Ecology and Contemporary Nordic Cinemas

From Nation-building to Ecocosmopolitanism

Pietari Kääpä

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781623569143
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica cinematográficas

Ecology and Contemporary Nordic Cinemas uses a range of analytical approaches to interrogate how the traditional socio-political rhetoric of national cinema can be rethought through ecosystemic concerns, by exploring a range of Nordic films as national and transnational, regional and local texts--all with significant global implications. By synergizing transnational theories with ecological approaches, the study considers the planetary implications of nation-based cultural production.

1

National Cinema as Natural Cinema?

The interconnections between nation and nature are a pervasive concern for several areas of film studies. Many, if not all, central works on national cinema (see Higson 2003; Galt 2006) suggest that the landscape forms an important iconographic and affective element in consolidating nationhood. Heritage culture, narratives of rural life, parallels about man and nature, and cinematic explorations of the national character draw on the landscape for their impact. Whether we are discussing British or Italian cinema, these depictions are wide-ranging and span genre, historical context, industrial mode of production and status in culture. Traditionally, such a relationship has been conceptualized from a human-centric perspective where the natural environment functions as an integral element in the construction of the national imaginary – nature is conceptualized as a mirror for the ‘national mentality’.

The connections between nation and nature proliferate in studies of Nordic literature with authors covering these interconnections from a variety of angles. These take on a range of ecophilosophical concerns, from conceptualizing the role of the natural environment as a cultural signifier in art and literature (Neijmann 2006; Zuck 2008, and a range of other similar collections) to ‘being’ in nature by blurring the boundaries between the human and the natural (Brummer and Ellenius 1997). Others have taken a more art history perspective on the correlation between nature and culture (Oslund and Cronon 2011), while some combine the history of ‘realism’ in Scandinavian literature with interrogations of its basis in environmental factors (Garton and Robinson 2002). Surprisingly, studies of Scandinavian or Nordic film culture are lacking in more critical explorations of the correlation between nature and culture, even if several studies of national cinema emphasize the constitutive role of nature in national narration (see Bondebjerg, Andersen and Schlepelern 1997 for Danish perspectives; Hedling and Wallengren 2006 for Swedish; Von Bagh 2000 for Finnish; Iversen and Solum 2010 for Norwegian; Nordfjörd 2010a for Icelandic).

As many of these studies confirm, the narrative and visual potential of nature provides an easy shorthand for consolidating the sense of authenticity and belonging that is a prerequisite for national communality. Nordfjörd’s recent study of Icelandic cinema, for example, discusses the ways nature has performed a central role in Icelandic arts and literature (Nordfjörd 2010b). This is based on connecting nature to the national imagination with classics of national culture such as the poems of Jonas Hallgrimsson and paintings of Johannes Kjarval. These Icelanders are not alone by any means as similar ideas proliferate in the other Nordic countries. The nineteenth-century Fennomans in Finland used similar means to consolidate a sense of national identity against imperial domination, combining ‘private enterprise and nature-worship with primitive patriotism’ (Soila 1998: 44). Contemporary examples are plentiful in, for example, Gunnar Iversen’s discussion of the role of landscape and the rural environment in fostering Norwegian cinema as ‘a cinema of opposition’ in relation to Hollywood (Soila, Söderberg-Widding and Iversen 1998: 102). While nature, even here, is conceptualized as providing origins for national narratives, its role is ultimately a secondary one to socio-political idioms. The stance of analysis is justified to a large extent as the texts discussed have continued the project instigated by art and literature in fostering connections between nation and nature. But from an ecocritical standpoint, these academic evocations continue to play a convergent role that consolidates human dominance over the natural environment, an approach that takes the use of the environment as a given.

I will address this issue in more depth throughout this chapter, but for now, I focus on the changes that ecological rhetoric has had to undergo through the history of Nordic cinema. Interestingly, these changes often mirror one another in different contexts as is evident from the chapters in Nordic National Cinemas. While contextual variations occur, of course, the film histories of the Nordic nations all share a focus on distinctions between the city and the countryside, which forms an integral part of their depiction of national mentality (see Sundholm et al. 2012 for concise but informative overviews of these national film histories). At least up until the 1950s, the rural countryside was an idyllic authentic space of identity in most of the Nordic film cultures (Sihvonen 2000). In comparison, the city was a place of corruption, a notion that in ecocritical terms, could be connected to humanity’s disconnection from nature, but was often considered more as a societal idea – a modernist space of turbulence and transition.

Continuing the ways Ingmar Bergman’s films, for example, have featured different roles for nature as a setting and mirror for societal conformism and inner turbulence (see Michaels 2000 or Wood 2012 for readings of this kind) experimental art film production has maintained a diverse, often contradictory approach to narrating the nation through nature. As the economic and industrial infrastructures of Nordic societies underwent considerable changes in the 1950s and 60s, depictions of the countryside had to adapt to the changing conditions. For example, the 1960s saw the emergence of New Wave film-making in most of the Nordic countries (see Toiviainen 1975 and Qvist and Von Bagh 2000). Many of these films depicted urban realities and the disappearance of traditional agrarian cultures. But even in these more urbanized depictions, the natural environment plays a central role. Key films of the era such as Risto Jarva’s Yhden miehen sota/One Man’s War (1973) feature protagonists who have to move from their agricultural communities to the big city in search of a better life. Agriculture cannot provide income in these turbulent times, and Jarva’s film opens with shots of the emptying countryside as the inhabitants move to the cities or to the neighbouring countries in search of work. Meanwhile, the hymn Kallis Suomenmaa (Precious Finland) plays as an ironic contrapuntal commentary on these transformations. The houses and barns that used to host the nation’s economic future are now only rotten reminders of something that once was and which has now invariably disappeared.

Such depictions of the transforming infrastructures of the Nordic countries are also found in diverse forms in, for example, the Swedish Dom kallar oss mods/They Call Us Misfits (Jarl 1968) or Norwegian Streik!/Strike! (Tuhus 1974). In contrast to these depictions, Iceland’s film industry has proceeded at a different pace from the rest of the Nordic countries as significant productions were only mounted in the early 1980s when, for example, historical tales known as the sagas provided material for the Viking films directed by Hrafn Gunnlaugsson. As Bjørn Sørensen suggests in his overview of Gunnlaugsson’s work, nature plays a central role here, providing ‘rough saga realism’ as well as impressions of the ‘dirty outskirts of civilisation’ which provides the trilogy with their Icelandic quality (Sørensen 2005: 354). The New Wave films and the Icelandic saga adaptations share the grittiness of their imagery, which provides a distinct alternative to the more glamourized landscape evocations of earlier periods.

While the saga adaptations use nature as a sign of authenticity, and the New Wave films to criticize the contemporary state of the nation, nature is not much more than a signifier of societal organization here. This sort of appropriation of nature for nation-building purposes delineates nature as the property of the nation-people, as a material asset that belongs to the human part of the ecosystem. Such appropriations continue to the present day though the exact role of nature in the national imaginary changes according to the context. While the urban and rural operate as two distinct poles in the national imagination (Sihvonen 2000), the status of landscape as a signifier of authenticity increased in importance in the postmodernist shallowness of the 1990s. For example, it plays this role in the films of Finnish director Markku Pölönen, including Kivenpyörittäjän kylä/The Last Wedding (1995). This example of the heritage film focuses on the homecoming of Finns who relocated to Sweden during the earlier decades. As I have suggested elsewhere (Kääpä 2010b), the film is a response to Finland’s concurrent EU accession in 1995, as it glamourizes Finnish ways of life, with nature especially emerging as a space of authenticity that provides an antidote to the preoccupations and simulacra of urban dispersion.

The ideological structures of the rural utopia

The heritage mode operates in a wide variety of ways in contemporary Nordic cinema, enabling diverse strategies for appropriation of nature. For example, a frequent trope in Nordic film culture concerns narratives that feature urbanized characters who are often explicitly forced to relocate to the rural parts of the country. These narratives can involve a protagonist who has deep roots in the countryside returning to his familiar turf such as is the case with many of Pölönen’s films. Or alternatively, the narrative can centre on a ‘city slicker’ who finds their real identity in the authenticity of the rural life in contrast to the superficiality of the city. Such narratives are by no means unique to the Nordic countries but prevail in most film cultures, as exemplified by anything from Sullivan’s Travels (Sturges 1941) to Wo de fu qin mu qin/The Road Home (Yimou 2000). But what makes them relevant for our purposes is the ways these narratives are constructed around the city–countryside parallel in an effort to create populist tales to appeal to domestic audiences, and also continue the association of conservative politics with nostalgia.

As was the case with Pölönen’s The Last Wedding, these narratives often have a contemporary cultural political motivation, such as the Finnish EU referendum generating much discussion during the production of Pölönen’s film. While Sweden has been part of the EU since 1994, a vote for adopting the euro as Sweden’s currency was held in 2003 with an outcome that rejected the currency. While perhaps not directly related, the Swedish rural urban romantic comedy Grabben I Graven Bredvid/The Guy from the Grave Next Door (Sundvall 2003) touches on many themes that played key roles in the vote. The story of farmer Benny and the cultured librarian Desiree is a good example of the ways film productions caricature the oppositions between the city and the countryside. For example, she likes all the trappings of convenient modernity while he is obsessed with dungheaps and milking cows. His opinionated and outspoken manner clashes with her ‘civilized’ friends as much as the crudeness of his ‘country bumpkin’ friends infuriates her. Similar modes of stereotyping are also evident in other parts of the film’s narrative. Göran, Desiree’s ex husband, was a biologist who was into t’ai chi and vegetarianism, the de facto indicators of a liberal green worldview, it seems. His habits and ecological choices are frequently recalled in a humorous manner and he even died while cycling, with his head ‘squashed like a watermelon in his helmet’. All of his green choices are shown to be superfluous and lacking in understanding of the realities of natural life. In contrast, the down and dirty rural life of Benny is about hard work and responsibility, not the sort of flippant idealism and pseudo intellectualism that characterizes large parts of Göran’s cultured naturalism.

While much of the narrative in The Guy from the Grave Next Door is based on the opposition between ‘inbred farmers’ and ‘lazy city bums’, as a debating match between the two groups puts it, the film does contain shadings of a more complex understanding of humanity’s relationship with nature. We eventually find out that Benny excelled in school in his youth and could have progressed to a brilliant career in the big city. His decision to be a farmer is not to do with some sort of utopian idealistic nostalgia for more earthly ways, but about continuing his family line. In this way, the film seems to acknowledge the socio-economic realities of contemporary Sweden. Valorizing the rural heartlands as the true calling of the Swede is complemented by Desiree’s character development. Her intention to move to Stockholm caricatures the intellectual as a transient being, whereas rural communities are seen as loyal and reliable and essential for the maintenance of a well functioning welfare society.

Desiree chooses life with Benny, creating an impression that eases the viewer into accepting the appealing fairytale narrative of the conservative authenticity of agrarian life. Emphasizing sustainable farming by depicting its daily realities is certainly commendable, but when these realities are foregrounded for simplistic anti-intellectualist arguments premised on the binary division of the city and the country, their roots as populist rhetorical tools come to the forefront, suggesting the ways such conservative forms of identity politics work in revitalizing national narratives. By incorporating more contemporaneous ironic ideas about authentic living, The Guy in the Grave Next Door may seem a progressively ‘green’ narrative about the contemporary relationship between the urban and the rural aspects of Sweden. But its conservative politics and its prioritization of anti-intellectual ecological activity reveals it to be not so much a hybridized narrative, but instead, more a form of neo-heritage nature appropriation akin to the films criticized by Higson et al. And it is precisely through an ecocritical angle that these sorts of heritage politics are shown to be more conservative than their more surface-based revisionism would indicate.

While The Guy from the Grave Next Door reinforces conservative paradigms in nation-building, other productions such as the Norwegian anthology film Folk flest bor I Kina/In China They Eat Dogs (2000) deconstruct such modes of nature appropriation. This anthology tale provides several interconnected segments that focus on allegorical explorations of the different political party agendas in Norway. Framed by a narrative set at a Statsoil gas station (owned in part by the Norwegian state), the film inspects the ideological premises of the main Norwegian parties through symbolic narratives. Rees (2006) suggests that the episode focusing on the depiction of the Centre Party unravels the ways nature is used in creating political narratives. As the urbanite protagonist Marion journeys to rural Norway, the film shows us the flipside of the Centre Party’s traditionalist ideology which characterizes rural life through ‘an absurd loss of consciousness and contact with reality, a journey into an appealing but impossible fairytale land’ (Rees 2006: 102). Instead of discovering the authenticity promised by the glamourized media spectacle of the rural north, the reality for Marion is revealed to be much more dirty as the local farmers speak in different dialects and the traditional customs collide with the liberal urbanite perspective.

As Rees suggests, this depiction is closely connected with debates over Norway’s accession to the EU. A controversial mode of political and economic integration across the Nordic region, the early 1990s saw Denmark, Sweden and Finland join the EU (though Sweden and Denmark retained many key exceptions, including their own currency) (see Dosenrode and Halkier 2004 for more on the political and cultural machinations behind the accession). A public referendum in Norway consolidated the decision to opt out of the Union, a decision that provides the general context for this segment of In China They Eat Dogs. Agricultural subsidies and import regulations were an issue of central concern in many of the national debates across the Nordic region, and in the Norwegian context, the Centre Party relied on its anti-EU propaganda in the 1994 EU accession vote and effectively mobilized the discourse of rural authenticity in its attempts to appeal to voters. This segment of the film takes a critical look at these discourses, showing that the differences between urban representations and the reality of rural life are often considerable. Indeed, the film emphasizes this lack of understanding of the ‘other’ (that is, rural Norway from an urban perspective) by persistently foregrounding an idealized image of rural life, which is simultaneously undercut by the inability of the urban and the rural folk to communicate on a similar level.

Cinema and the appropriated landscape

The evocation of rural utopia in films like The Guy from the Grave Next Door and The Last Wedding are premised on showing the agrarian countryside, especially its farmland landscapes, in an idyllic light. Here, nature functions as part of the heritage aspirations of the film, where it occupies two distinct roles, as a suturing device to undo problems inherent in any conceptualization of the national collective, or as the locus for debating these schisms. In fact, it is not surprising that in the film In China They Eat Dogs the glamourized impression of nature is the first idea unravelled. These ideas have been discussed by Higson among others, for whom the cultural role of landscape and natural iconography are significant areas for debating, for example, class politics and culture. In the sorts of narratives discussed here, nature has few other roles besides acting as cultural capital or a signifier of authenticity, providing films with their aura of historicity and traditionalism. The natural properties of the landscape are specifically problematic when it functions as spectacle, as a visually pleasurable lure to the spectator’s eye often used to consolidate class and gender hegemonies (Higson 1984: 3).

While the role of landscape in cinema is invariably diverse (for example, In China They Eat Dogs or even the Sigur Ros music documentary Heima, 2007, could be interpreted in multiple ways), the heritage genre arguably appropriates nature for conservative politics, which is certainly a criticism that could be directed at Markku Pölönen’s films. American folklorist Thomas DuBois (2005) certainly agrees with this as he suggests Pölönen’s logger film Kuningasjätkä/Summer by the River (1997) revisions the central role of the logger in Finnish culture. He discusses the log-rolling genre as a particular example of nature-based Finnish cinema, which draws on discourses of not only national mentality and culture but also the socio-economic situation that saw logging operate as a fundamental part of the nation’s infrastructure in the early twentieth century. The film draws on traditional iconography and themes central to the genre in very conscious ways as it seeks to become more relevant for urban audiences who may not share a tangible, lived connection with the world the film shows. By focusing on the sometimes harrowing experiences of a widowed father working as a logger in 1950s Finland, the film repurposes the heroic (or alternatively dangerous) logger for a more sensitive era, updating it to a more ‘relevant’ status.

Narrating social convalescence through nature requires, at least in this case, a convergent take on nature narration, a mode that explicitly utilizes natural iconography for the purposes of conducting its argumentation. Embodying this resonance, the film is brimming with nostalgia, highlighted by numerous scenes showing nature in glamorous ways, in scenes where its role is to facilitate this nostalgic connection with audiences (such as the protagonist learning to shoot the rapids or engaging in some summer love at an outdoor dance). Through this, the film establishes a continuum that reconciles the traditional image of the tough logger with the caring emasculated male of the 1990s, providing a consolation where the ‘soft Finnish man of the 1990s is not a perversion but a continuation of the man of the past’ (Dubois 2005: 244). Reasserting a conservative form of gender politics the film positions its rhetoric firmly as part of the wider cycle of Nordic heritage films of the 1990s (Nestingen 2008), enabling them to be interpreted as reactions against globalization and geopolitical pro-cesses such as Finland’s accession to the EU in 1995. That these types of films proved to be enormously successful at least in Sweden and Finland during the late 1990s and early 2000s suggests...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Topics and Issues in National Cinema
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 National Cinema as Natural Cinema?
• 2 Ecovariations of Genre Film
• 3 The Horror Film in an Ecological Context
• 4 Education or Indoctrination: Children’s Cinema
• 5 Urban Ecologies of the Nordic Welfare State
• 6 Brownfields of Late Capitalism
• 7 Intercultural Approaches to Ecocinema
• 8 Ecopolitics of Multicultural and Minority Cinemas
• 9 Responsibility and the Nordic Model
• 10 Eco-cosmopolitan Urges and Documentary Film
• 11 Representing the End Times
• Openings and Conclusions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright