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4 - Crime Up North: The Case of Norway, Finland and Iceland
- from PART II - CRIME AND DETECTIVE NARRATIVES
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- By Björn Ægir Norðfjörð, Associate Professor and Director of Film Studies at the University of Iceland
- Edited by Tommy Gustafsson, Pietari Kääpä
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- Book:
- Nordic Genre Film
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 25 October 2017
- Print publication:
- 15 May 2015, pp 61-75
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Summary
Although the great local and global interest in Nordic noir bears witness to a remarkable change in the national cinemas of the Nordic countries, certain things remain the same: Norway, Finland and Iceland are overshadowed by Denmark and Sweden. With its roots in the police procedurals of writer-couple Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, a form later revitalised by Henning Mankell, not to mention the unparalleled success of Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy (a police procedural in journalism ‘disguise’), Sweden was and remains the centre of Scandinavian crime fiction. Recently, however, Danish crime films and television series, including the influential police procedural The Killing (Forbrydelsen, Soren Sveistrup, 2007–12), have given adaptations of said Swedish crime series good competition for the primacy of Nordic noir. The Bridge (Broen|Bron, Hans Rosenfeldt, 2011–) could be said to consolidate their mutual supremacy as Danish and Swedish police officers (and television producers) join hands when a body is found exactly halfway across the Oresund bridge connecting the two countries – leaving the other Nordic countries watching from a distance. Norway, Finland and Iceland have, however, not remained out of it altogether and on occasion managed to grab the spotlight, as evidenced by films such as Jar City (Mýrin, Baltasar Kormakur, 2006) and Headhunters (Hodejegerne, Morten Tyldum, 2011), the latter based on a novel by the Norwegian Jo Nesbo (2011) – arguably Larsson's heir to the Scandinavian crime fiction crown.
As these opening remarks suggest, it is impossible to discuss contemporary Nordic crime cinema and television without taking into account the ties to its literary counterpart – notably most of the films discussed in this chapter are adaptations. One of the benefits of the increasingly popular label Nordic Noir – English home video distributor Arrow Films even offers T-shirts marked thus for sale – is that it is not medium specific and perhaps even emphasises film due to its film noir connotations while ‘fiction’ (as in Scandinavian crime fiction) is conventionally limited to literature. Nordic noir is indeed a constellation of texts stemming from novels, television and cinema, tied together in various and often blurred ways. The coinage is, however, somewhat misleading.
12 - Hollywood Does Iceland: Authenticity, Genericity and the Picturesque
- from PART II - HOLLYWOOD HEGEMONY
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- By Björn Norðfjörð, University of Iceland
- Edited by Anna Westerstahl Stenport, Associate Professor of Scandinavian Studies and Media and Cinema Studies, and Director of the European Union Center, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Scott MacKenzie, Queen's University, Canada
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- Book:
- Films on Ice
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 05 September 2016
- Print publication:
- 02 December 2014, pp 176-186
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Summary
PROLOGUE
We approach Iceland from above, glimpsing it through the clouds. Steam rises from the barren landscape, draped mostly in black and grey, if not altogether devoid of green. Perpendicular overhead shots form abstract patterns out of the landscape, and the introduction of ice prompts new colour combinations. As we travel over the land through smooth camera movements, lakes and rivers enhance the spectacle before we finally arrive at the powerful and majestic waterfall Dettifoss. One might be inclined to believe that one was watching a tourist promotion of Iceland – albeit an unusually expansive and breathtaking one. But as we travel upstream towards the waterfall from below – lo and behold, a spaceship hovers over it. And walking towards the cliff's edge is an alien in the form of a mythical creature about to give life to humanity.
Most viewers of Ridley Scott's Prometheus (2012) do not see Iceland in the film's prologue, but prehistoric Earth, a landscape signifying universality rather than a specific place. The film's opening exemplifies a particular quality of Icelandic landscape that allows it to stand in for other places, imaginary or real. Nonetheless, Prometheus has much in common with a long tradition of depicting Iceland as an alien and wild location. Steaming geysers, harrowing mountains and icy glaciers prevail over culture and habitat, as few travel to Iceland in search of buildings or other monuments. This otherworldliness helps explain the smooth transition of the Icelandic landscape to Hollywood's fan tastical mise-en-sc ène, in not only Prometheus but numerous recent runaway productions (using offshore location filming for economic and/or scenic reasons).
Although the role of Iceland can vary considerably, it is typically limited to a specific part or scenes in the completed films, and most often stands in for other places. Its nature as a stand-in complicates assumptions of, for example, landscape theory and criticism, in which a picture (painted, photographed or filmed) is usually understood to be a representation of the particular model/ landscape painted or captured. Ecocriticism makes comparable assumptions regarding the relations of location or environment to their filmic representation, although environmental issues are certainly central to runaway productions.
2 - Iceland
- from Part One - Europe
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- By Björn Norðfjörð, University of Iceland
- Edited by Mette Hjort, Lingnan University, Hong Kong, Duncan Petrie, University of York
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- Book:
- The Cinema of Small Nations
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 05 August 2013
- Print publication:
- 21 November 2007, pp 43-59
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Summary
The anti-hero of the novel 101 Reykjavik travels around the world by browsing the World Wide Web and flipping through his satellite television channels without ever leaving downtown Reykjavik:
I watch the Pakistani news, mainly to see if they've included Iceland on their world map. The anchor is a ball of hair: hair all over Europe and Greenland. I wait for him to bend his head a little. Iceland isn't there. That's the deal with Iceland. Iceland is the kind of country that sometimes is there and sometimes isn't.
(Helgason 2002: 138)And very much like the country itself, Icelandic cinema is the kind of national cinema that is sometimes there and sometimes is not.
In the voluminous Oxford History of World Cinema not a single Icelandic film is mentioned (Nowell-Smith 1996). Nordic National Cinemas has a very brief chapter on Icelandic cinema (Soila et al. 1998). However, call it Scandinavian instead of Nordic and you can leave Iceland out of the equation, as in The Cinema of Scandinavia(Soila 2005), but then Peter Cowie (1992) includes the country in his study of Scandinavian Cinema.In Cinema TodayEdward Buscombe ends his chapter on Western European cinema with Iceland: ‘It seems appropriate to conclude with one of Europe's smallest nations. In an age of globalization it is heartening to find that such countries accord so important a place to national cinema’ (Buscombe 2003: 333). And in this very volume Iceland is represented as one of the world's smallest national cinemas - one where the local and the global meet face to face.