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Nordic Film Cultures rethinks and reformulates the images, legacies, and impacts of Nordic cinemas within dynamic and multi-directional global contexts. The book engages with lacunae of transnational, extra-territorial history of Scandinavian and Nordic filmmaking from its early phases up to the present moment. The volume’s quest is to re-imagine Nordic cinema outside the confines of national and even regional cinema brackets to an even further new degree and in locations often least expected. Departing from what may be, to an international audience (and partially also to domestic spectators), obvious “traditions” of the Nordic region, the authors read against the grain of “the national” and reveal how significantly Scandinavian films and filmmakers transcend and transgress these national boundaries on myriad levels.

This introductory chapter sets out the book’s unique regional focus that distinguishes its approach from scholarly works that have regarded Asian cinema predominantly from a national cinema perspective. The chapter outlines the book’s innovative methodology derived from comparative film studies and inter-Asia cultural studies approaches.

This introduction argues that Hong Kong cinema and media are best understood as a public sphere, where affects associated with Hong Kongers’ extraterritorial position of being doubly occupied and ostracised by contesting sociopolitical forces are being negotiated. It first examines why the national/transnational debate on Hong Kong cinema falls short of helping us understand the core of the sociopolitical perturbation it seeks to locate. It then expounds the term ‘extraterritoriality’ from both theoretical and historical angles. With these in mind, this chapter studies Mandarin musical Chang xiangsi [An All-Consuming Love, He Zhaozhang, 1947] as an example of an extraterritorial cinematic and musical experience. Finally, it introduces the specific topics and case studies discussed in each chapter of this book.

The introductory chapter clarifies the goal of the book, which is to question the monolithic understanding of wartime film and to focus on the complexities and contradictions of national identity formation of cultural texts in this period. The chapter begins by providing a brief summary of the era’s film industry. Then, it introduces the state of research of wartime Japanese film studies through an examination of the definition of ‘national policy film’ or kokusaku eiga. Finally, it underlines the significance of interdisciplinary and relational approaches to wartime Japanese film by discussing the methodologies and narratives of other national film histories that have informed this project. (105 words)

The chapter on Bulgaria explores how the country’s EU membership impacted on national cinema legislation, leading to a progressive change in production models and a steady increase in co-production activities. The chapter discusses the emergence of a new generation of filmmakers with new artistic styles, the evident tension between arthouse and mainstream films and the reception of national cinema by local audiences. It also examines the increased visibility of Bulgarian cinema at international film festivals and its critical acclaim.

The chapter on Romania examines post 2008 Romanian cinema through the dual prism of its film festival successes and the developing strand of genre-based popular films. Offering an account that goes beyond the critical successes of the New Wave films, the chapter discusses the difficulty of national productions to reach local audiences despite the increased adoption of genre. It also provides some explanations for the limited output of Romanian cinema, which is notable despite the increase in European and Balkan co-productions.

This chapter looks into the varied efforts of filmmakers to develop Joseon film culture and to define what constituted Joseon film from the early 1920s up to the late 1930s. Specifically, it explores filmmakers’ endeavours to find a way to develop cinematic aesthetics that reflected something uniquely Korean but at the same time integrated Joseon’s colonial status into their filmic representation of the colony Joseon. The inquiry begins with a discussion of the cinematic tropes and aesthetics developed by the 1926 film Arirang that laid the foundation for Joseon film production. The author discusses the film’s role in the discursive formation of Joseon cinema and cinematic representation of Joseon. Then the chapter analyses a wide variety of films, recurring stylistic patterns, and critical questions Joseon filmmakers considered when they tried to cinematize their respective versions of a Joseon image.

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 introduction presents the main conceptual framework and historiographical methods of the book, detailing the author’s efforts to redefine the concept of the cinema of colonial Korea or “Joseon (colonial Korea) cinema.”

The chapter on Albania examines the increased transnational mobility of production funds from both the former Eastern Bloc and the West, placing particular emphasis on the international education and life experiences of Albanian filmmakers debuting or active in the late 2000s and 2010s. It identifies how this cultural cosmopolitanism has rendered Albania’s decades-long isolation a thing of the past, while fostering the development of a cinema of quality and an increase in international co-productions.

This epilogue underscores the fact that 'cinéma-monde' always came with a question mark: it was a hypothesis, a heuristic device, conjuring up a 'what would happen if' we looked at Francophone film production through a slightly different lens. Moving forward from this mapping of the possibilities of cinéma-monde while at the same time highlighting the persistence of the national, the essay proposes that one way to take ‘monde’ seriously is to situate Francophone film production within world history. An example taken is Chloé Leriche’s Avant les rues (2016, Canada), filmed in an Atikamekw community, which raises questions of colonialism, indigeneity, ecology and the cosmos. It suggests that connections can be formed in terms of parts of wholes, in other words of the worlds within, for example, Quebec or French national cinema.

This chapter develops on the topic of foreignness in Singapore films and discusses the ways that Singapore has been depicted in films made outside the country, especially by Hollywood. It addresses the tendency to polarise local- and foreign-made films as inside/outside perspectives and argues that they all perform a Singapore that is equally foreign regardless of where they were made. The chapter also problematises the tendency to limit the study of national cinema to locally-made films by making the case for how a Hollywood production like Saint Jack (Peter Bogdanovich, 1979) can be considered a Singapore film.

Before the First World War, two pioneers of the British film industry, WG Barker (Ealing Studios) and GB Samuelson, injected an unprecedented level of investment into a feature length docudrama on the life and times of Queen Victoria. Apart from a small fragment the film is lost, but a luxury souvenir book containing production stills survives. Sixty Years a Queen was released at the end of 1913 and toured the UK in the early part of 1914, to tremendous box office success. A majestic piece of national cinema, it was perfect for the point in the British market when the new purpose built picture palaces were opening all around the UK. Yet its legacy has dwindled to a footnote in histories of the feature film. Using production stills and information from trade magazines to recreate its construction, this chapter looks at tableaux from the film and discusses its debt to Victorian media, particularly the illustrated news. It will reveal Sixty Years a Queen as the most lavish example of a British film on a national theme before the First World War, the creation of an optimistic, forward thinking industry and an emotionally memorable experience for those in its audience.

The chapter on Bosnia and Herzegovina focuses on the country’s small film industry that still struggles with the recent history of violent conflict, but whose cinematic output has garnered international attention and widespread critical acclaim. Prominent themes discussed include the ongoing efforts to come to terms with the wounds of war trauma, and the ever-growing economic precarity. The chapter also examines the role of film festivals in the circulation of Bosnian and regional cinema, and the ongoing regional collaborations between the national film industries of the former Yugoslav countries - a transnational network of cinematic output.

The chapter focuses on popular culture as key site for the production of constructs of geopolitical identity and practices of national security as common sense knowledge and conventional wisdom, examining popular Hollywood movies of the ‘national security cinema’ and the involvement of the Pentagon in the filmmaking process. Representations of geopolitical identity and national security are analyzed in some of the commercially most successful films in the United States released between 2009 and 2015. The chapter’s analysis testifies to the enduring popularity of key ideational themes and mythologies, such as American exceptionalism, military heroism, and external threats endangering the existence of the United States, its interests and values under the Obama presidency. The serial reproduction of these national security narratives, realized in multi-million dollar film productions, illustrates the cross-discursive leverage of American hegemony over alternative formulations of grand strategy under the Obama presidency and the popularity of a particular national security imagery of American geopolitical identity.

Romeo and Juliet is the most obvious example of a single play by Shakespeare influencing a myriad of movies, to the extent that we can recognize a ‘romeo-and-juliet’ genre film even when Shakespeare is not referenced. Although the tales of romantic tragedy go much further back than Shakespeare, it is his version which has proved the most durable in its specific conventions and the kind of love represented in it. There have been a series of watershed film adaptations of the play itself, such as those by Cukor, Zeffirelli, and Luhrman, but this chapter takes the occasion to trace the play’s more subtle and indirect influence into films made in a range of countries, the United States, the Czech Republic, Wales, and India.