes the ‘natural’ personal relations and values often found in rural communities, Gesellschaft stands for the ‘constructed’ impersonal relations through business and formal interaction that characterise life in the urban capitalist era (Asplund 1991: 63–90). As national identity became a central issue in twentieth-century Europe – Fascism being the most extreme ideological project – gangsters and other social, legal and moral transgressors were often defined in popular culture as an alien intrusion of an otherwise idyllic Gemeinschaft.

Road movies are usually defined as stories of resistance and freedom. The road is seen as a space of possibility which, when moving away from certain place, gives the wanderer a sense of freedom and the opportunity to criticise what is left behind. As such, road movies can be understood as progressive, for they give rise to the possibility of reinterpreting societal conventions and boundaries. In Western societies, which cherish the notion of rationality and productivity, freedom reached on the road through aimless wandering means opposition. It is often coded as youthful rebellion, but the road genre has never been only confined to young people (e.g. Mills 2006: 20).

This chapter asks what happens to the conventions of the road movie, and in particular its ethos of resistance, when younger and older generations hit the road together in Nordic films of the 2000s. In raising this question I discuss the use of road movie conventions in two Finnish road movies, the fictional Road North (Mika Kaurismaki, 2012) and the documentary Finnish Blood Swedish Heart (Mika Ronkainen, 2012), which both feature stories of father–son pairings driving together towards a new kind of understanding of their roots. The films offer two ways to see how road movies, in essence, work between the national and the transnational. Road North depicts a road journey inside the borders of Finland. Finnish Blood Swedish Heart, in comparison, is profoundly transnational anyway in its subject matter of a father and son duo driving from Finland to their past in Sweden, but film was also financed as a Finnish–Swedish co-production and, before being awarded as the best Finnish documentary of the year, it received the Dragon award for the best Nordic documentary at the Gothenburg International Film Festival 2013.

It is often said that cinema cannot be understood as nationally isolated, for the boundaries between nations are crossed in several dimensions from financing and production to distribution and exhibition (e.g. Elkington and Nestingen 2005: 1–16). This is eminently true when talking about road movies. The road movie is the epitome of transnational cinema because of its circulating conventions and universal theme of struggle between individual and community.

THE MUSICAL AS (AN AMERICAN) GENRE

When thinking about Nordic cinema, the musical is not the first genre to come to mind. This holds true for the global audiences as well as for Nordic ones, nowadays and in retrospect. The film musical, in some kind of down-to-earth classical generic sense, is for a Western audience most probably associated with Hollywood films from the 1930s and onwards, with an obvious decline after the successful productions Mary Poppins (1964) and The Sound of Music (1965). Some European musicals are probably also well-known to the nonspecialist public, such as Jacques Demy's Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, 1964) and Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (The Young Girls of Rochefort, 1967). Since then musicals have changed or transformed. Even if some characteristics usually connected with the genre are still in use, they are now often utilised in an excessive or transformed way (Altman 1987; Grant 2012).

It is not at all curious that audiences in general, at least Western audiences, link musicals primarily to Hollywood. After all, it was a very important genre for the American film industry as well as for the music industry. The films were a feast for the eye which attracted audiences globally, and songs and music from the musicals had worldwide appeal. Some of the most renowned scholars even write from the standpoint that, in a strict sense, only Hollywood musicals can be classified as musicals. In his essay in The Oxford History of World Cinema, Rick Altman argues that Hollywood is the only film industry that has produced films that match the genre. Consequently Altman asserts: ‘To study the musical is thus primarily to analyze the history of Hollywood's 1,500 or so musical films’ (Altman 1996: 294). Jane Feuer also, more or less without discussion, writes about musicals as a Hollywood phenomenon in her classical book The Hollywood Musical from 1993. And an overwhelming corpus of books about the musical, as genre and as history, has titles that directly state the musical to be an American or Hollywoodian cultural product.

Arguably, the horror film is the most frowned upon film genre, perhaps only surpassed by the porn film. Historically, the horror film has often been seen by Nordic film critics and film censors since the 1930s as something foreign or as yet another sign of unlawful Americanisation. Although the production of genre films has been prominent among all Nordic film industries ever since the silent film period, these genre films have mostly consisted of comedies and, especially in recent years, crime and detective films. The Nordic horror film in all its shapes and forms has been an anomaly in the Nordic countries, and this argument does not include the somewhat anachronistic genre labelling of films such as The Phantom Chariot (Körkarlen, Victor Sjostrom, 1921) and The Vampire (Vampyr, Carl Theodore Dreyer, 1932).

This historic rejection can be explained by three interrelated factors: (1) a weak tradition of horror in Nordic film and literature; (2) an officially sanctioned aversion from depictions of horror which was seen as ‘brutalizing, arousing, or creating confusion to law and order’ (Skoglund 1971: 18) via the establishment of national film censorship boards in all the Nordic countries; (3) the difficulties of financing horror films as a consequence of this publicly sanctioned aversion. When state-funded film institutes were established in the Nordic countries between 1955 and 1972, they did not fund ‘low-brow’ horror films. This in turn created two outcomes. First, only a few feature horror films have been produced in all of the Nordic countries and, consequently, compiling a precise list to cover these is not the easiest task. Nevertheless, all in all there have been approximately ninety feature films produced that could be labelled as horror films. These range from Iceland's two horror films, The Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre (Julius Kemp, 2009) and Frost (Reynir Lyngdal, 2012) to the fifty or so horror films produced in Sweden. Second, and the main reason for the difficulty in compiling a list, is the fact that these feature horror films have been produced, almost without exception, with extremely low budgets and outside the regular film industry.

In this chapter I want to propose the ‘quirky feel-good’ as a particular Nordic film genre. What exactly is meant by the term ‘feel-good’ is poorly defined within film studies, and it is often used to dismiss superficial films that lack intellectual or emotional depth. Yet as Mette Hjort suggests in her booklength study of Lone Scherfig's Italiensk for begyndere (Italian for Beginners, 2000) – itself perhaps the most widely recognised example of what I am calling the Nordic quirky feel-good – a film that makes its viewers feel good does not preclude it from having significant depth (Hjort 2010: 116–17). Hjort proposes the term ‘ethical feel-good’ as a genre delineation for Italian for Beginners, but I think such a term underplays the importance of humour. As I see it, generally speaking a ‘feel-good’ is a film that combines drama with comic effects in order to establish emotional connections between viewers and characters, and among characters, rather than simply to generate laughter or for the purposes of ridicule. A feel-good will thus by definition have an ethos that emphasises emotional connections. Understood in this way, there are clearly many, many feel-good films, both in the US film industry and around the world; films like Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amélie (2001) and the works of Pedro Almodovar are probably the most prominent quirky examples worldwide. The genre can also be said to encompass the romantic comedy, which is more narrowly focused thematically, privileging heterosexual romance over all other preoccupations as it most often does. Feel-goods more generally can and do concern themselves with a much broader spectrum of human relationships. They also straddle many more traditional categories, such as the coming-of-age film, the road movie, the literary adaptation and even the documentary.

The choice of the modifier ‘quirky’ for the Nordic context is based on my sense that the film industries in the five Nordic countries have actively cultivated a kind of exoticism that is non-erotic; it is a foreignness in relation to the Anglo-American cultural context that emphasises what is perceived to be the strange but charming oddness of Scandinavia rather than the perceived seductive or threatening otherness of more culturally distant societies.

Following my first viewing of Zhao Liang's Petition at the Hong Kong International Film Festival, my real introduction to China's contemporary independent docu¬mentary culture took place in the years following in small, unofficial screening venues scattered around Beijing. I saw Zhao's other feature-length documenta¬ries, for example, over a series of chilly nights in a small, draughty gallery named Studio X, tucked beside the entrance gate of a former factory in the city centre. The same compound housed Trainspotting Café (Cai Huoche), an eatery that contained a screening room in which independent documentaries and features were shown on most weekends, often with the directors present. Venues such as these have sprung up across Beijing and other major cities such as Shanghai and Guangzhou as China's economy has liberalised, and a substantial private sector has developed for the first time since 1949. Although it took some effort to seek out these venues and their screening times, their activities were relatively open and noted in some of China's more liberal press. Issues raised in the films were openly discussed by audiences following the screenings, sometimes in formal question-and-answer sessions with directors.

This unofficial public screening culture is a contrast to the much more restricted situation into which independent Chinese documentary was born in the early 1990s. At that time, seeing independent works inside China was virtually impos¬sible unless you personally knew the directors and were able to attend their very rare clandestine screenings staged for friends and associates among Beijing's creative circles. Films such as the first independent documentary, Bumming in Beijing, were consequently only seen by a tiny number of Chinese citizens at the time they were made.

This chapter will trace the development of independent Chinese documentary from a marginalised, underground practice in the 1990s to the increasingly public culture of today. This is by no means an exhaustive history of a large and diverse field, but rather a selective account that focuses on the sector's increas-ingly public nature and how this has been reflected in the form and content of the films being made. In contrast to the personalised concerns of Bumming in Beijing and the detached analytical observations of many other key early independent works, documentaries of the digital era evidence a much more interpersonal style intended to foreground the voices and views of the subjects on screen.

Tim League, the founder of Austin's Alamo Drafthouse Cinema chain, and a key figure in distributing genre cinema in the US, outlines several significant developments in the international profile of Nordic film culture. His comments touch on the context where a range of genre films like Iron Sky (Vuorensola, 2012), Død snø/Dead Snow (Wirkola, 2008), The Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre (Kemp, 2010) and Kommandør Treholt og Ninja troppen/Norwegian Ninja (Malling, 2010) have broken the perception of a bleak sense of Nordic miserabilism of the Bergman or the Kaurismaki variety. Instead, cinemas of the Nordic countries are now ‘cool’ and receive blessing from both high-minded arts institutions and geeky fans alike. Furthermore, it seems genre has a substantial role to play here with both producers and creative institutions from the Nordic countries embracing its commercial and creative potential. In addition, League's comments were published in Wired magazine, a venue for tech-savvy media connoisseurs, which reports on the very latest in the intersection of technology and communications. The combination of genre and new media culture clearly provides Nordic film producers with a novel take on infiltrating what is, in reality, still very much a global niche market.

From where do the inspiration and incentives for such productions emanate? How does the often quirky genre-related content of these films fit in with the parameters of national cinema culture in the Nordic context? The quirkiness prevalent in the above productions is not entirely surprising, as Nordic film productions have a history of featuring odd comic behaviour including works by well-known auteurs such as Lars von Trier, Aki Kaurismaki, Nicolas Winding Refn and Bent Hamer.

Nordic cinema since the 2000s has turned to history to a greater degree than before, employing historical subject matter and settings to entertain, show off costumes and tell stories, but also to contribute with images and sounds to what historian Robert A. Rosenstone calls ‘that larger History … that web of connections to the past that holds a culture together, that tells us not only where we have been but also suggests where we are going’ (Rosenstone 1995: 23).

This chapter discusses the connections to the past made by the genre of the historical film. By historical film I mean films that create stories that take place in the past and not the present. The main questions are: How do Nordic filmmakers interpret and construct Nordic history? How do Nordic filmmakers engage with the past? And, what constitutes history for current filmmakers in the Nordic countries?

I discuss four different feature films, from four different countries, in order to show the scope of the new Nordic historical film and different varieties of engagement with the past. The films are not necessarily typical of their countries, but they represent important aspects of the national film industries as well as important aspects of the historical film genre in the Nordic countries. In all of the Nordic countries, the study of history is important, and the publication of numerous history books as well as historical fictions is proof that history not only fascinates a large audience in itself, but plays a role in the construction of contemporary national identities. Even though the genre deals with the past, the historical film will always reflect its time of production, and most Nordic historical dramas use the past for the purposes of the present.

NORDIC HISTORICAL FILM

Compared to contemporary dramas relatively few films produced in the Nordic countries have been consciously historical in their subject matter or attempted to represent the past. Although some Nordic national cinemas, especially Finnish cinema, have relied on historical representations throughout their history, there are far fewer historical films than ones set in the present. The main reason lies in the small markets of Nordic cinema and the big budgets of most historical films. The extra cost of creating a believable historical past through costumes and settings, instead of filming a contemporary story, proved too expensive for many filmmakers and production companies.

INTRODUCTION: NATIONS AND NATIONALISMS IN A ‘POSTNATIONAL’ WORLD

In a globalised world, the notions of neatly defined, homogeneous ethnies or national identities are difficult to sustain, especially if they are construed as organic features of social organisation and historical development. Instead, the present moment is characterised by hybridisation, multiculturalism and all manners of transnational movement, flux and entanglement. It has even been argued that we are now situated in a postnational condition, where the construction of supranationals, such as the European Union, and the transnational, ‘deregulated’, cross-border movement of capital, cultures and people is indicative of a decline of nations and traditional concepts of the national as key factors (Ezra and Rowden 2006: 1f.; see also Habermas 2001). Although the relation between the ‘transnational’ and the ‘postnational’ is not absolutely clear in this line of argument, the terms can be understood as connoting progressive stages in the decline of the national in the face of the challenges of globalisation (for example in Kaapa 2011: 14ff.). However, in the postnational condition more traditional or conservative ways of imagining the nation and national community simply will not make sense (Hedetoft and Hjort 2002). Modernist theories of nationalism hold that feelings of national belonging and community are constructed (‘imagined’) and sustained through mediated social communication (Deutsch 1966: 96–8 and 188; Gellner 1983: 127; Anderson 1991: 122). One implication of this for the contemporary postnational condition seems to be that national community remains a potent fiction; whereas postnational flux is the reality this fiction tries to disavow.

Indeed, on a political level, nations, conceptions of national specificity and nationalisms are still very real, and loom large in the mobilisation of various groups (conceived as, precisely, national, or ethnic, religious or otherwise designated) for political action (Juergensmeyer 2002: 3–8). Current development in Europe and elsewhere makes this abundantly clear.