Nordic Film Classics
Скачать книги из серии Nordic Film ClassicsRoy Andersson’s “Songs from the Second Floor”
Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson�s celebrated and enigmatic film Songs from the Second Floor, his first feature film in twenty-five years, won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2000. The �songs� of the film�s title refer to Andersson�s artistic ruminations on the state of mankind from his office on the second floor of Studio 24 in Stockholm. The film presents a series of forty-six tableaux�long, deep-focus shots with a still camera, mostly in studio settings, using older visual tricks such as trompe l�oeil. The tableaux showcase seemingly trivial tragicomic situations designed to provoke thoughts about existential guilt, broken relationships, and the failure of social institutions to treat people as human beings. Lindqvist draws from interviews with Andersson and his team that provide a behind-the-scenes look at how the film was made and investigates its philosophical and artistic influences, providing a nuanced reading of a film that has both befuddled and entranced its viewers. This first book-length study in English of Andersson�s work considers his aesthetic agenda and the unique methods that have become hallmarks of his filmmaking, as well as his firm belief in film�s revolutionary function as social critique.
Thomas Vinterberg's Festen (The Celebration)
Danish filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg's searing film Festen (�The Celebration�) was the first film from the Dogme 95 stable. Adhering to Dogme's cinematic purity � no artificial lighting, no superficial action, no credit for the director, and only handheld cameras for equipment � Festen was a commercial and critical success, winning the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1998 and garnering worldwide attention.The film is set at the sixtieth birthday party of Helge, the wealthy patriarch of a large Danish family. The birthday festivities take a turn when Helge�s son Christian raises a toast and denounces Helge for having raped and abused him as a child, along with his twin sister, who recently committed suicide. The film explores the escalating consequences of Christian�s announcement, from the stunned dinner party�s collective denial, to violence, to an unexpected catharsis.
Dagur Kari's Noi the Albino
Dagur Kari�s Noi the Albino (Noi albinoi, 2003) succeeded on the international festival circuit as a film that was both distinctively Icelandic and appealingly universal. Noi the Albino taps into perennial themes of escapism and existential angst, while its setting in the Westfjords of Iceland provided an almost surreal backdrop whose particularities of place are uniquely Icelandic. Bjorn Nordfjord�s examination of the film integrates the broad context and history of Icelandic cinema into a close reading of Noi the Albino�s themes, visual style, and key scenes. The book also includes an interview with director Dagur Kari.Noi the Albino�s successful negotiation of the tensions between the local and the global contribute to the film�s status as a contemporary classic. Its place within the history of Icelandic cinema highlights the specific problems this small nation faces as it pursues its filmmaking ambitions, allowing us to appreciate the remarkable success of Kari�s film in relation to the challenges of transnational filmmaking.
Lukas Moodysson’s Show Me Love
Lukas Moodysson is one of the most accomplished and unconventional filmmakers of his generation in Sweden. Moodysson, now well known for his English-language film Mammoth (2009) as well as his heartbreaking indictment of sex-trafficking in Sweden, Lilya 4-Ever (2002), debuted as a writer and director while still in his twenties with Show Me Love (1998). The film received four Guldbaggar–the Swedish equivalent of the Academy Awards–including best film, best director, best screenplay, and best actresses. A coming-of-age and coming out film about two young women in a stiflingly oppressive small town, Show Me Love is widely considered a youth film classic and was called a «masterpiece» by Ingmar Bergman.This book, which is the first study of Moodysson in any language, includes discussions of the film's genre, aesthetics, and style, and situates the film in both contemporary Swedish cinema and broader Swedish culture. It includes sequence and dialogue analysis and discusses how and why this particular film became so important: its queer significance, its unusually realistic depiction of youth, and its critical reception. Anna Stenport conducted extensive interviews with the cast and crew, including several enlightening discussions with Moodysson himself. Lukas Moodysson's Show Me Love offers an incisive introduction to Moodysson for readers interested in contemporary film, as well as a history and close analysis of changes in the Swedish film industry.
Lone Scherfig's Italian for Beginners
Lone Scherfig was the first of a number of women directors to take up the challenge of Dogme, the back-to-basics, manifesto-based, rule-governed, and now globalized film initiative introduced by Danish filmmakers Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg in 1995. Entitled Italiensk for begyndere (Italian for Beginners), Scherfig's Dogme film transformed this already accomplished filmmaker into one of Europe's most noteworthy women directors. Danish and international critics lavished praise on Scherfig and her film, and their reactions harmonized with those of festival juries.Battered by life, but by no means defeated or destroyed, the characters in Italian for Beginners are all in touch at some deep intuitive level with the truth that is the film's basic message: that happiness and a sense of self-worth are sustained by love–whether romantic love or that of a community of like-minded people. The film struck an important chord with viewers precisely because it took Dogme in a new direction, one that reflects Scherfig's sensibilities and preferences as a woman.The book includes the Dogme manifesto and draws on interviews with the filmmaker as well as with the cast and crew.Watch the book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gk7SGfrIHGA
Ingmar Bergman's The Silence
Ingmar Bergman's 1963 film The Silence was made at a point in his career when his stature as one of the great art-film directors allowed him to push beyond the boundaries of what was acceptable to censorship boards in Sweden and the United States. The film's depiction of sexuality was, as Judith Crist wrote at the time in the New York Herald-Tribune, «not for the prudish.» Yet Bergman's notebooks and screenplays reveal his tendency for self-censorship, both to dampen the literary quality of his screenwriting and to alter portions of the script that Bergman ultimately deemed too provocative.Maaret Koskinen, a professor of cinema studies and film critic for Sweden's largest national daily newspaper, was the first scholar given access to Bergman's private papers during the last years of his life. Bergman's notebooks reveal the difficulties he experienced in writing for the medium of moving images and his meditations on the relationship (or its lack) between moving images and the spoken or written word. Koskinen's attention to this intermedial framework is anchored in a close reading of the film, focusing on the many-faceted relationships between images and dialogue, music, sound, and silence.The Silence offers filmgoers an entryway into the cinematic, cultural, and sociopolitical issues of its time, but remains a classic – rich enough for scrutiny from a variety of perspectives and methodologies. Koskinen draws a picture of Bergman that challenges the traditional view of him as an auteur, revealing his attempts to overcome his own image as a creator of serious art films by making his work relevant to a new generation of filmgoers. Her exploration of the film touches on issues of censorship and the cinema of small nations, while shedding new light on the shifting views of Bergman and auteurist film, high art, and popular culture.