Intellect is thrilled to announce the new issue of Journal of Scandinavian Cinema 6.2 is now available.

 

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This Special Issue focuses on contemporary Scandinavian documentary cinema. Guest Editors Ilona Hongisto and Malin Wahlberg present a collection of contemporary scholarship that illuminates Scandinavian documentary cinema through meticulous case studies, while also addressing the broader notions of belonging, identity and, ‘Scandinavia’ in relation to film production, distribution and the politics of media practice and cultural memory.

 

Articles in the issue include (partial list):

 

Can catalogues be dangerous? The anti-catalogue of FilmCentrum

Authors: Stefan Ramstedt

Page Start: 101

 

This article offers a survey of the film distribution of FilmCentrum during the first years of the organization. Like the catalogues of other film cooperatives that were working with distribution, FilmCentrum’s was open, which meant that the organization accepted all submitted films. This openness is discussed at length, both in terms of the discourses around it and the controversies that it aroused, but also as a form of democratization of the film distribution. The notion of the open catalogue is also put into the context of a larger counter-cultural movement and connected to the notion of the anti-catalogue. The film distribution of FilmCentrum is also placed in the context of the history of Swedish cinema.

 

Contemporary experimental feminist Sámi documentary: The first person politics of Liselotte Wajstedt and Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers

Authors: Scott MacKenzie and Anna Westerståhl Stenport

Page Start: 169

 

This article examines two experimental documentary feminist Sámi films by Liselotte Wajstedt and Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers. Their works deploy experimental techniques such as cell and computer animation, time-lapse photography and superimposition, along with autobiographical voice-overs, thereby challenging many dominant tropes of Sámi filmmaking, including the preponderance of realism and cultural revivalist narratives. Through ‘first person’ filmmaking, Wajstedt’s Sami Daughter Yoik (2007) and Tailfeathers’ Rebel (2014) and Colonial Gaze Sámi Artists’ Collective (co-directed with Nango, 2012) explore the hybridity of identity, trauma, cultural memory and the status of documentary films as artistic practice. The films are situated within larger recent developments in Sámi filmmaking, including initiatives by the International Sámi Film Institute. This article reframes the perimeters of both Sámi and Scandinavian documentary filmmaking in the twenty-first century.

 

Expanded epistemologies: Animation meets live action in contemporary Swedish documentary film

Authors: Johnathan Rozenkrantz

Page Start: 189

 

This short subject studies configurations of animation and live action in contemporary Swedish documentary film. While digitization has challenged the indexical image’s verifying function, animation has been elevated to the level of legitimate document. The epistemological boundaries of documentary film have consequently been expanded, and now include the inner worlds of social subjects. In Gömd (Hidden) (Heilborn and Aronowitsch, 2002), animation and live action are repeatedly juxtaposed in order to visualize a refugee child’s experienced Otherness. In Still Born (Sandzén, 2014), ultrasound footage is fused with digital film and animation to manifest the merging perspectives of a mourning mother and her aborted child.

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