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7176 results in Media, mass communication

Page 150 of 359

  • 2 - Whose Repressed Memories? Max Manus: Man of War and Flame–Citron (from a Swede's Point of View)

  • from PART I - HERITAGE CINEMA AND NATIONAL NARRATIVES
    • By Erik Hedling, Professor of Film Studies at Lund University, Sweden
  • Edited by Tommy Gustafsson, Pietari Kääpä
  • Book:
    Nordic Genre Film
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    25 October 2017
    Print publication:
    15 May 2015, pp 33-46

  • Summary

    In 2008, both Norway and Denmark delivered major contributions to the cinematic genre of the ‘occupation drama’ (Norwegian), or ‘occupation film’ (Danish): the Norwegian film was Max Manus: Man of War (Max Manus, Joachim Ronning and Espen Sandberg, 2008) and the Danish Flame & Citron (Flammen og citronen, Ole Christian Madsen, 2008). In Scandinavia, these generic markers refer to many films set during the Second World War and depicting the fates of Danes and Norwegians in the years 1940–5, when their respective countries were occupied by Nazi Germany. Thus, both Norway and Denmark eventually came to be on the victorious allied side of the war.

    The other Nordic countries had different obligations. Finland was between 1941 and 1944 fighting on the side of Nazi Germany in a savage war against the Soviet Union. This struggle was bound to be lost, and Finland came to switch sides in 1944, making peace with the Soviets and agreeing to evict a German army in northern Finland by military force. Sweden, most importantly in the present context, was neutral and kept its independence throughout the war. This chapter will study how Max Manus: Man of War and Flame & Citron can be understood in a Swedish context, referring to Swedish history during the war, textual analyses of mainly the scenes from Sweden in the films, and the reception of the films in Sweden. That is, I analyse Norwegian and Danish perceptions of Sweden during the war, but strictly from a Swede's point of view.

    It should be noted that films about the occupation of Norway and Denmark have been very common particularly in Norway, where the occupation drama has flourished and evolved in the cinema since 1946, including classics like the docudrama Kampen om tungtvannet (Titus Vibe-Muller and Jean Dreville, 1948) and the artistically refined Kalde spor (Arne Skouen, 1962) (Iversen 2011: 145–55). In Denmark, the first occupation film, Den usynlige hær (Johan Jacobsen, 1945) came shortly after the liberation, and the genre peaked in the early 1990s, with films like Drengene fra Sankt Petri (Soren Kragh- Jacobsen, 1991) (Schepelern, 2001: 136, 327). Few films, however, can match the domestic successes of Max Manus: Man of War or Flame & Citron.

  • Introduction: Nordic Genre Film and Institutional History

    • By Tommy Gustafsson, Associate Professor in Film Studies at Linnaeus University, Sweden, Pietari Kääpä, Lecturer in Media and Communications at the University of Stirling
  • Edited by Tommy Gustafsson, Pietari Kääpä
  • Book:
    Nordic Genre Film
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    25 October 2017
    Print publication:
    15 May 2015, pp 1-18

  • Summary

    The demand for all areas of Nordic film and television culture outside the borders of the Nordic countries may come as no surprise. The popularity of television shows such as The Killing (Forbrydelsen, 2007) and The Bridge (Bron|Broen, 2011) both domestically and internationally have increased the profile of Nordic media while the crime novels of Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson have penetrated the American market – the barometer for global commercial ‘relevance’. The Guardian in the UK has published several articles on the craze, noting how the protagonist of the original Danish version of The Killing, detective Sarah Lund, has become an unlikely fashion icon with her knitted sweaters. While a certain type of Nordic film – the existential artistry of a Dreyer, a Bergman or a Kaurismaki – has existed at the periphery of this global consciousness, such perceptions are clearly shifting as the contemporary situation seems to be more characterised by Nordic contributions to global popular culture instead of the more traditional frameworks of artistic or experimental relevance. How did we get to this situation? In short, how did the media products of this small region of the world become part of global popular culture?

    In order to understand the international emergence of the Nordic media of the twenty-first century, we must turn to the ‘revival’ of the Nordic film industries in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Specifically, we must focus on the history of the Nordic genre film and its relationship with governmental support and film institutes. Previous international scholarship on Nordic cinemas has been carried out through a dense focus of art house cinema, often with a small number of auteur films with international distribution as its preferred examples (see, for example, Hardy 1952; Cowie 1992; Thomson 2006). This institutionalised history is largely based on the concept of film as a national art cinema, a concept that relies on a sharp contrast with Hollywood's fordianesque output of genre films. The notion of the national art film is so prevalent that a historical dictionary on Scandinavian cinema published in 2012 states as fact that ‘the production of genre film was sparse and, instead, a production of art house films and social problem films was favored’ during the period from 1960 to 1990 (Sundholm et al. 2012: 3).

  • Conclusions: Mediating Suffering, Dividing Class

  • Jonathan Corpus Ong, University of Leicester
  • Book:
    The Poverty of Television
    Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    18 January 2018
    Print publication:
    15 May 2015, pp 153-176

  • Summary

    The test of acknowledgment is not the reflex reaction to a TV news item, a beggar on the street, or an Amnesty advertisement, but how we live in between such moments.

    Stan Cohen, States of Denial

    This book has explored moral problems in the mediation of suffering using an audience-centred approach. Drawing on an ethnographic study of television audiences in the Philippines, this book provided empirical material in dialogue with the normative and often text-centred media ethics literature. Inspired by perspectives within the anthropology of moralities, it sought to be attentive to moral discourses and practices in the context of everyday life whilst keeping these in conversation with normative theory as well as empirical studies of other cultural contexts. At the same time, it has demanded more careful evaluation of television production of suffering – one that acknowledges the diversity of media institutional practices around the world and differences in audiences’ social positions.

    As the title clearly made the point, one of the central themes of this book is the discussion of the poverty of television in a class-divided Philippines, anchored from a holistic yet insistently grounded account of audiences’ (dis/) engagement with media and their varied ways of over-representing and even resolving poverty and disaster. This sheds light on particular challenges of the Philippines as a developing country where, social denial strategies notwithstanding, it is most impossible for people to honestly claim ignorance about the plight of vulnerable others (Bauman 2001, 1); after all, suffering exists in excess both on national television and in the ‘liquid mess’ of the metropolis (Tadiar 1996). In this context, the poverty of television thus is not an ‘out there’ phenomenon (‘distant suffering’ in the Western-centric literature) but ‘in here’ – an ever-present social reality that television culture shapes and is fundamentally shaped by. The everyday experience of poverty by the lowerclass majority is crucial to the political economy of mass media institutions, their motivations for legitimation, their programming styles and stories, and the ways in which they invite media pilgrimages from charity-seeking poor people.

  • 16 - Going Hollywood: Nordic Directors in American Cinema

  • from PART V - GENRE BENDERS
    • By Arne Lunde, Associate Professor in the Scandinavian Section and in Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA
  • Edited by Tommy Gustafsson, Pietari Kääpä
  • Book:
    Nordic Genre Film
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    25 October 2017
    Print publication:
    15 May 2015, pp 230-243

  • Summary

    Starting with a historical overview of the presence of Nordic directors in Hollywood, this chapter aims to explore the critical mass of Nordic directorial talents in contemporary American cinema. It interrogates their importance for the transnational dynamism of Nordic cinema outside its normative national borders and reveals how vitally Nordic directors have contributed to an increasingly globalised Hollywood. By configuring Nordic directors within different temporal and categorical groupings, this study charts differences and similarities of ‘Nordic’ stylistic and thematic traits when migrating into Hollywood cinema.

    1920s HOLLYWOOD'S SCANDINAVIAN COLONY

    Until the 1990s, only the 1920s featured any sustained collective presence of Nordic directors in Hollywood. Three of European silent cinema's greatest artists, Victor Sjostrom, Mauritz Stiller and Benjamin Christensen, immigrated to Hollywood during a decade in which the American film industry first actively courted competing talent from overseas. The Scandinavian film colony in Los Angeles would at its height in the mid- to late 1920s also include actors such as Stiller's protegee Greta Garbo, Einar Hanson, Lars Hanson, Nils Asther, Anna Q. Nilsson, Warner Oland, Jean Hersholt, Anders Randolph and Greta Nissen.

    The most ambitiously productive and successful of the Nordic directors in silent Hollywood was Victor Sjostrom, renamed Seastrom in Hollywood, who directed ten features in all at Goldwyn/MGM between 1923 and 1930, including three masterworks, He Who Gets Slapped (1924), The Scarlet Letter (1926) and The Wind (1928). Those three films in particular retain much of the naturalistic power and vision of the director's Swedish masterworks. As Bo Florin has argued, Sjostrom successfully reintegrated many of his Swedish cinema stylistic visual elements (most prominently, his evocative dissolve transitions) into new contexts and narrative conventions. But Florin also states that ‘Although he was regarded as alien and exotic at the beginning, his last works seemed to have turned him into just another Hollywood director’ (Florin 2013: 136). After directing one talkie, A Lady to Love (in both English- and German-language versions) in 1930, Sjostrom returned permanently to Sweden.

  • 4 - The Right to be Public and a Public with Rights

  • Dan Edwards
  • Book:
    Independent Chinese Documentary
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    26 October 2017
    Print publication:
    15 May 2015, pp 96-126

  • Summary

    One of the distinctive features of the alternative public sphere of independent Chinese documentary is a concern with the individual rights of citizens. As noted in earlier chapters, both Jia Zhangke and Ou Ning regard China's independent filmmaking and viewing culture itself as a reassertion of rights related to indi¬vidual choice and expression after the micromanagement of daily life that char¬acterised communist China up until the 1980s. Many of the independent films produced in this realm, such as Ou Ning's Meishi Street, also feature on-screen subjects engaged in struggles to claim various legal rights. Others such as Hu Jie's historical documentaries feature Chinese citizens expressing a desire for justice related to atrocities of the Maoist period. Thus the implicit values that both underlie and are expressed through independent Chinese documentaries in the digital era overlap significantly with the aims and philosophy of China's Rights Defence Movement (Weiquan yundong), a grassroots effort involving lawyers and citizens who have attempted to exploit civil rights ostensibly guaranteed in China's 1982 constitution to limit the power of the party-state through the courts. The movement has also used judicial means to try to carve a space for further legal and political reform.

    The commonalities between the unsanctioned cultures of independent docu¬mentary and rights defence (weiquan) have resulted in a degree of convergence in terms of ideas, actions and personnel. The work of Chinese academic Ai Xiaoming is a prime example of this convergence, although points of contact are evident in all the socially engaged documentaries discussed in this book.

    Initially inspired by Hu Jie's Lin Zhao documentary on the one hand and the online reaction to Sun Zhigang's 2003 death in custody on the other, Ai Xiaoming took up a camera in the mid-2000s because she wished to help publicise other unreported instances of injustice she saw taking place around her. Specifically, in her work she critiques the widely publicised claims of CCP leaders that the Chinese state promotes the rule of law. This connects her filmmaking directly with the Rights Defence Movement and the attempts of those in the movement to enforce legal accountability in China.

  • 4 - Crime Up North: The Case of Norway, Finland and Iceland

  • from PART II - CRIME AND DETECTIVE NARRATIVES
  • Edited by Tommy Gustafsson, Pietari Kääpä
  • Book:
    Nordic Genre Film
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    25 October 2017
    Print publication:
    15 May 2015, pp 61-75

  • Summary

    Although the great local and global interest in Nordic noir bears witness to a remarkable change in the national cinemas of the Nordic countries, certain things remain the same: Norway, Finland and Iceland are overshadowed by Denmark and Sweden. With its roots in the police procedurals of writer-couple Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, a form later revitalised by Henning Mankell, not to mention the unparalleled success of Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy (a police procedural in journalism ‘disguise’), Sweden was and remains the centre of Scandinavian crime fiction. Recently, however, Danish crime films and television series, including the influential police procedural The Killing (Forbrydelsen, Soren Sveistrup, 2007–12), have given adaptations of said Swedish crime series good competition for the primacy of Nordic noir. The Bridge (Broen|Bron, Hans Rosenfeldt, 2011–) could be said to consolidate their mutual supremacy as Danish and Swedish police officers (and television producers) join hands when a body is found exactly halfway across the Oresund bridge connecting the two countries – leaving the other Nordic countries watching from a distance. Norway, Finland and Iceland have, however, not remained out of it altogether and on occasion managed to grab the spotlight, as evidenced by films such as Jar City (Mýrin, Baltasar Kormakur, 2006) and Headhunters (Hodejegerne, Morten Tyldum, 2011), the latter based on a novel by the Norwegian Jo Nesbo (2011) – arguably Larsson's heir to the Scandinavian crime fiction crown.

    As these opening remarks suggest, it is impossible to discuss contemporary Nordic crime cinema and television without taking into account the ties to its literary counterpart – notably most of the films discussed in this chapter are adaptations. One of the benefits of the increasingly popular label Nordic Noir – English home video distributor Arrow Films even offers T-shirts marked thus for sale – is that it is not medium specific and perhaps even emphasises film due to its film noir connotations while ‘fiction’ (as in Scandinavian crime fiction) is conventionally limited to literature. Nordic noir is indeed a constellation of texts stemming from novels, television and cinema, tied together in various and often blurred ways. The coinage is, however, somewhat misleading.

  • Traditions in World Cinema

  • Edited by Tommy Gustafsson, Pietari Kääpä
  • Book:
    Nordic Genre Film
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    25 October 2017
    Print publication:
    15 May 2015, pp xii-xiv

  • Summary

    General editors: Linda Badley and R. Barton Palmer

    Founding editor: Steven Jay Schneider

    Traditions in World Cinema is a series of textbooks and monographs devoted to the analysis of currently popular and previously underexamined or undervalued film movements from around the globe. Also intended for general interest readers, the textbooks in this series offer undergraduate- and graduate- level film students accessible and comprehensive introductions to diverse traditions in world cinema. The monographs open up for advanced academic study more specialised groups of films, including those that require theoretically oriented approaches. Both textbooks and monographs provide thorough examinations of the industrial, cultural, and socio-historical conditions of production and reception.

    The flagship textbook for the series includes chapters by noted scholars on traditions of acknowledged importance (the French New Wave, German Expressionism), recent and emergent traditions (New Iranian, post-Cinema Novo), and those whose rightful claim to recognition has yet to be established (the Israeli persecution film, global found footage cinema). Other volumes concentrate on individual national, regional or global cinema traditions. As the introductory chapter to each volume makes clear, the films under discussion form a coherent group on the basis of substantive and relatively transparent, if not always obvious, commonalities. These commonalities may be formal, stylistic or thematic, and the groupings may, although they need not, be popularly identified as genres, cycles or movements (Japanese horror, Chinese martial arts cinema, Italian Neorealism). Indeed, in cases in which a group of films is not already commonly identified as a tradition, one purpose of the volume is to establish its claim to importance and make it visible (East Central European Magical Realist cinema, Palestinian cinema).

    Textbooks and monographs include:

  • • An introduction that clarifies the rationale for the grouping of films under examination

  • • A concise history of the regional, national, or transnational cinema in question

  • • A summary of previous published work on the tradition

  • • Contextual analysis of industrial, cultural and socio-historical conditions of production and reception

  • • Textual analysis of specific and notable films, with clear and judicious application of relevant film theoretical approaches

  • • Bibliograph(ies)/filmograph(ies)

    • Monographs may additionally include:

  • • Discussion of the dynamics of cross-cultural exchange in light of current research and thinking about cultural imperialism and globalisation, as well as issues of regional/national cinema or political/ aesthetic movements (such as new waves, postmodernism, or identity politics)

  • • Interview(s) with key filmmakers working within the tradition.

  • 8 - The Private Life of the Prime Minister? Politics, Drama and Documentary in Pääministeri and Palme

  • from PART II - CRIME AND DETECTIVE NARRATIVES
    • By Anneli Lehtisalo, post-doctoral researcher in a three-year research project at the Academy of Finland
  • Edited by Tommy Gustafsson, Pietari Kääpä
  • Book:
    Nordic Genre Film
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    25 October 2017
    Print publication:
    15 May 2015, pp 119-130

  • Summary

    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.

  • Appendix

  • Jonathan Corpus Ong, University of Leicester
  • Book:
    The Poverty of Television
    Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    18 January 2018
    Print publication:
    15 May 2015, pp 177-186

  • Summary

    This book draws from a four-year PhD project carried in the Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge and fully funded by the Gates Cambridge Trust from September 2007 to July 2011. Ethnographic research with television audiences, supplemented with interviews and participant observation in three television networks, was conducted intermittently from June 2008 to October 2009, June to July 2010 and December 2010 to January 2011.

    This appendix summarizes the project's methodology and presents information about the background and sampling of project participants and the general conduct of fieldwork. The ethnographic approach taken here draws from the tradition of audience ethnographies in media studies and the anthropology of moralities in the attention to lay moralities expressed in ordinary people's media talk about poverty and suffering on television.

    Ethnography of Media and Moralities

    Ethnography is traditionally defined as the use of participant observation requiring long-term immersion in a particular culture. Hammersley and Atkinson (1995, 1) define it as participating ‘overtly or covertly in people's daily lives for an extended period of time, watching what happens, listening to what is said, asking questions – in fact, collecting whatever data are available to throw light in the issues that are the focus of research.’

    In media studies the use of ethnography is well documented. Within the ‘ethnographic turn’ of media research in the 1980s to 1990s, studies highlighted how media artifacts are appropriated in people's everyday lives and how media messages are differently interpreted by audiences (e.g., Gillespie 1995; Radway 1985). An ethnographic perspective is understood as well suited to examine the ‘double articulation’ of media as texts and as technologies or objects (Silverstone 1994). This holistic approach not only examines processes of reception in investigating specific interpretations of media messages; it also accounts for general processes of consumption in studying what people do with the media in their everyday lives (Morley 2006).

    Ethnography is understood to be ideal in studies that employ the framework of mediation in examining the ‘circulation of meaning’ in media and social life (Silverstone 1999, 13). Ethnography is sensitive to different moments that constitute the mediation process, namely media production, media texts, media technologies and the social and cultural context (Madianou 2009).

  • 7 - Stockholm Noir: Neoliberalism and Gangsterism in Easy Money

  • from PART II - CRIME AND DETECTIVE NARRATIVES
    • By Michael Tapper, film critic for the Swedish daily Sydsvenska Dagbladet and has a PhD in Film Studies from Lund University, Sweden
  • Edited by Tommy Gustafsson, Pietari Kääpä
  • Book:
    Nordic Genre Film
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    25 October 2017
    Print publication:
    15 May 2015, pp 104-118

  • Summary

    Every man is enemy to every man.

    Thomas Hobbes Leviathan (1651/2004, p. 77)

    Adios losers.

    Jorge in Jens Lapidus's Easy Money (Snabba cash, 2006/2008, p. 467)

    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.

Page 150 of 359