Exposing Vulnerability

Adriana Margareta Dancus

Description

This book explores the diversity of perspectives afforded by the emerging body of Scandinavian films produced by women. The author focuses on women filmmakers' use of their own vulnerability in representing Scandinavian experiences with globally relevant contemporary issues such as race, gender, mental illness, bullying and the trauma of migration, and highlights the frictions between the positive and negative manifestations of such vulnerability. Though Scandinavia is reputed for its ambitious and innovative film tradition, film scholarship has largely ignored women’s bold contributions to the canon. Exposing Vulnerability is a cultural and socio-political analysis of contemporary film by Scandinavian women as they use their lives and work to reconfigure the cinematic, the political and the ethical.

Preface

Introduction: Women, vulnerability and first person filmmaking

Chapter 1: Good girl gets electroshock

Chapter 2: Big parent is watching you

Chapter 3: Bullying and the act of viewing

Chapter 4: (Self)mediating self-harm

Chapter 5: Reclaiming Sami identity: Of blood and genes

Chapter 6: Panic and migration

Conclusion: Exposing vulnerability: A call to responsiveness

References

Filmography

Index

Sujets

• Cinéma
• Cinéma
• Cinéma
• Cinema
• Film
• ART
• Cultural Studies
• Documentary film
• History of film
• Media studies
• Video
• Film director
• Película fotográfica

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 15 juillet 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781789380347
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2019 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2019 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2019 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library.
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas
Cover image: Painted by Khosrow Jamali
Production manager: Amy Rollason
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978–1–78320–988–0
ePDF ISBN: 978–1–78938–034–7
ePub ISBN: 978–1–78938–033–0
Printed and bound by 4edge, UK.
This is a peer-reviewed publication.
Contents

Preface
Introduction: Women, vulnerability and first person filmmaking
Chapter 1: Good girl gets electroshock
Chapter 2: Big parent is watching you
Chapter 3: Bullying and the act of viewing
Chapter 4: (Self)mediating self-harm
Chapter 5: Reclaiming Sami identity: Of blood and genes
Chapter 6: Panic and migration
Conclusion: Exposing vulnerability: A call to responsiveness
References
Filmography
Index
Preface

For several years now, I have been interested in the affective investments afforded by contemporary Nordic cinema, particularly Norwegian fiction film. As a Scandinavian scholar with an education background from Romania and the United States, I have been immediately drawn to grand, cathartic emotions like compassion, the love of nation, melancholia and nostalgia. Men, both in front and behind the camera, have populated my explorations, and concepts like masculinity and fatherhood have been central to my work. 2014 marked a shift in my research. I saw a film at the Bergen International Film Festival that shook me in ways that few other Norwegian films had done before: Solveig Melkeraaen’s Flink pike ( Good Girl ), in which the director films her own struggle with severe depression. Good Girl troubled me and made me react viscerally, a response I also document in Chapter 1 of this book. During the public screening, I felt confused, vulnerable, even frustrated and wanted to exit the cinema hall as soon as possible. I am glad I did not. Instead I dwelled in that uncomfortable feeling which stayed with me long after I left the cinema hall, and which, at the time, I could not make much sense of. I started to work on an article about the film and dissect the ‘ugly feelings’ engendered by this film experience, to use a term coined by the American cultural theorist Sianne Ngai (2005). I also realized that Melkeraaen was only one of several other Nordic women filmmakers who stepped up in front of the camera in the 2000s to stage their own vulnerabilities for a larger audience. I watched these women’s films again and again, in deep fascination, but also with dread. These films hit me in the gut and tested my limits (visceral, political, ethical). Film by film, one form of vulnerability after another, Exposing Vulnerability grew as a book.
The book project also came along at a time when my life took significant turns. After fifteen years of academic training in Scandinavian studies in Romania, Norway, Sweden and the United States, I got a permanent position as an Associate Professor at the University of Agder in Norway. Once again, I packed my things and moved from the Norwegian capital city of Oslo, where I was living at the time, to Kristiansand, a much smaller town situated 320 km southwest from Oslo. I left behind my friends and my now husband, boyfriend at the time, and committed to commute between the two places. This volatile living situation left aside, I loved my new job, the challenges and opportunities it provided.
Particularly in the beginning, I felt much more ‘exposed’ in Kristiansand. I will never forget the encounter I had with a little boy in the suburb where I first lived, and who, one day, ran after me eager for interaction. In dialect, he wondered where I worked, and when I answered I was teaching at the university, he put a sly smile on his face and said: ‘You don’t do that. I know you are a cleaning woman’. I said nothing, went inside the house and instantly burst into tears. It was not the comparison to a cleaning woman that upset me. To make ends meet as a student, I had taken cleaning jobs before. What bothered me was how deterministic and charged my Eastern European look became in the eyes of this little boy. While I brushed off this incident quite quickly, that feeling of vulnerable exposure has come back to me time and again while working on this book. Although I clearly realize that the women filmmakers’ struggles documented in this book are certainly not mine, I am deeply grateful for the ways in which their films have given me the opportunity to work through my own vulnerabilities, as a woman in her late thirties, an only daughter (living abroad), a wife (working 320 km away from home) and a scholar interested in affect.
In my work with Exposing Vulnerability , I have received invaluable support. It is an impossible task to list everyone who has contributed to this project, yet I want to name those to whom I am most indebted. Anca Lungu, Elisabeth Oxfeldt, Julianne Yang, Per Thomas Andersen and Unni Langås read early drafts of the book proposal and provided constructive feedback that helped me frame the project. Gunnar Iversen was a close interlocutor during the last year of writing and read drafts of several chapters, for which I am deeply grateful. Thank you to Ralitsa Lazarova, who has read through versions of the manuscript and whose erudition and critical eye have strengthened my arguments and the legibility of this book. I want to express appreciation to my colleagues in the Research Group in Ethics and Trauma Fictions in Contemporary Culture at the University in Agder, who commented on various sections of this book. The film librarians from the National Library of Norway, Birgit Stenseth, Randi Østvold and Laila Johns, have helped me gather my corpus and obtain the necessary information from the film archives. I thank them for their support and enthusiasm for the project. I have also presented early versions of this work at conferences, annual meetings of professional organizations and seminars, including the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Studies, the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies, Sami Film Cultures organized by the National Library of Norway and the Centre for Norwegian Studies Abroad (SNU) at the University of Agder. At these venues, I have met known and unknown faces whose comments have been perceptive and have inspired me to continue my work.
I must also acknowledge my undergraduate and graduate students, who gave me the opportunity to test my ideas on a young generation for whom self-mediation is daily routine. MA student Mariell Johnson performed minute work when proofreading and formatting the reference and filmography lists as I prepared the manuscript for the peer review process. I also want to express my appreciation to Ph.D. student Bjørn David Dolmen from the Department of Popular Music at the University of Agder, who assisted me in decoding the music in the scenes from Idas dagbok ( Ida’s Diary ) (Hanssen, 2014).
I am indebted to the National Library of Norway and Tore Dybing Myklebust, filmmakers Yvonne Thomassen and Ellen-Astri Lundby, production houses Medieoperatørene AS, Fenris Film, French Quarter Film, Indie Film, Nordisk Film Production AB and Memento Film, who have kindly given their permission to use images from the films analysed in this book. Elin Johansen has helped me track down the origins of one of the archival clips used in Min mors hemmelighet ( Suddenly Sami ) (Lundby, 2009). Live Nermoen at the Norwegian Film Institute and Johan Fröberg from the Swedish Film Institute have promptly shared film statistics and helped me access information that was not readily available to the public. I have also received important institutional support from my home university. The Faculty of Humanities and Pedagogy at the University of Agder has provided generous funding for the publishing of the book. The BALANSE initiative has funded a much-needed research period that I used to structure my ideas and write the book proposal.
My close friends have contributed directly and indirectly to this project by stimulating conversations and engaging with vulnerability on so many levels, in so many forms, in inestimable nuances. I will not make a list of all of you. I trust you know who you are and how much I appreciate your friendship. Special thanks to Cecilie Endresen, whose generosity and brilliance has always inspired me to keep on delving into Nordicness despite trials, tribulations or insecurities. To Frida Andreasson, who has checked the accuracy of my translations from the Swedish films and read early versions of Chapter 6. And to Unni Straume, who time and again has provided insights from what it is like to work as a woman director in a male-dominated film sector.
Finally, Exposing Vulnerability is dedicated to my husband Øystein Sassebo Bryhni, whose love, wisdom and boundless patience have been essential in the realization of this book. When most things were in flux, I had you to hold onto, for which I am profoundly indebted.
Introduction

Women, vulnerability and first person filmmaking
I n 2016, the Scandinavian term ‘hygge’ was adopted into the English language. In the British and World English Oxford Dictionary, hygge is defined as ‘a quality of cosiness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being’ and is culturally tied to Denmark, although the concept is also very much a part of the other Scandinavian cultures (Oxford Dictionary). As several book