This article presents a genre-conscious critique of the power dynamics shaping political documentary production for global audiences. Centring on Praying for Armageddon (2023) – a provocative documentary addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the rise of faith-based politics in the United States – I examine its production through participatory ethnographic research and in-depth dialogue with its creators. Employing Bourdieu’s concept of ‘field’, the analysis reveals how both national institutions in Norway and transnational entities shaped the film’s development. The complications, however, are so profoundly interconnected and iterative that the putative dichotomy between national and international frameworks is increasingly destabilized. Findings suggest that, despite the growing presence of activist paradigms, international broadcasters and emerging gatekeepers continue to pressure filmmakers into adopting compliant strategies that dilute progressive narratives. Yet, in this case, the multipolar nature of global media has enabled a degree of autonomy, resisting full absorption and neutralization within the ‘heteronomous’ transnational field.
This article analyses Gabriela Pichler’s TV series Painkiller to examine the subversive potential of the contemporary art experience in its social and aesthetic specificity. Using Jacques Rancière’s concept of ‘distribution of the sensible’, the analysis reveals how access to aesthetic experience is divided along class and education lines. Through close readings of key scenes, the article argues that emancipatory potential emerges not from top-down artistic intervention but through collective creative practices. The series’ final episode captures the improvised collaborative performance as a moment of self-expression that at the same time is intrinsically artistic. Thus, Painkiller presents an instance where subjects who have traditionally been excluded from the art community become active agents who produce new knowledge from within the system, thereby creating a new shared space based on their own lived experience.
During the inter-war period, as the vision of an ideal social democratic society took shape, Swedish children's cinema increasingly intersected with ideological currents such as nationalism and moral narratives surrounding childhood. In this context, children's cinema evolved beyond mere entertainment to become a cultural artefact that articulated national identity, moral values and socially constructed ideals of childhood. While scholarly consensus situates the emergence of Swedish children's film history in the mid-1940s, I argue that Trollsl & auml;ndan ('The dragonfly'), directed by Pauline Brunius in 1920, already reflected these ideological demands in both its contextual and textual dimensions. This article examines the film's production intentions, marketing strategies, critical reception, exhibition practices, narrative structure and representation to provide a deeper understanding of how 'The drag-onfly' responds to - and negotiates - critiques of prevailing social and moral norms.
The success of a film depends on producers and creative teams making correct deci-sions during the production process. Decisions in film production create tension that arises from the internal organization of the companies, the nature of the film product and the type of decision-making processes before and during filming. Our aim is to focus on decision-making as a critical issue for production research. Furthermore, we highlight the distinctive features of the Finnish film context that may influence the way decisions are made. To this end, we combine our theoreti-cal review with comments and reflections from an in-depth interview with the Finnish producer Jussi Rauntam & auml;ki about his multiple works. Our conceptual framework combines paradox theory with insights from film studies and cognitive science that can be used in studies aimed at unravelling paradoxes in the context of Finnish film production that are brought to light in the interview.
This short subject explores the function of irony in Woman at War (Erlingsson 2018), particularly through the lens of Paul de Man's theory of irony and its connection to the parabasis of Attic comedy. It argues that the recurring appearance of musicians and Ukrainian chorus singers - visible only to the audience - acts as a structural inter-ruption that breaks the film's narrative coherence. These interventions signal a self-reflexive stance that undermines the film's verisimilitude and compli-cates its engagement with environ-mentalist discourse in a late capitalist context. Here, irony is not merely rhetorical but also political: it exposes the gap between the urgency of the climate crisis and the inertia of state and corporate responses. The viewer is drawn into this paradox, positioned as a witness to both the collapse of narra-tive illusion and the spectacle of plan-etary collapse itself
The article examines Bronze Age(1955), a short film exploring rock art on the Swedish west coast that forms the basis of a new (2025) exhibition at Vitlycke Museum. The film is discussed as an example of the post-war art film, highlighting both its formal qualities and its role in visualizing rock art.
This article discusses the dissemination strategy for Swedish films produced using photographic colour film systems released between 1946 and 1956. For these films, a recurring approach of the respective production and distribution companies was to employ the keyword ‘first’ for promotional purposes. Drawing on archival research at the Swedish Film Institute and the National Library of Sweden, the article examines publications such as cinema programmes, advertisements, press reviews and reports from various production phases published in periodicals. Through this discourse analysis, probable reasons behind the choice of specific colour film processes are hypothesized and placed in the broader context of cinema journalism and industrial practices in film promotion in Sweden during this period.
This article investigates representations of media in the Danish slasher films Sidste time ( Final Hour ) () and Mørkeleg ( Backstabbed ) (), arguing that such representations function as focal points of a self-reflexive exploration of slasher cinema and its potential cultural work. Utilizing two interrelated media historical contexts as interpretive frameworks, it first reads Final Hour as concerned with the commercialization of Danish film and television culture in the late 1980s and early 1990s, arguing that the film establishes television as a medial and ideological Other in order to explore its own relationship to the dominant system of capitalist commodification. It then reads Backstabbed as engaged with concurrent anxieties concerning filmic representations of violence, specifically the Scandinavian media panics revolving around home video technology. It concludes that Final Hour ’s ideological ambivalence allows it to retain a degree of critical distance, while Backstabbed reinforces the cultural logic it ostensibly opposes.
This article explores Liv Ullmann’s film adaptation of August Strindberg’s play Miss Julie , utilizing Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation as an analytical framework. The study examines modifications to narrative structure, themes, characters and settings to determine the motivations behind these changes and their impact on the adaptation’s fidelity to Strindberg’s original work. The central questions of this investigation are: in what ways does Ullmann’s adaptation demonstrate Hutcheon’s notion of critical distance regarding the source material while introducing thematic or stylistic modifications? How do alterations impact the adaptation’s portrayal of characters, themes, settings and narrative? The article argues that as a contemporary female director, Ullmann offers a unique perspective that challenges Strindberg’s misogyny and provides a new, visually engaging interpretation that appeals to modern viewers while remaining respectful of the original work. Her adaptation combines theatrical with cinematic storytelling, skilfully navigating the complexities of bringing the play to the screen. Ullmann’s method shows how a film adaptation can pay homage to its source material while standing on its own, presenting new perspectives on well-known themes and characters.
This article discusses the value of projection prints as primary sources. Preservation work at the National Library of Norway on two Norwegian educational films in home economics from the years 1944 and 1948 led to the discovery of variations between projection prints. The use of colour in some prints motivated preserving several versions of one of the films. The article argues that different versions should be made available in the web portal for accountable dissemination and examines important issues in preservation work in general.
During the second half of the 1930s, a particularly weighty aesthetic, called the ‘French style’, emerged in the Finnish film studios. With its expressionist lighting, in-depth staging and Dutch tilts, this style, inspired by French films, became one of the most characteristic and popular features of Finland’s classical cinema. Drawing from existing scholarship on Finnish film studios, this article explores the conditions of transfer of this specific aesthetic from France to Finland and its impacts, highlighting the economic and technical conditions underpinning this aesthetic circulation. To do so, it examines the critical reception of French cinema in Finland and compares the sociocultural issues of the two countries in order to show that, more than a style, such influences are evidence of a production model that circulates from France to Finland.
This article focuses on the cultural and aesthetic meanings of horror elements in Finnish children’s cinema, situating it within a Nordic context. Combining close reading and intertextual analysis of Ulrika Bengts’ Iris (2011), the investigation demonstrates that the horror elements are tonal, aesthetic and thematic, making the film representative of an arthouse-oriented Nordic children’s horror genre that differs in significant respects from Anglo-American children’s horror. The article also discusses the pedagogical potential of children’s films influenced by horror aesthetics and proposes a model that aligns with multiliteracy pedagogy, highlighting the active participation of the audience. This model connects the learners’ perspectives with the analytical process of acquiring film literacy, showcasing flexible approaches to understanding horror elements and their intertextuality in children’s films.
This article considers the Finnish drama comedy Päin seinää (Headfirst) (2014) as a work of neo-liberal pedagogy that represents human waste management and the culture of cruelty as normal and routine, denying marginalized young people the possibility of a better future.
Cinema is particularly suited for illuminating the kinaesthetic aspects of cultural subjugation. In Sameblod ( Sami Blood) (2016), writer-director Amanda Kernell portrays the self-assimilatory journey of an indigenous 14-year-old girl as a result of forced and voluntary exposure to novel bodily experiences. Using as its conceptual point of departure the term 'kinaesthesia' - the body's sensations of movement and spatiality - this article analyses the filmic techniques Kernell uses to offer audiences a vicarious experience of assimilation, and later, cultural revitalization. A century after majority-population Swedes subjected Kernell's family and other S & aacute;mi to social Darwinian racism, the director's third- eye film turns the camera back at those who portrayed them as inferior. Sami Blood exemplifies how important sensory and affective experiences are for our politics, histories and perception of cultural texts. The film is part of the past decades' S & aacute;mi revitalization, an artistic movement in which screen media have played an important role.
Review of: Visions and Victims: Art Melodrama in the Films of Carl Th. Dreyer, Amanda Doxtater (2024) Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 255 pp., ISBN 987-0-29934-750-5, h/bk, $79.95
Following a boom of user-friendly artificial intelligence tools in recent years, AI-enhanced (or manipulated) films have been framed as a serious threat to film archives. The purpose of this article is to trace and critically evaluate how AI artists use algorithmic upscaling to modify early cinema, more particularly surviving films of the film company Swedish Biograph, and how fragments of this company’s cinematic past circulate online today.
This article explores how animation has unique abilities to portray the emotional lives of characters in concise, accurate, reflective and engaging ways. It does so through a close reading of the experimental Norwegian film Ninjababy (), about Rakel, a young woman who, discovering that she is six-and-a-half-months pregnant after casual sex, decides to put her baby up for adoption. In Ninjababy, animation is combined with live-action footage and used to illustrate interior states of mind that live-action film cannot show. The article also discusses how the use of animation makes Ninjababy particularly fit to address sensitive topics like sexuality and mental health in secondary education.
Youth cultures have had a ubiquitous presence on Nordic screens for more than seven decades and are currently experiencing a surge in visibility across streaming platforms. However, studies pertaining to the production, representation and reception of youth film in Nordic cinema have been scarce. This introduction to the In Focus section ‘Youth cultures in Nordic cinema’ provides background and context for the section and presents its four contributing articles.
This article considers the Finnish drama comedy P & auml;in sein & auml;& auml; ( Headfirst ) (2014) as a work of neo-liberal pedagogy that represents human waste management and the culture of cruelty as normal and routine, denying marginalized young people the possibility of a better future.
This article investigates the changed market conditions for production of films for young audiences in the on-demand age. More precisely, I analyse how the public funding of films for children and youth in Denmark has undergone significant change in response to intensified competition and waning audience interest. From the outset of the Commissioner’s Scheme for films for children and youth at the Danish Film Institute (DFI), the state subsidized main financier in the national industry, the institution has changed away from selective funding based on cultural evaluation criteria towards audience-centric funding based on market orientation and data-driven audience insights. The DFI’s objective is to reach young audiences more precisely with films that are relevant to them. Yet, one of the implications so far of this practice has been that funds earmarked by law for films for children and youth are spent on films for adults, with significant ramifications for domestic film culture for young audiences.
