One of the biggest challenges to editing The Routledge Companion to World Cinema is defining what is meant by a ‘cinema’. Is it a building, a small group of films, an omnitudinous category or an abstract ideal? If I pay to watch a film in a building is that cinema? How about if I stream it at home on my computer? Is it a film if I watch it all the way through on my television and still one if I watch a bit of it on my phone?
Don’t look at me; I’m asking you.
The task of remapping World cinema that we set ourselves certainly demanded that we refrained from being elitist, divisive or just plain stubborn in our understanding and projection of what that might cover. The bigger the screen the better, perhaps, but if cinema for some folk is a digital snippet then we had to cover that too. If we were going to adequately remap World cinema, we had to do it before the Marvel Extended Universe took over. And there was no point in putting up barriers that filtered multi-media incarnations into categories that we could reject or accept based on an Australian-style points-system.
The first distinction to be dissolved was that between film and television, which was easy; we just followed the leaders. HBO, Netflix and the like have been blurring the boundaries for several years now. The best films that weren’t films in recent times have been Better Call Saul, Fargo, Jessica Jones, Sense8, Borgen, Spiral… You haven’t seen [insert title]? Oh, you must!
In fact, several contributors had already taken it upon themselves to deal with this redundant distinction. Paul Julian Smith on Spanish film and television, for example, and Olof Hedling on the Scandinavian. Olof is an Associate Professor in Film Studies at Lund University, Sweden. During the last few years his research activities have dealt with queries located at the intersection between several scholarly fields, including Swedish and Scandinavian film history, film production studies, economics, critical film policy review and regional development. Recently, he has been the co-author and co-editor of Historical Dictionary of Scandinavian Cinema (2012) and Regional Aesthetics: Locating Swedish Media (2010).
This was his timely abstract.
Contemporary Scandinavian Cinema between Art and Commerce
With regard to Scandinavian cinema and television, the last decades have been marked by the unexpected international appeal and unforeseen longevity of Scandinavian crime or Nordic noir as it is sometimes labeled. This development has paved the way for ever increasing financial and artistic collaboration within the audiovisual industries, especially among the Scandinavian countries. But it has also attracted rising interest from the broadcasting and film sectors in Germany, the UK and the US. At the same time, what can be described as “film production as usual”, implying the production of art films, occasional national epics as well as a long line of domestic comedies and dramas, has continued. In this article, the mounting tension inherent in this situation – between film and television as a transnational industry vs. as a predominantly national form of art and entertainment, between different agents with stakes in the field such as filmmakers, critics and politicians etc. – will be put under scrutiny.
Cinema, literature, art, entertainment, television and industry – it’s all there in the mix.