Ecology and Contemporary Nordic Cinemas: From Nation-building to Ecocosmopolitanism 9781441192790, 9781628929959, 9781441143211

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Introduction
The framework for ecocinema
Defining ecocinema
Cinema and its ecological potential
Resource practices and cultural conceptions of nature in the Nordic countries
Environmental films and Nordic nation-building
Transnational ecocinema in the global North
Ecocriticism and the Nordic film cultures
Transnational as a challenge to the anthropocentric nation: Eco-cosmopolitanism
From the transnational to the transvergent
Transvergent approaches to anthropocentricism
Organization of the book
The relevance of Nordic ecocinema
1 National Cinema as Natural Cinema?
The ideological structures of the rural utopia
Cinema and the appropriated landscape
‘Natured gender’
The natural male caricature in Shooting the Sun
The sensitive male as a natural phenomenon
Gender and the limitations of the anthropocentric worldview
Ecofeminist perspectives
The anthropocentric gaze and heritage: Eternal Moments
The anthropocentric gaze and beyond
Gender, national identity, narrativity and nature
2 Ecovariations of Genre Film
The Nordic deer western
Denaturalizing nation-buildingand masculine identity
Revisionist masculinity and the natural mirror
Towards an ecocritical approach: North
Conclusions
3 The Horror Film in an Ecological Context
Norwegian slashers
Open season on anthropocentric logic
Human animals
The Icelandic ecoslasher: Ecotourism and resource management
A divergent take on the ecohorror genre: Dead Snow
Of elves and trolls: Mythical ecomonsters and commercial national cinema
Natural resources for the international markets: Rare Exports
Ecophilosophical understandings of national narratives: Sauna
Ecotopic understandings of human nature relations: Thale
Discrediting the environmentalist ethos through ecohorror: Body of Water
Conclusion: Convergence, divergence and transvergence in ecohorror
4 Education or Indoctrination: Children’s Cinema
Ecoanimation as a transnational practice: The Ugly Duckling and Me and Disco Worms
Animism as a convergent tool: Help, I’m a Fish and Niko – The Way to The Stars
Anthropomorphic objects as narrators of ecocinema
The Magic Crystal and the fallacies of commercial animated ecocinema
Conclusion
5 Urban Ecologies of the Nordic Welfare State
Consumption patterns and the contemporary Nordic malfare society
Well-being and human ecology
Roy Andersson’s cinematic suspension
The man without a natural past
Global Iceland and ecosystemic rehabilitation
Conclusion: Human ecology and Nordic ecocinema
6 Brownfields of Late Capitalism
Liminal spaces between the urban and the rural: Jar City
The Pusher trilogy as urban ecocinema
The absence of nature as a nihilistic disconnection: R
From coal to culture power: Nordkraft
The welfare state ecology and remains of the agricultural infrastructure
Brownfields of the welfare state
Towards a dystopian future: Metropia
Conclusion: Urbanity as a transvergent phenomenon
7 Intercultural Approaches to Ecocinema
Interculturalism in the Norden: As If I Wasn’t There
Cultural encounters in natural spaces
Liminal natural space and the road: Bye Bye Bluebird
Intercultural harmony and food consumption
Conclusion: Anthropocentric undercurrents of intercultural encounters
8 Ecopolitics of Multicultural and Minority Cinemas
A hybrid approach to multicultural cinema
Deconstructing naturalization: The case of ‘minority’ cinema
Ecocritical rhetoric in Sámi documentaries
Fictional encounters with a dominant culture: The case of Non Profit
The cinema of the Sámi in an ecological framework
The Kautokeino Rebellion and deprioritizing the ecological
Ethnographic ecodocumentaries
Conclusion
9 Responsibility and the Nordic Model
Nordics abroad
Relating to the world: Mammoth
Nordic exceptionalism
The problems of exceptionalism: After the Wedding
Nordic exceptionalism as a global model
Conlusion: A global perspective on Nordic ecocinema
10 Eco- cosmopolitan Urges and Documentary Film
Critical perspectives on the egodocumentary
Environmental politics on a global scale: Bananas!
Even the word Finland scares us: Transnational documentary and critical perspectives on Nordic responsibility
Taking care of the globe at home: Ecodocumentaries and everyday responsibility
Temporality and the planetary implications of local resource management
Beyond individualism
Rax Rinnekangas and cosmopolitan nodality
Conclusion: The ecodocumentary and Nordic exceptionalism
11 Representing the End Times
Refusing the spectacle of ecocatastrophe: It’s All About Love and running out of objectifications
The human as organic material: Corporeal challenges
Twisting worlds: Transvergent imaginaries in Christoffer Boe’s films
Transvergent approaches to the anthrobiogeomorphic machine
The end of ideology and the apocalyptic ecoimagination
Conclusion
Openings and Conclusions
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Ecology and Contemporary Nordic Cinemas

Topics and Issues in National Cinema VOLUME 2 Ecology and Contemporary Nordic Cinemas Series Editor: Armida de la Garza, University College Cork, Ireland Editorial Board: Mette Hjort, Chair Professor and Head, Visual Studies, Lingnan University, Hong Kong Lúcia Nagib, Centenary Chair in World Cinemas, University of Leeds, UK Chris Berry, Professor of Film and Television Studies and Co-Director of the Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre, UK Sarah Street, Professor of Film and Foundation Chair of Drama, Bristol University, UK Jeanette Hoorn, Professor of Visual Cultures, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne, Australia Shohini Chaudhuri, Director of the Centre for Film Studies, University of Essex, UK Other Titles in the Series: Volume 1: Revolution and Rebellion in Mexican Film

Ecology and Contemporary Nordic Cinemas From Nation-­building to Ecocosmopolitanism Pietari Kääpä

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2014 Paperback edition first published 2015 © Pietari Kääpä 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-Publication Data Kääpä, Pietari, 1977– Ecology and contemporary Nordic cinemas : from nation-building to ecocosmopolitanism / Pietari Kääpä. p. cm. — (Topics and issues in national cinema) ISBN 978-1-4411-9279-0 (hardback) 1. Environmental protection and motion pictures.  2. Ecology in motion pictures.  3. Environmentalism in motion pictures.  4. Motion pictures--Scandinavia—History and criticism.  5. Documentary films—Scandinavia—History and criticism.  I. Title. PN1995.9.E78K33 2014 791.430948—dc23  2013046795 ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-9279-0 PB: 978-1-5013-0860-4 ePub: 978-1-6235-6914-3 ePDF: 978-1-4411-4321-1 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

I would like to thank, first of all, Armida De La Garza, the editor of Issues and Topics in National Cinema. Her guidance and critical feedback have been invaluable throughout the project. The editorial team at Continuum/Bloomsbury has provided sterling support and enabled the timely completion of the project. Finally, I would like to offer my sincerest gratitude to the anonymous peer reviewers whose insightful and pervasive comments were significant for the final shape and flow of my arguments. As ever, this book is dedicated to the one and only Yan.

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

1 27 51 67 89 105 125 147 159 181 193 217 235 241 243 255

Introduction Nature is [. . .] a common source for myths and beliefs all over the world [. . .] but for Scandinavian people and for life in Scandinavia nature has a special meaning. The wilderness and its woods and lakes are in particular regarded as a utopia of abundance and power. It should be noted that within fantasy, nature is almost always a positive element. Occasionally, it may show itself to be dangerous, even in fiction, but that is because it must guard itself against intruders. Soila 1998: 32 The Nordic countries do not only have objectively high levels of ecological modernisation, but are also perceived as leaders in this policy by other countries in the EU and their public is generally aware of their individual responsibility as consumers and citizens. Tunkrova 2008: 27 As comments from cultural historian Tytti Soila and political economist Lucie Tunkrova illustrate, the centrality of nature for Nordic film culture cannot be underestimated. For example, one of the earliest English language academic collections on Nordic cinema, Nordic National Cinemas (Soila, Widding and Iversen 1998), underlines this conception. Its chapters on the film cultures of the region (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden) all discuss the central role nature holds not only as a repository of mythic meaning (as Soila suggests above), but also as a key part in the politics of the Nordic countries. From summits on climate change to debating resource and energy production, from sustainable development policies to enhancing the greening of urban spaces, the Nordic countries maintain leading roles in ecological progress and policy on an increasingly global level. The politics are conducted within individual national contexts, but also increasingly with a regional and global scope in mind. The Nordic countries pride themselves on being global leaders and role models in many areas of environmental activity, often for good reason, but it is also clear that much of the economic and resource

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infrastructure of countries such as Norway and Finland relies on resources such as oil and nuclear power. These contradictions evident not only in environmental policy, but in cultural reflections of this policy are at the centre of this book. The societal relevance of cinema, as both a cultural industrialist form of popular entertainment, and a politicized form of cultural argumentation, positions it as one of the most dynamic areas for interrogating the multiple variations ecological discourse takes in the Nordic context, not only as a region but also as five distinct nation states. While the veracity of ecological arguments in Nordic cinema remains contested, the importance of Nordic films as topics for ecocritical analysis is certain. Thus, any study of cinematic evocations of ecological rhetoric in this context must work on an interdisciplinary level, combining culture with politics, aesthetics with economics. Unravelling the role of environmentalist politics in Nordic film culture necessitates considering national myths and international political movements, anthropocentric forms of cultural production and ‘green’ politics. To understand how these ideas and interdisciplinary frameworks combine in Nordic film culture, a brief overview of key academic explorations combining ecocriticism and film studies follows.

The framework for ecocinema The field of ecocinema – or the ecocritical study of film culture – is a relatively new phenomenon. While studying the relationship between cinema and nature has been a common area of, for example, the field of national cinema studies (with Higson 1984, discussing British heritage cinema and landscape, and Galt 2006, providing a more comparative study of European film cultures). Others study the ways cinematic anthropology works in depicting cultures that are perceived to be closer to nature than the ‘civilized’ industrialized world (examples range from McDougall’s 1998 ethnographic work to Rony’s 1996 dissection of Flaherty’s Nanook of the North, 1922, to a wide range of other examples). While landscape and ethnographic studies are vital areas of film research, they are often focused on a more or less taken-­for-granted approach to the anthropocentric dimensions of cinema. By this I mean that they focus on social or cultural concerns in a way that does not question the centrality of human experience as the ultimate arbiter of knowledge. With the publication of David Ingram’s Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema in 2004 and Pat Brereton’s Hollywood Utopia: Ecology

Introduction

3

and Contemporary American Cinema in 2005, critical studies of cinema’s relationship with the natural world and its environmentalist dimensions have become more established. Ingram and Brereton’s works focused predominantly on Hollywood film culture and made a substantial intervention in studies of cinema and nature by critically interrogating the ways environmentalism is conceptualized by the commercial machinations of the Hollywood industry. These key works on the intersections between Hollywood cinema and ecology attest to the ways cinema has partaken in wider developments in ecocritical thinking as, for example, films like The Omega Man (Sagal 1971) and Soylent Green (Fleischer 1973) reflect debates on the depletion of resources and the limits to growth, seen as integral to concurrent groundbreaking works by Rachel Carson (1972) and Paul Ehrlich (1968).1 Taking a more media studies focused approach to environmental communications, Sean Cubitt’s Ecomedia (2005) and Sidney Dobrin and Sean Morey’s Ecosee (2007) spread out to explore diverse philosophical and material considerations, including the ways media representations interact with the world they represent as well as the material footprint film productions leave on the environment which they represent. While much of this work focuses on mainstream media, experimental film production has received attention from Scott McDonald (2004) as well as articles in Paula Willoquet-Maricondi’s Framing the World (2010). WilloquetMaricondi’s collection expands the scope of existing works, firmly planted in criticism of Western modes of representation by including articles on Japanese cinema, among others. Similar directions are taken by Sheldon Lu and Jiayan Mi and their collection on Chinese ecocinema (2009) provides an important predecessor for this collection as it explores the transnational dimensions of Chinese cinema,2 contributing much to national and ecocinema studies. Finally, Monani, Rust and Cubitt’s Ecocinema Theory and Practice (2012) is a more recent and perhaps the most wide-­ranging of ecocinema collections to date, providing many key interventions in the field as well as consolidating its importance further. It, and many of the other works mentioned above, are explored throughout this work.

Defining ecocinema What exactly is ecocinema, then? Lu and Mi provide a suggestive delineation that conceptualizes it as a critical grid, an interpretative strategy based on questioning the conventional ways in which environmentalism and nature are

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represented in cultural production. Furthermore, it is a description of a conscious film practice among a range of different artists and producers. Ecocinema is thus both a way to study films and an ethical-­environmental approach to the production practices of film texts. According to Mi and Lu, it involves ‘the study of the production and reproduction of life, the relationship between the human body and the ecosystem, and the controlling and administering of the human body in modern capitalist and socialist regimes’ (Lu and Mi 2009: 2). An ‘ecological’ understanding of film culture does not have to thus only concern films that explicitly engage environmentalist politics or work with an aesthetic appreciation of nature. To these ends, we are not focused on compiling a list of what David Ingram (2004) has called environmental films. These are texts that leave room for environmental considerations, but which subjugate any sense of environmentalism to increasing the films’ cultural relevance. In terms of wider policy, environmental rhetoric is central to arguments concerning activities like sustainability drives, green energy production, environmental policy and nature conservation. These are all valuable aspects of providing, at least, a semblance of sense to the contemporary anthropocentric world, where human-­led exploitation of resources and harvesting of the environment form the basic principles of conceptualizing of humanity’s role in the ecosystem. But such environmental perspectives only reconceptualize nature as a resource for human consumption, or as Willoquet-Maricondi (2010) suggests in relation to film studies, environmental films are content with showing nature but do not do much with it beyond establishing human-­centric narrative concerns. Ecological approaches, in contrast, call for a more thorough rethinking of this relationship, including a fundamental reorganization of contemporary political and cultural paradigms. For me, to interpret and work only with such limited environmental evocations serves to strengthen the notion of cinema as part of a wider social project focused on human self-­realization. Rather, what I am interested in is to move the study of these environmental productions to an ecocritical level, and interrogate the relationship between humanity and the natural environment by incorporating critical work from the burgeoning field of ecocinema studies. As scholars in literary ecocriticism repeatedly point out (see Goodbody and Rigby 2011, for some of these perspectives), ecocinema studies must question the role of humanity as an embedded part of the ecosystem and make a distinct clarification between environmentalism and ecocriticism. As media theorist Matthew Fuller suggests, interconnectivity and the breaching of culturally constructed boundaries is an integral part of ecocritical explorations

Introduction

5

of cultural production, an approach that distinguishes itself from more environmentalist concerns: Echoing the differences in life sciences and various Green political movements, ‘environmentalism’ possesses a sustaining vision of the human and wants to make the world safe for it. Such environmentalism also often suggests . . . a state of equilibrium . . . Ecologists focus more on dynamic systems in which any one part is always multiply connected, acting by virtue of these connections and always variable, so that it can be regarded as a pattern rather than simply an object. Fuller 2005: 4

For Finnish sociologist Timo Räikkönen (2011), this is a distinction between an ‘anthropocentric’ and an ‘ecocentric’ worldview. Anthropocentricism indicates a way of thinking that places human experience at the centre of all logic and consideration over other parts of the ecosystem. Such perspectives consider the welfare of the human kind as the key principle for planetary development of interconnected parts of the ecosystem. By contrast, ecocentrism approaches humanity as part of the diversity of the ecosystem, on par with all the other organisms and processes that comprise its complex structures. The concept of ‘the more than human’ world indicates the basic tenet of an ecocentric worldview, where humanity is just one part of a much more complex network of intersecting, inter-­reliant existence. How do such ecocentric perspectives work in cinema then?

Cinema and its ecological potential The fundamental job of eco-­cinema [concerns] retraining of perception, as a way of offering an alternative to conventional media-­spectatorship, or a way of providing something like a garden—an ‘Edenic’ respite from conventional consumerism—from the machine of modern life, as modern life is embodied by the apparatus of media. McDonald 2004: 109 In Toward an Eco-­cinema, Scott McDonald discusses experimental cinema and the challenges it provides viewers. The challenge is of the Brechtian kind as spectators who are confronted with complex cinematic material that forces them to

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think differently and subsequently use this cognitive invigoration for politicized purposes. Chris Tong takes McDonald’s suggestions further as he sees the concept of ecocinema as not only another category of cinema (as has been the impetus in much of ecocritical film studies – see Willoquet-Maricondi 2010), but also a method for engaging with the reading of films. Tong’s argument is an analytical game changer as it frees the analyst from only discussing cinema with clearly pronounced environmentalist goals. This means that we can approach films with no discernible environmental content from an ecocritical perspective and understand them as part of a wider ecosystemic awareness. According to the editors of Ecocinema Theory and Practice, Salma Monani and Stephen Rust, the concept of ecocinema can apply to practically all types of films in as much as they evoke critical responses to humanity’s role in the world around us. They base this assertion on the notion that films show ‘a troubled state of affairs not only in human interactions, but also with the non-­human world. Cinema provides a window into how we imagine this state of affairs, and how we act with or against it’ (Monani, Rust and Cubitt 2012: 3). I agree with this statement as limiting our range of case studies to only those films which already show an environmental conscience would restrict my understanding of the ways cinema engages with the lived world and the planetary ecosystem. Two more articles in Ecocinema Theory and Practice elaborate on this potential. David Ingram investigates the affective and cognitive functions of ecocinema, challenging simplified perceptions concerning the suitable environmentalist content of an ecofilm. For him, ‘the meaning of a film is simply not inherent in the formal elements of the text itself ’ (Ingram 2012: 47), but also in the wide range of uses to which audiences put these texts. This connotes the need to work from the basis of ‘a pluralistic eco-­aesthetic which can find value – cognitive, emotional, and affective – in a wide range of films [. . .] without the need for critical opposition such as that between “eco-­films” and “environmental movies” ’ (Ingram 2012: 58). Andrew Hageman takes this argument further in his discussion of ecocinema and ideology, pointing out that ‘all films are bathed in ideology [. . . which] work through multiple structural levels and layers in any given text’ (Hageman 2012: 64). Simply put, the ecological argumentations of texts can work on multiple levels and include ideological positions that may seem contradictory or even anti-­environmentalist. As even such perspectives contribute to understanding our relationship to the ecosystem, these multiplicities and contradictions allow me to suggest a more complex, yet inclusive definition of ecocinema that enables for the expansion of the scope of my analysis far

Introduction

7

beyond the limitations of certain earlier modes of cinematic ecocriticism. An example will clarify some of these ideas. Dagur Kari’s Icelandic tale Noi Albinoi (2003) has often been read as a particularly striking depiction of the ways the people of Iceland live in close connection with their natural environment (Nordfjörd 2010a). Indeed, teasing out the ecological dimensions of the film is not particularly difficult. Every aspect of the protagonist’s life, Noi, is dictated by his environment. The cold existence of the small town in between a mountainous slope and the unwelcoming sea seems to imprison all the village’s participants. There is very little to do for a creative mind such as Noi’s beyond pointless rebellion and acts of vandalism. Not only do the snow and the bleakness provide crucial character material, they also work symbolically. Iceland’s geographic position in the middle of nowhere in the Atlantic sea, open to the mercies of natural forces, resembles the precarious existence of the village. The people are not only restricted in movements, but also face the constant threat of annihilation. And this is what happens in the end as the film culminates in a catastrophic avalanche that wipes out all of the main cast save for Noi. Nation and the natural environment thus combine in a typically bleak Nordic tale, providing a clear example of the ways nature is harnessed for cultural consumption. This reading of Noi Albinoi could be seen to situate the film in an anthropocentric trajectory, suggesting that the only use value nature holds is as part of a means for human self-­realization. But taking the more explicitly critical stance suggested by Tong et al. enables us to see the ways in which the film, in fact, trains our perception to focus on humanity’s embeddedness in the ecosystem. As Noi stumbles out of his basement hideout at the end of the film, all aspects of Icelandic social organization that the film frequently criticizes, have disappeared. At the end, school politics or the dominance of American culture matter little as all that is left are ruins and snow. The film literally wipes an anthropocentric worldview of the map as it confronts conventional unquestioning appropriations of nature for the use of cultural narratives or identity politics. It is appropriate to call the film’s depiction of nature as expanding beyond the human as humanity is only a part of this ecosystemic framework, and arguably not the most important part. While hardly the type of activist generating ecocinema called for by WilloquetMaricondi, the film is a clear illustration of the ecocritical potential of film production that may not seem particularly environmentalist. Rather than just using the environment as a backdrop to human activity, nature takes on a role that facilitates this activity and controls its survival. By evoking the notion of a

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more than human world, the film works to challenge and retrain our perception of the relationship between humanity and the environment.

Resource practices and cultural conceptions of nature in the Nordic countries These are all central concerns in Nordic film culture and require contextual exploration of the diverse environmental and ecocritical patterns produced in these cultures. Especially relevant here are both domestic and regional environmental policies and the ways these filter into cultural considerations. In her study of environmental policy developments in the Nordic countries, Tunkrova suggests that these countries can rightfully consider themselves global leaders in multiple areas of sustainable thinking. These concern not only environmental activism and governmental policy, but also the levels of public knowledge of issues such as global warming as well as strict policing of organizational and corporate responsibility. Operating as part of the European Union and on global platforms including various climate summits (among them the now infamous Copenhagen Summit in 2009), the Nordic countries have been able to advance environmental policy and sustainability awareness in many key sectors including the adoption of renewable resources and implementation of global standards in energy production. Simultaneously, the spectacular failure of the Copenhagen Summit and the negative press received by several Nordic ‘green’ corporations, such as the wind turbine manufacturer Vestas and foresting company Stora Enso paint a very different picture. Energy consumption and resource sustainability are heavily debated in the Nordic countries with certain forms of energy production – nuclear power in Finland, oil resources in Norway – the topic of controversy and extensive criticism. To counteract this criticism, much discussion, both domestically and internationally, is devoted to the need to lead global developments in sustainable production and consumption with symposia like the ‘Shaping a Low-Carbon World: Lessons from Nordic Countries’ held by the Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) and the Nordic Council at Washington DC in 2010. Keith Clement has outlined the many transformations the environmental policies of the Nordic countries have undergone in the past few decades both in relation to country specific differences as well as on the level of regional policy (Clement 2005: 298–300). The time and level of implementation varies substantially as Denmark,

Introduction

9

for example, incorporated extensive environmen talist policy in the 1990s, while Finland has maintained a central role for the environmentalist agenda since at least the early 1980s. Most importantly, all five Nordic countries have reached a level of uniform consent on the importance of environmental policy by the 2000s, even if differences remain in their implementation. Sweden, for one, takes substantial pride in developing its reputation as a leader in environmental thinking. In 2006, the Environment Secretary Andreas Carlgren described governmental initiatives as follows: ‘By engaging in wide-­ranging collaboration, we can develop Sweden into a leading model for a modern society by using the base of renewable resources to achieve harmony with the Earth’s climatic conditions’ (Carlgren 2006). There is ample evidence that this sustainable activity is having some impact. For example, in 2008, Swedish emissions of carbon dioxide totaled 50.5 million tons, compared with 58.7 million tons in 1998, corroborating suggestions that the environmental budget for 2010–12, which amounts to over SEK  5 billion (US$718 million, EUR 537 million) per year, is being used to considerable effect. Similar ideas prevail in other Nordic countries. For example, Denmark announced new policies on sustainable living and its intention of being free of fossil fuels by 2050. Many of these initiatives are based on the country’s technological investments in wind energy. While Sweden and Denmark have invested substantially in green energy, Finland’s production incentives are increasingly premised on nuclear power production. The decision sets Finland’s environmental resource production at a distinct disadvantage and has received criticism even in cinema (Into Eternity, Madsen 2010 – discussed in Chapter 11 of this work). In contrast, Iceland can provide 80 per cent of the population’s energy consumption from renewable resources such as geothermal and hydropower, which enables it to feature high in environmental rankings. In addition, its geographical isolation has led to projects such as the DeCODE genetics database, known as the Íslendingabók. The genetics data collected by the project has been controversial in Iceland due to its collection of personal information from its citizens. The ability to observe genetic heritage among a limited population sample has provided avenues for tackling many human ailments but it also benefits from the US$200 million in financial ‘support’ from the US drugs company Hoffmann – La Roche. The project is a good example of the various interests, especially those of multinational capital, that underscore the development and implementation of most ecological issues. Similar critiques play out in the other Nordic contexts. Norway announced its intention to go carbon neutral by 2030, advancing an earlier deadline of 2050 by

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twenty years. Critics however question the rationale and feasibility of the plan, especially as the country is heavily indebted to oil and gas for its domestic welfare and economic prosperity. They point out that achieving carbon neutrality will not be feasible on the basis of cutting emissions domestically or imposing substantial restrictions on oil production. Instead, it is heavily reliant on purchasing carbon credits and operating within the means of the United Nations’ environmental accounting policy. This is a typical manoeuvre for affluent Western countries wanting to benefit from the positive connotations of a green image where ‘environmental accounting’ implies a range of operations in both supporting and financing diverse environmental operations in the developing countries while maintaining consumption standards at the home market. To confirm some of these suspicions, the Nordic countries have been ranked in the top twenty countries with the largest ecological footprint (The Footprint Network 2010). The greening of the Nordic countries is by no means a given process but rather a complex, potentially hypocritical form of sustainable development and resource management, involving both greenwashing and contradictory public relations as well as inspiring idealism and resourceful environmentalist activism.

Environmental films and Nordic nation-­building This introduction to Nordic environmental politics makes it clear that nature plays a key role in the contemporary national identity these nations project. Similar correlations function in the cultures of these countries with literature and film often evoking direct correlations between nation and nature. The use of natural myths in canonic texts like the Finnish Kalevala and the Icelandic Norse sagas are still drawn on in arguing for the organic roots and continued existence of their respective nations. Stories and myths in theatre, music, literature and art in Finland, for example, use impressions of expansive forests, wild rapids, wheat fields and lakes to convey Finnish culture and identity (Reunala 1989). Such visual signifiers draw on the impression of authenticity generated by nature, designed to construct a connection with audiences and indicate the national characteristics of a cultural product. Similar ideas are centrally featured in what Mette Hjort has termed the Nordic literary heritage film (Hjort 2003), with pan-Scandinavian examples such as Pelle the Conqueror/Pelle erövraren (August 1988) and I Am Dina (Bornedal

Introduction

11

2002). In Iceland, the reliance on mythical narratives of the sagas in the 1980s by directors such as Hrafn Gunnlaugsson fostered the consolidation of the domestic film industry (see Nordfjörd 2010b for more). Finnish authors including Väinö Linna and Aleksis Kivi, with works like Täällä Pohjantähden alla/Here Under the Northern Star (1959) and Nummisuutarit/The Village Shoemakers (1864), respectively, tie notions of national identity and politics with land ethics and landscape appreciation. Similarly, Danish adaptations of Morten Korch’s novels on rural life, starting from De røde heste/The Red Horses (O’Fredericks and Iversen 1950) and continuing in the 2000s with the Lars von Trier produced television series Morten Korch – Ved stillebækken/Still Brook (Sherfig 2000), centralize the rural landscape. Interestingly, the more traditional uses of ideology and stereotypes in The Red Horses are recontextualized in Trier and Sherfig’s adaptation to convey a sense of stability to its audience, suggesting that the iconography of nature continues to play a key role in Danish cultural politics. The framing of nature thus becomes a part of a larger political project – that is, the cultivation of national identity and culture. While nature appropriation is central to the rhetoric of national cinema, the connection between nature and national identity is not a ‘natural’ one or in any sense economically or environmentally sustainable. By this, I mean that national identity – especially when it comes to nature – is a constructed notion that depends on a range of factors to do with the global economy, geopolitics, trans­ national cultural flow, and domestic consideration. As we will see throughout this book, when nature comes to represent or reflect national identity, this is a thoroughly subjective, context-­specific rhetorical process. Appropriating nature for socio-­political argumentation is a conscious rhetorical direction, and this only becomes taken as fact through persistent repetition. For example, the concept of national landscape reveals how this appropriation takes place and is often premised on cultural political purposes. Finnish-Latvian director Teuvo Tulio’s films are often discussed as attaining a sense of authentic national identity by their pervasive glamorous uses of landscape and rural imagery as cultural signifiers. In an intriguing twist, Fedja (Zelve 2012), a documentary on the director’s life traces this technique to his memories of a childhood spent in the rural areas of Latvia. To emphasize the connection, the film compares and contrasts the ways the Finnish and Latvian landscapes appear almost identical. What have been seen as authentic evocations of Finnish landscape are in fact based on Tulio’s memories of Latvia. The extent to which appropriations of nature play a key role in Nordic cinema has even become a real cultural concern. Birgir Thor

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Ecology and Contemporary Nordic Cinemas

Møller (2005), for example, notes how Icelandic films have been frequently criticized for their excessive reliance on nature has become a cultural problem. In the wake of successful films such as the Oscar nominated Börn náttúrunnar/Children of Nature (Friðriksson 1991), many notable and internationally successful films, according to domestic critics, emphasized an explicitly romanticized and traditional picture of the nation, one that is out of touch with some of its contemporary realities. Such problems are one of the reasons I emphasize a critical take on nationalized nature, and initial steps in this direction will be provided by transnational considerations.

Transnational ecocinema in the global North The environment is a good example of an area in which Nordic co-­operation can contribute to raising the standards of the EU. We are still facing many challenges to keep the Baltic Sea clean. Environmental problems cross borders, and therefore we must seek international solutions. Hedegaard and Enestam, quoted in Tunkrova 2008: 37–38 As many of the policy documents of the Commission of the European Communities (2008) or the European Union (2007) concerning environmental activism state, ecological issues do not remain sequestered within the nation state structure. As corroborated by the above quotation from the Danish and Finnish ministers for environment, Connie Hedegaard and Jan-Erik Enestam, environmental activism has to operate on a regional or transnational level. While nations may function as one of the underlying causes of environmental problems, they also act as one of the most efficient ways to impose environmentalist regulation on harmful and unsustainable activity. But nations are still a conceptual and operational formation that enforces human dominance over resource production and consumption as well as structuring societal attitudes to the environment. To construct a more dynamic and comprehensively ecocritical perspective on the human in the ecosystem, we must rethink the role the anthropocentric nation plays. One way to initiate this sort of interrogation is to work on a regional cultural level. While it may be the case that the Nordic countries do not constitute what esteemed ecocritic Lawrence Buell sees as a unique or uniform bioregion, ‘determined “initially” by “climatology, physiography, animal and plant geography” ’

Introduction

13

(Buell 2005: 83), ‘Nordicity’ is a label and a political action front that can be used to productive effect in wider geopolitical negotiations. Lucie Tunkrova has shown how the Nordic countries have a history of regional co-­operation on environmental policy. Through this, they ‘usefully utilise their coalition potential for pursuing a policy that they consider part of their key national interest’ (Tunkrova 2008: 2). Underlying this assumption is the supposition that the individual countries may be too ‘small’ to evoke interest or have any real impact on policy. To situate this discussion back in the filmic realm, the Nordic film industries comprise what Hjort and Petrie (2007) have called small nation cinemas as they work with restricted means and limited target audiences. Responding to this perceived smallness, Andrew Nestingen’s study (2008) of film and literature of the region makes a succinct and persuasive case for adopting a regional approach. Discussing the long history of regional cultural interaction and ensuing similarities, as well as the political co-­operation and dependency that have enabled this interregional interaction, it is clear that a comparative approach is needed to understand the wider context in which these films operate. Nestingen also makes an important point about how ‘the categories of debate’ – that is, the concerns of each country – share similarities that focus on conflicts between neoliberalism, welfare state ideology, and egalitarianism (Nestingen 2008: 11), yet each country values its difference. Thus, the collation of the countries under a mutual label can be understood as an indicator of their sovereignty and also as a way to indicate a regional model of economic and cultural politics. The choice of a regional comparative approach extends to the titles of many key studies of the region, including collection on economics (Creating Nordic Capitalism) and film (Nordic National Cinemas), the title and the outline of each work evoking regional homogeneity. Simultaneously, each of the nations is allocated its own chapter written by authors from these countries. Transnational approaches that focus on cultural flows and co-­operation between the countries have also become more pervasive in Nordic film studies since the publication of Nestingen and Elkington’s Transnational Cinema in a Global North (2005). The editors of the collection suggest that their work ‘challenges historically the national as a point of departure in the first place, seeking to identify an ongoing transition in Nordic cinema: from national to transnational and global cinema’ (Nestingen and Elkington 2005: 12). While regional togetherness is seen critically by Ib Bondebjerg (2010) and others, a comparative take on interregional differences and similarities evokes a sense of unity in diversity. My work takes this ongoing transition and explores it via the prism of ecocriticism as this

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Ecology and Contemporary Nordic Cinemas

feeds into alternative, emphatically planetary perspectives on the ways these transnational transformations operate in the field of cinema.

Ecocriticism and the Nordic film cultures It is very telling that one of the first ecocritical explorations of Nordic cinema by Claire Thomson (2006) discusses Friðrik Þór Friðriksson’s Cold Fever (1995), a tale of transnational travel and connectivity. By working from a transnational basis, Thomson argues the film questions the embedded meanings of national identity and culture with which the environment of Iceland is often imbued. Drawing on the work of Sarah Whatmore, Thomson suggests that the narrative of the film evokes a hybrid approach to transnational forms of cultural affectivity. The film’s narrative follows Hirata, a Japanese man travelling to Iceland to perform a cultural ritual in the place where his parents died. By immersing the protagonist in the freezing snow and warm fountains, the film shows a hybridizing process that breaks down the anthropocentric borders that fostered his earlier isolation and cultural confusion. By generating new forms of cultural understanding between peoples, the hybrid cartographies of belonging that the film establishes highlight the role that nature can play in facilitating trans­national connectivity. By challenging the primacy of nature as national property, the film provides a first step in, if not necessarily necessitating, then inviting both the film-­ maker and the academic to question the role of nature in national narratives. While the emphasis on transnational understanding still follows anthropocentric logic, its ability to question ingrained forms of human appropriation of nature are important for a more complex understanding of the human in the ecosystem. The chapters of the current work will follow this critical approach, providing both a clear delineation with antecedent scholarship on the Nordic film cultures and enabling the formation of an ecocritical perspective on the rhetoric of Nordic nation-­building. To construct this perspective, I explore many of the key ideological facilitators and methods involved in anthropocentric approaches to nation-­building, including the role of landscape in consolidating nationhood. To emphasize the problematic notion of such actions, I turn to an example of transnational cinema that concretely unravels such argument, the war film Gränsen/The Border (Holm 2011). As Brereton suggests (Brereton 2005), war films are often concerned with nation-­building and frequently use imagery of the human body merging with

Introduction

15

the natural scenery as an ideological tool, connoting the need to sacrifice one’s life for the homeland, the patria. While the genre is prolific in Finland due to the experiences the country went through during the Second World War, a more emphatic transnational perspective emerges in the Swedish led The Border. The focus is on Swedish war efforts in the Second World War with a fictional story focused on a group of soldiers who stray from their post between the Norwegian and Swedish border. Nazi Germany’s occupation of Norway has been a constant threat to Sweden but the country’s neutrality has made them stand back from the war effort. But as the soldiers move into occupied Norway they come face to face with the inhuman side of the Nazis. Ultimately, the particular band of Nazis is defeated by a group consisting of Finns, Swedes and Norwegians, providing an enthusiastically Nordic sense of solidarity against an external threat. This sense of solidarity is consolidated by nature imagery as the boundary between the nations is depicted as only a small razed line running through the forest. The suggestion is clear – there is not much difference between the two countries as the same snowy landscapes proliferate on both sides of the border and the soldiers even complain of its monotony and the ever-­pervasive snow. Cultural affinity between the soldiers further enhances the view of borders as only a formality between the nations. As a film negotiating the parameters of the national and the transnational, the imagery of the border has two purposes. For one, the indication is that national borders have no essentialist or authentic rooting in nature, a notion that challenges the argument that nature provides distinct nations with their characteristics. Secondly, it shows that transcending these barriers can be a way to aspire to a sense of universal humanism and regional solidarity. In contrast to other Nordic war films (such as the Norwegian resistance fighter tale Max Manus, Rønning and Sandberg 2008), The Border does not take nationhood for granted. Nature, instead, comes to evoke a more complex sense of an anthropocentrically organized world of nations, existing as a geopolitical structure and not a natural order. If nation forms the fundamental tenet of an anthropocentric worldview (a view that enforces human society as the pinnacle of evolution), critical approaches that question the role of nation in cinema can function as a move away from taken-­for-granted anthropocentricism. As Ezra and Rowden suggest, the key to transnationalism is the recognition of the impossibility to assign a fixed national identity to much of cinematic production (Ezra and Rowden 2005), something which is especially true for the concept of ecocinema. ‘Nature’ as a pristine untouched idea does not care about human-­made borders unless

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Ecology and Contemporary Nordic Cinemas

these ideas are imposed on it, for example, when natural resources are designated to state or private interests and the ecosystem is subjugated to the anthropocentric logic of property. Indeed, most collections on transnational cinema point out (including Ezra and Rowden 2005 and De La Garza and Shaw 2010), we cannot do away with nations as they still operate as the fundamental structuring principle of what is ultimately an anthropocentric world. But this does not mean that we can accept the logic of nation at face value. To respond to these challenges, we must understand the transnational as an analytical approach, a way to make sense of the complexities of an increasingly globalized film culture. By this, I mean that it is a way to interrogate the national basis of much contemporary film culture, seeing nation as a rhetorical tactic, a conscious decision to highlight certain iconographic elements – such as the ‘national’ landscape – to promote a sense of authentic film culture. By synergizing the transnational with an ecocritical examination of Nordic cinema, we are able to account for the ways these films can be simultaneously national, regional and local texts, all with significant global implications, and part of a larger ecosystemic framework. This does not imply that I force the label transnational on films that may often be more productively understood as national. Nor does it imply that I foreground only those aspects of the films that cross borders. Instead, I conceptualize of the transnational here as an ecocritical approach to film culture that emphasizes the disembeddedness of films beyond the socio-cultural paradigms of the nation. As the transnational, as an analytical approach, necessitates that we operate outside the conventional parameters of the nation, its use for ecocritical forms of film criticism request that I view depictions of the environment in ways that divest them of their naturalized connotations.

Transnational as a challenge to the anthropocentric nation: Eco-­cosmopolitanism In one of the key studies of globalization, Tomlinson (2001) emphasizes the complex connectivity that shapes our understanding of the ways cultural and economic forms of globalization operate. This is not only to do with the ways information flows across borders but the ways in which individuals and organizations are able to conceptualize the globe as a unitary and interconnected entity. Such ideas are key to envisioning the ways ecosystemic considerations work not only on the immediate or local level but also as part of the holistic ecosystem.

Introduction

17

Another framework of use for ecocritical studies is the glocalization model (see Featherstone, Lash and Robertson 1995), which emphasizes the multidirectional patterns of globalization where local dimensions of global movements and the global connotations of local decisions exist in a reciprocal matrix. Such a reciprocal perspective is useful for conceptualizing an ecological planetary approach to debates over the transnational economic and geopolitical systems that structure the world. Reciprocal approaches have been introduced to ecocriticism, especially with the notion of ‘eco-­cosmopolitanism’, an approach formulated by Ursula Heise (2007) to challenge the sense of authenticity afforded to localism in environmentalist thinking. According to her, ecological concerns are a lot more complex than simple valorization of the local against the perceived dispersion of globalization. Heise’s work provides an important advance in cultural ecocriticism as it facilitates an alternative analytical approach that, certainly, acknowledges the tangibility of local concerns as part of an interconnected planetary ecosystem. But simultaneously, the global is too ambiguous and wide-­ranging in its contextual and concrete applications. Adopting a perspective that emphasizes reciprocal dialogue between the global and the local, and blurs the practical differences between the two, is essential to understanding the role of culture in engaging contemporary ecological problems. This applies to Nordic cinema as well as any attempt to come to terms with the regional dimensions of ecological issues and their resonance in a wider planetary scope needs to be seen in this dialogic framework. Thus, I adopt some of the central concerns of the eco-­cosmopolitan approach to exploring the operations of environmentalist rhetoric and sustainable ideologies in the Nordic countries and their national and regional film cultures. The complex dynamics of the local, the regional, the transnational and the planetary set the stage for our interrogation of ecological rhetoric in the Nordic context, especially the ways the geographic form and layout of nations as human-­made ‘inventions’ and impositions, not as a set of natural phenomena. Yet, I will also develop a critical response to eco-­cosmopolitanism throughout this work as Heise’s applications remain too ambiguous and somewhat underdeveloped in their contextual application. Her use of the Google Earth application as a model for visualizing eco-­cosmopolitan approaches has been questioned elsewhere (Gustafsson and Kääpa 2013), but similarly we can note the problems arising from any attempt to ground this particular analytical approach in the very real cultural contexts – including those of nations – that still influence and shape the global ecopolitical map, especially all the shifting balances of power

18

Ecology and Contemporary Nordic Cinemas

that emerge at the points of contact between the local and the global. Adopting some of the perspectives inherent to transnational film studies – especially the focus on global inequality and exploitation – provides us with a critical take on eco-­cosmopolitanism, that enables me to rethink the ways Nordic producers work across borders. As many of the academic collections on Nordic studies rarely fail to mention, the Nordic countries can boast some of the world’s leading GDPs and position themselves as exceptional models on a global scale, evoking the sort of oscillation that eco-­cosmopolitanism discusses. This is especially the case as the Nordic model evokes interest and wide-­ranging attempts to emulate some of its parameters, a fascination that often focuses on the region’s communitarian ethos (Bondeson 2003). Most often, economics and specifically the role of capitalism is reserved as a critical target of ecocriticism, as its ideological principles and concrete manifestations are widely understood as prime causes of environmental depletion and exploitation. The Nordic countries are some of the key arbitrators of capitalist practices, despite their commitment to social egalitarianism and the welfare state. A recent economic overview of the competitive dimensions of the Nordic countries, Susanna Fellman, Martin Jes Iversen, Hans Sjögren and Lars Thue’s Creating Nordic Capitalism (2008), highlights some of the practices that have been key to constructing a Nordic form of capitalism, which enables it to exist as one of the most competitive regions in the world (Fellman et al. 2008: 18). While the individual practices of the five countries are covered later, Fellman et al. note the frequency with which welfare state policies combine with government-­sanctioned forms of private enterprise and competition, leading to very profitable mergers of state and private enterprise such as the Norwegian Statsoil and the Finnish Stora Enso. These visible flagships of Nordic capitalism combine with domestic policies premised on high taxes and well functioning welfare systems, facilitating, at least in theory, the foundations for the cultural prestige and economic viability these countries command globally. In contrast to the often unquestioned economic superiority that Fellman et al. prioritize, Keith Clement and Malin Hansen (2001) focus on an environmental economics approach. This strand of enquiry emphasized that the adoption of sustainable development practices can lead not only to environmentally aware actions but also to substantial financial profit. Underlying this argument is the problematic supposition that becoming a leader in diverse sustainable technologies increases the competitive edge of the country in question. Thus, as sustainable development and green economics use and appropriate nature while

Introduction

19

they rely on arguments for protecting and respecting it, any rhetoric of sustainability and green policy has to be inspected critically. This is especially the case as the cultural production of these countries complements and contradicts the complexities of the Keynesian policies that provide the basis for the Nordic model combining welfare state protectionism and capitalism. In many key ways, the point of contestation between green activism and green capitalism is one that also extends to the film culture of these countries. As the competing pulls of environmentalism and neoliberalism, green policy and economics, and their multiple overlaps, form some of the fundamental debates in Nordic ecocinema, it is best to illustrate their relationship to cinema with an example, Baltasar Kormákur’s Hafen/The Sea (2005). A family drama at heart, the film provides an incisive critique concerning contemporary Iceland and its ecosystemic relations. Patriarch Ágúst faces a challenge as he has to pass on his fishery to his heirs, who aim to make it more viable for the global markets or, alternatively, to sell it off altogether. Ágúst does not want fish processing factories to be placed on boats as they waste fish and have a dilapidating impact on the socio-­economic structures of the local community. Industrialization and a sense of economic progress are not only changing the structures of the land but also of the sea which is now an extension of human-­made modernization and factorization. The stubbornness of the father and the destructive selfishness of the offspring paint a bleak depiction of Iceland as a place ‘where idiots rape other idiots’, as one character puts it, evoking a distinctively negative conception of Iceland’s reclusiveness. Through this, the film provides both a critical and ironically affective portrayal of the contemporary state of the nation, a nation undergoing an economic boom and transforming relationship to the production and consumption of its natural resources. The Sea touches on a key theme in Nordic ecocinema frequently discussed in this work – the impact of neoliberal policies on ecosystemic sustainability. These policies and their infiltration into cultural production form what Andrew Hageman (2012) has elsewhere referred to as, respectively, the constituted and constitutive ideology of the text. Hageman draws on Slavoj Žižek’s concepts, which concern different ways in which ideology infiltrates texts. Constituted ideology is to do with the ways certain ideological perspectives of producers et  al. are integrated into the text. Constitutive ideology, in turn, concerns the ways the wider cultural political system in which the text is produced influences the text. Both Žižek and Hageman use James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) as an illustration of how these ideas work. In Cameron’s CGI fantasy, many thematic

20

Ecology and Contemporary Nordic Cinemas

and narrative areas evoke a distinct anti-­militarist and anti-­colonialist identification with the plight of the exploited ‘natural’ Na’vi of the planet Pandora. As Hageman incisively suggests, we are only able to achieve our critical perspectives on colonialist militarism within the realm of technological glamourization, which Cameron’s film, as both a narrative text and a cultural industrial product, fully embraces. The world of the Na’vi is shown to us only through the biotechnology of the human Jake Sully’s avatar suit, which restricts our identification to an anthropocentric perspective on the ‘other’. As spectators of this high-­end product, which uses considerable resources for its production, distribution, exhibition and consumption, we support the consolidation and need for ever more intricate technological advances in our entertainment industries, which contradict the seemingly ‘green’ messages of the film. While the constituted ideology – the messages of the film – may seem pro-­environmentalist, even anti-­ capitalist, Avatar’s constitutive ideology – its embeddedness in wider systems of operation in commercial mainstream cinema, especially its shock and awe of technological mastery – make it a part of the structures it seeks to critique. To explain the relation of these terms to The Sea, the neoliberalist practices of a booming Iceland form the wider context – the constitutive ideology – with which the film works. Its constituted ideology is most clearly visible in its pessimistic but also very ironic take on these practices and what they imply for the family units integral to the construction of its society. While most forms of film culture, and indeed, also The Sea, are embedded in the wider network of capitalist logic, Hageman suggests we can still construct meaningful ecocritical analysis as ‘every film contains contradictions [which act] as indices of the contradictions within the ideology that determines our current ability to think and represent ecology’ (Hageman 2012: 65). His use of constitutive ideology is central to much of my discussion of ecocinema production in the Nordic countries, where the distinct national ideological frameworks, combining social politics with economics, environmentalist concerns with cultural representations, provide the constitutive framework in which many of these well-­meaning films express their perspectives and discover their limitations.

From the transnational to the transvergent Transnational approaches allow us to see nation-­based cultural production as a constructed, discursive idea, where Nordic film culture is something which is

Introduction

21

never settled or permanent. From an ecocritical perspective, the adoption of transnational approaches provides the first step in overcoming problems to do with the strictures of human-­made barriers. Synergizing disciplinary means and considerations from ecocritical work with advances made in the field of trans­ national film studies enables the construction of a more sophisticated frame of analysis to account for the ways that cinema both partakes in global ecopolitics and negotiates its contradictory anthropogenic roots and rhetorical idealism. Throughout this work, I draw on the concept of ‘transvergence’ to address the complexities of ecocinema’s inherent anthropocentric constitution. According to architectural theorist Marcos Novak, transvergence is a term indicating something unformed, something ‘alien’ that cannot be adequately discussed by relying on established paradigms of cultural representation and critical thinking. In Novak’s view, conventional perspectives and existent paradigms rely on ‘epistemologies of continuity and consistency’ and maintain antecedent social and epistemological structures (Novak 2002). Transvergence, in contrast to convergent or divergent modes of philosophical inquiry, of which these epistemologies consist, implies ‘incompleteness’ and the formation of something we cannot yet decipher. Following Novak, I use the concept of ‘transvergence’ in analysis of ecocinema to imply a sense of constant transformation, where cultures, identities and societies are never stable, but always in flux, morphing into ever-­changing new formations. Transvergent cultural products that seek to capture this transformation do not necessarily gesture towards any sense of completion or stability, but reveal the very process of transformation, in all its insecurities, as a relevant social condition in its own right. Such evocations of incompleteness and polyvocal critical perspectives are not only the property of social criticism but are also easy to identify in the ecocinema favoured by Paula Willoquet-Maricondi and Scott McDonald, that is, experimental films that challenge conventions. In their persistent foregrounding of transitory moments and unstable social structures, many such explicitly ecocritical films – such as the highly experimental Riverglass (Zdravoc 2007), consisting of lengthy static shots depicting a river system – complicate easy approaches to depicting ecosystemic relations. Transvergence in this case concerns the ways the shots of Zdravoc’s film refuse narrative linearity or points of human identification. In contrast to the questioning and ambiguity of transvergence, other forms of thinking relationality offered by Novak indicate the ecocritical potential found in transvergence. To use some of Novak’s terminology, ‘convergence’ can be seen in

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Ecology and Contemporary Nordic Cinemas

practices such as deep ecology philosophy, a mode of ecophilosophy initiated by Norwegian ecologist Arne Naess. The philosophy of deep ecology emphasizes the absolute relationality of the human as a part of nature, often subsuming the human to natural concerns. In terms of cinematic representations, the radical conservationist and ecocentric rhetoric of the footage shot by bear activist Timothy Treadwell, widely seen in Werner Herzog’s documentary The Grizzly Man (2005) showcase such a convergent approach. As we will see, this term also applies in a more general sense to practices of appropriating nature for ideological purposes, including that of narrating nationhood. In comparison to these perspectives combining human and nature (often in problematic ways), anti-­environmentalist texts like the urban racing The Fast and the Furious series (2001–), as discussed by Murray and Heumann (2009), can be considered as ecologically divergent modes of representation. In films such as these, excessive consumption is glamourized and complemented by utter disregard for any environmentalist consideration. If a deep ecology perspective converges the human with the more than human and the divergence of anti-­environmentalism separates the two, the outcome is always certain and the ideological motivations of the text clear. Instead of operating within the moral clarities of narrative cinema such as The Day After Tomorrow (Emmerich 2004) or the ecoactivist film movement, as encouraged by Willoquet-Maricondi, transvergence takes into account the multiple ways in which ecological messages are conveyed as well as the potential for subversive and contested readings. First and foremost then, transvergent approaches to ecocinema are about the notion of transgressing boundaries and operating between the certainties of a binary world. Riverglass is a good example here as its displacing of the human from the centre and refusal of imposing narrative tendencies on nature comes close to Novak’s use of the term ‘alien’ in describing how the blurring of distinctions between constructed categories of the human and the natural can be rethought. By alien, I do not mean something that does not yet exist in material terms but an approach that conceptualizes new ways of thinking of humanity in and as part of nature. In terms of ecocinema, transvergent conceptualizations problematize the fact that cinema is an inherently human conceptualization and thus an anthropogenic form. While we are not able to transcend this fact, adopting a transvergent approach approach in our ecocritical exploration sees this relationship as a constant question mark, not a taken-­for-granted fact.

Introduction

23

Transvergent approaches to anthropocentricism In contrast to the clearly definable ideological positions inherent to traditional anthropocentric paradigms, transvergent approaches – both in terms of cinematic representation and analytical discussion of these representations – acknowledge human positionality as the initiator of dialogue even in hybridized evocations. As the ecologist M. J. Smith suggests, ‘the question is not how we escape human valuation but whether it is possible to think of ways in which the value of natural things is not subordinate to the way they ratify the consumption patterns of human beings’ (Smith 1998: 5). In trying to find such ways, transvergent takes on ecocritical rhetoric are situated somewhere between the three ecologies of Adrian Ivakhiv’s description (Ivakhiv 2008). The first two of these comprise the material ecology (the resources of film production) and social ecology (the ideological and social context in which the films operate) which combine to facilitate the creation of his third ecology, the perceptual or mental ecology. This is to do with the ways filmic and contextual elements act in dialogue in creating affective and cognitive reactions in viewers. These perspectives participate in the existing discourse between humans and the non-­human world and contribute to the further development of spectators’ environmental awareness and comprehension of ecological issues. Studying this area of interaction, or ‘ecocinecriticism’, as Ivakhiv calls it, is to focus on the ways our perceptions connect the cinematic world with the contextual or extra-filmic world around us. They open up spaces of perception which call for critical intervention that allows for multiple and contradictory meanings even in the construction of ecological environmental rhetoric. This is a key intervention in consolidating the necessity to work on a much more complex level than the simplistic endorsement of any ‘green’ cinematic product. While ecocriticm and ecophilosophy grabble with the shifting borders between the human and the non-­human, transvergent perspectives take the uncertainties and contradictions of these schisms as their focus. Transvergent approaches to Nordic ecocinema wrestle with the ways exploitation and appropriation of nature form a key part of any cultural understanding of human social organization. These are all films from a cultural context that takes substantial pride in being one of the most ecologically advanced regions in the world. But simultaneously, the histories of these countries are based on exploitation of natural resources, even if this is only on the level of gathering cultural capital from natural resources. As interdisciplinary works combining political

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Ecology and Contemporary Nordic Cinemas

philosophy and economics (Fellman et al. 2008) make clear, the close relationship between consumption, natural resources, economics and national narratives, is integrally based on human appropriation of natural resources. To challenge such essentialist conceptions, I work with the interrogation techniques implicit in transvergent approaches to make the familiar and taken-­for-granted unfamiliar, especially concerning the fundamental anthropocentricity of national cinema.

Organization of the book The contrasting urges to use nature to build and strengthen national communality and to envision humanity as a part of the wider planetary ecosystemic network are strands that run through this book. All chapters work at the intersections of the local and the global – that is, the dialogic relationship they maintain – and pay attention to the constant dynamics of local awareness and global applicability that emerges from envisioning anthropocentric cultural production through an ecocentric prism. The aim is to construct a thematic narrative of sorts that builds in elaborative connotations throughout the work, moving from evocations of social unity based on ecological harmony to more fragmented understandings of humanity’s embeddeness in the ecosystem, in fact, from a sense of socio-­ecological convergence to a more transvergent sense of ecological complexity. Thus, Chapters  1 and 2 explore conservative parallels between nature and the human that are often conducted through heritage politics, with Chapter 1 especially concerned with historical narratives in the heritage mould. Chapter 2 elaborates on these dynamics with more contemporaneous, popular genre variations of heritage themes. Genre emerges as an underlying logic to the early chapters of this work as Chapters 3 and 4 interrogate the ecocritical repercussions of the horror genre and ecoanimations, respectively, on narratives of nationhood. The implications of the convergent logic of national narration are central even to these popular genre productions, especially as they blur the lines between human and nature, often in problematic terms. The next set of chapters focuses on the relationship between welfare ideologies and urban society. Malfunctions in the welfare state structures and their repercussions for human corporeality form the focus for Chapter 5, while cinematic representations of urban space, especially the destructive behaviour human activity has on the environment provide the focus for Chapter 6. While all these chapters consider Nordic cinema in a transnational framework, they are also largely focused on consolidations

Introduction

25

and challenges to national narratives and the appropriative convergent logic underlining them. The next set of chapters significantly expands on such concerns by adopting a more global scope of cultural interaction. They approach challenges to the limitations of national narratives by focusing on intercultural concerns (Chapter 7) and multicultural and minority cinema (Chapter 8). The last section interrogates notions of Nordic exceptionalism in ecocritical cinema (Chapter 9) and a range of ecodocumentaries that oscillate between local and global concerns (Chapter  10). Finally, I conclude this book by exploring the notion of transvergence in ecophilosophical films with a planetary scope.

The relevance of Nordic ecocinema Scholars have discussed many of the problems outlined above from the perspective of ecocriticism in, for example, the context of Chinese cinema (Lu and Mi 2009) and especially in relation to the Hollywood industry. Ideas including the frontier myth and incorporation of the landscape, for example, into national narratives in American film culture have been discussed by authors such as Pat Brereton (2005) and Deborah Carmichael (2005). Thus, it is somewhat surprising that academic work on Nordic ecocinema is relatively sparse, despite the fact that collections such as Nordic National Cinemas and Andrew Nestingen and Trevor Elkington’s Transnational Cinema in a Global North (2005) cover areas that would be integral to ecocritical studies. While Brereton and Carmichael focus on nature appropriation, environmental justice and other key concerns through an ecological lens, much of the work on Nordic national cinemas is focused on the social – that is, the cultural – aspects of the films. Indeed, Nordic National Cinemas and Transnational Cinema in a Global North cover a range of artistic and socio-­political issues, but they only touch on ecocritical areas when covering the construction of national identity. Although they do acknowledge, either implicitly or explicitly, the constructed parameters of the ‘naturalized’ national discourse, the articles do not go much beyond noting this problem. While these collections do not, of course, even pretend to be ecocritical works, they ultimately do not do much to advance ecocritical thinking on the relationship between cinema and the environment, or identity and nature. It is thus imperative that this gap is filled expediently. What emerges from all these considerations is the sense that critical inter­ disciplinary exploration of the diversity of Nordic ecocinema can not only make

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Ecology and Contemporary Nordic Cinemas

a significant contribution to the study of Nordic cultures, but also to bring back political participation to a field which has lost some of its explicit engagement with political issues. Thus, it is somewhat surprising that little attention has been devoted to academic exploration of these topics in the Nordic context. The need for a study of Nordic ecocinema is especially urgent as the recent years have seen the exponential increase of critical books and articles on other aspects of eco­ cinema, and Nordic productions certainly deserve similar critical attention. By discussing a range of films and cultural concerns that have received very little attention in English language academia, Ecology and Contemporary Nordic Cinemas posits the Nordic cinemas at the centre of concurrent developments in both transnational and ecocritical debates in studies of film. Having stated all this, the book is not intended as the final word in Nordic ecocinema. Far from it, I am very aware of at least two major limitations. First, a book of this length can only cover some aspects of the multitude of ways in which the distinct national film industries of the Nordic countries engage in ecological argumentation. Thus, I focus on films that I find particularly representative of concerns central to my ecocritical interests, with full acknowledgement that I am excluding a range of very important texts and approaches from this study. Secondly, my analytical methodologies are mostly focused on textual analysis, and do not delve into such vital areas as production or reception. As Ivakhiv suggestively points out, a deeper or more holistic eco-­cinecriticism, however, would closely analyze not only the representations found in a film but the telling of the film itself—its discursive and narrative structures, its inter-­textual relations with the larger world, its capacities for extending or transforming perception of the larger world—and the actual contexts and effects of the film and its technical and cultural (entertainment industry, art world) apparatus in the larger world. (Ivakhiv 2008: 18)

The restrictions are lamentable, but necessary if we are to start making sense of the complexities of Nordic ecocinema. I fully acknowledge that this volume presents only an initial exploration into Nordic ecocinema, but these are key steps that need to be taken to ensure the thriving of the field not only in ideological readings but studies of their production and consumption cycles.

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).

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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culture. He discusses the log-­rolling genre as a particular example of naturebased 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 processes 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 that landscape played an important role as cultural capital for the heritage politics of these films, facilitating the creation of nostalgia that sutured, at least for some, the sense of uncertainty that contemporary socio-­political developments had generated. Thus, the history of the ‘national heritage film’ (Sundholm et  al. 2012) in Sweden and Finland showcases the appropriation of rural utopias for diverse socio-­political purposes. While critics have certainly acknowledged the limitations of such constructed national imaginaries (see Soila 2007 for a range of examples), reflecting Higson’s take on landscape in British cinema, academic studies of Nordic cinema are often based on anthropocentric assumptions concerning the relationship between nation and nature. Such a convergent

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approach is understandable as questioning the role of nature in cultural representations is not a prime concern for most studies of national narratives. Yet, it is a concern we must address if we are to explore the ecological implications of such narratives further, especially the constitutive role such heritage appropriations of nature play in national narration.

‘Natured gender’ As nature works as a part of the convergent anthropocentric logic of national narration, it is imperative that we unravel some of the fundamental assumptions that maintain this correlation. A common strategy to consolidate nature in the act of national narration is by reflecting national characteristics through gender, and normalizing this connection by ‘naturalizing’ gender. To explain this process, Anu Koivunen’s dissection of national narration and gender politics in the Finnish Niskavuori play, literature and film series (Koivunen 2003) provides an exemplary start. The series chronicles the family dynamics of the Niskavuori landowner clan, and is well known for featuring strong central female characters as well as their weak or exploitative male counterparts. While Koivunen’s work explores the cultural discourse generated by these texts – especially the ways gender politics are contextualized in and as part of national myths – we only have space for discussing certain key ideological features of her work. The current study follows Koivunen’s approach, if not in method, at least in expanding some of her concerns to an ecocritical level. In expanding on Koivunen’s work, I draw on her use of the concept of performativity, which she identifies as a method through which gender politics are performed by diverse agents in their attempts to consolidate certain ideological principles including gender roles and stereotypes. As the complex meanings generated by the content of the films and their surrounding material are open to multiple, even contradictory readings, as such, they can be used in performances of diverse ideological perspectives. Particularly useful for our purposes is the ways Koivunen’s discussion imbues the rural landscape with a performative dimension capable of incorporating a multitude of uses. For one, it does not have to only concern traditional heritage politics of the sort I have discussed above, but can also be used to critique such notions as was arguably the case with Jarva’s One Man’s War. To expand on these ideas, I contextualize this discussion more firmly with ecocritical approaches, which not only question gender politics,

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but also the ways landscape appropriation works invariably as an anthropo­ centric tool.

The natural male caricature in Shooting the Sun Deconstructing the ways national narratives use notions of gender necessitates unravelling the many stereotypes and gender binaries that hold the constitutive ideology of nationalized nature in place. Nature is often coded as distinctly feminine, especially when it comes to projecting the purity of the national soil and the need to retain its independence and sovereignty. Alternatively, seeing masculine characteristics in nature is a way to consolidate notions such as strength and authenticity in and as part of the idealized national character (Gordon and Lahelma 1998). While examples of these can be found globally, the Norwegian Jernanger/Shooting the Sun (2007) works as an illustrative example of how these ideas take place in Nordic cinema. A conventional way of mirroring gender identity in nature can take place by equating one of the larger animals controlling their immediate ecosystem with a stubborn male character. Indeed, such forms of symbolic contrast emerge in the first shot of the film which follows a large craggy catfish swimming in murky waters. Soon, we are introduced to Evind, the main protagonist of the film, a large hostile creature himself. He lives on a rotten boat which is half keeled in water. Evind has no friends nor wants any until he is confronted by the similarly lost and alienated Kris. Evind’s bleak existence is rooted in the past and in the ‘one that got away’ – a woman in this case. Any sustainable life he may have had is only a shadow of itself, as his boat now only harbours a bar and has not seen any real fishing for years. Having been told of his imminent parenthood, Kris steers the older man back from his self-­imposed isolation. As Evind claws back to life, his boat’s keel becomes steadier. But we soon find out that he has a fatal heart condition which will take his life, though he is able to make a final trip to right past mistakes and pass the fisher’s mantle to Kris. The fishing industry structures most aspects of Evind’s bleak existence, but when we meet him, they are only reminders of what has been lost. In some way, this is a commentary on both the decline of the Norwegian fishing industry and the challenges these fundamental socio-­economic changes imply for traditional identities in the contemporary emasculated society. Evind is a clear symbol of patriarchal masculinity, and Kris’ predicament concerns the need to accept his natural role as a parent. As both the old and the young are unsteered by

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the changing conventions of society, the catfish metaphor takes on powerful connotations. By suggesting that Evind and Kris need to flow with the water like the elderly catfish, Shooting the Sun positions the male odyssey as the natural progression for these two lost men. Regaining their sense of self-­respect is earned not by fighting against the tide or floating aimlessly in the sea. It is only achieved by taking their righteous position as the head of the family (for Kris) or gaining an heir to their near extinct profession as a fisherman (Evind). Fighting the flow seems as natural and useful as shooting the sun, which Evind does in the early moments of the film. By establishing the male odyssey as the natural progression to reclaiming their sense of self, nature becomes an anthropocentric instrument of a distinctly conservative form of masculine gender politics. The concepts of convergence and constitutive ideology introduced earlier can be used to explain some of the ways nature and nation coalesce in the thematic scope of Shooting the Sun. From an ecocritical perspective, both notions are interrelated and in fact rely on each other’s propensities. To construct the sort of mythical masculine identity on which national narratives often rely, Evind’s journey converges nation and nature symbolically, where to be able to overcome one’s socio-psychological failings, one must ultimately overcome nature. In such narrative patterns, nature has no other role other than to act as vindication for anthropocentric attitudes. Through this, it would not be too difficult to suggest that if national narration has an ideological relationship with the environment, its normative constitutive ideology is anthropocentric.

The sensitive male as a natural phenomenon If Shooting the Sun relies heavily on traditional approaches to combining nation and nature, others address emasculation directly to strengthen their conservative politics. One example of updating patriarchal gender politics to account for transformation in social paradigms was identified in Thomas Dubois’ discussion of Markku Pölönen’s Summer by the River. In this case, Pölönen’s film reasserts patriarchal masculinity by depicting the emasculated male as a continua­ tion of traditional male roles, using nature to strengthen the argument. Another perspective on the use of masculinity in inspecting national identity is evident in Joonas Berghall and Mika Hotakainen’s documentary Miesten Vuoro/Steam of Life (2010). It received substantial critical attention and surprising commercial

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success in Finland with its frank depiction of Finnish men revealing their emotional core while encased in the steamy privacy of the sauna. Whereas other documentaries such as Joutilaat/The Idle Ones (Helke and Suutari 2001), focusing on unemployed, idle men in backward communities, are content with showing a more typical depiction of Finnish masculinity (based on realistic surroundings nonetheless), the approach of Steam of Life enables a more ecocritical assertion of natural masculinity, both as an affective and a reinvigorative phenomenon to rethinking the Finnish male. All the usual elements for narrating Finnish national masculinity are heavily present in the film. The use of alcohol, the depressive life circumstances, the histories of violence, shattered fantasies and broken families proliferate the stories. Yet, no judgement is passed on the men and instead the focus is on the potential of the sauna to facilitate emotional purification. If a film like Summer by the River re-­established patriarchal relations, Steam of Life would seem to operate with a less clearly defined ideological goal. To support this ideological complexity, the images of the film are both stunning and exceedingly familiar. The film even starts out with unrelated landscape shots of the fells of northern Finland indicating both the film’s cultural context as well as the ways such references rely on nature. They emphasize expansive natural scenery and an impression of the sauna as a distinctly masculine sphere. While the sauna is a key aspect of Finnish cultural imagery and is frequently used as a symbol of authenticity in cultural representations – as initially would seem to be the case here – it also acts as a separate ecosphere with its own norms. The sauna in Steam of Life is depicted as a space of authenticity, but not in the sense called for in national narratives. Rather, this is a social space where individuals are able to access registers of their own being outside strict paradigmatic social conventions. The connections the film reveals between its subjects are only possible in this space that exists simultaneously outside and within social conventions. The steam of life that the film acknowledges in its English title is part of this ability to allow the humans to get closer to a more immersive sense of belonging in nature. By undressing the oppressive social conventionality that binds these individuals outside the space of the sauna, they are able to strip away the cultural binds that control them. While the use of the sauna may be progressive for gender political re-­evaluation, its ecological role remains less inventive. Deployed as a tool to depict and deconstruct the stereotype of the Finnish male, the film certainly moves the sauna beyond its normative cultural role. But the use of wood and other natural

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resources in the provision of steam is hardly considered, while the sauna is clearly presented as part of nature in its unmasking and immersive qualities. Because of these aspects, it is a thoroughly anthropocentric tool, one designed as a place of human self-­realization and fulfillment. There is thus a dual bind at work in the ways the sauna operates as a stand-­in for nature and as a way of connecting with a deeper sense of the human self. While the sauna has divested the men of social oppression and enabled them to access their inner selves, it operates as part of the wider framework in which national narratives continue to appropriate nature. By this we mean that it certainly provides an impressive deconstruction of the ‘authentic’ male phenomenon, but by working within the limits of the anthropocentric framework, the sauna is made into a mythic naturalizing tool, capable of incorporating even these emotional men as part of the masculine national narrative. While Steam of Life can be considered progressive in that it leaves masculine identities in flux, a transvergent take on its nature appropriation reveals it to continue a more conservative attitude to national narration. Or in other words, while its contribution to gender politics may be progressive, its approach to using nature reveals the pervasive scope of anthropocentric constitutive ideology that continues to maintain a hold on even such ‘green’ films.

Gender and the limitations of the anthropocentric worldview Contemporary work on ecocinema criticism has started to address the patriarchal gendering of nature, echoing some of the concerns we have expressed in relation to the above examples of Nordic ecocinema. Berila (2010), for example, suggests that many key environmental films by Robert Redford, including A River Runs Through It (1992) and The Horse Whisperer (1998), use feminization and radicalization of nature to serve a wider socio-­political project. According to her, these films use excessive nature imagery and conservationist rhetoric as part of their ‘liberal’ politics to vindicate conceptualizing nature as masculine property. The othering of nature extends to the depiction of especially non-­white women who are often conceptualized as equivalent to ‘natural’ or ‘wild’ beings. Similar ‘liberalized’ forms of patriarchal ideology pervade Nordic films as well, as nature has often been conceptualized as a space for masculine self-­realization. Colonialist attitudes to ethnic ‘others’ are also evident throughout the history of Nordic cinema. While these are addressed in more depth in Chapter 9, Finnish films such as Valkoinen peura/The White Reindeer (Blomberg 1952) and Sensuela

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(Tulio 1973) combine exoticism and eroticism in their depictions of Sámi women, a minority group occupying territory in northern Norway, Sweden and Finland. This is a direction that continues even in more ‘realist’ films such as Maa on syntinen laulu/The Earth is a Sinful Song (Mollberg 1973) (see Toiviainen 1975) and contemporary tales such as Umur (Lehtinen 2003), the latter of which provides an intriguing companion piece to the emasculated male narratives. In Kai Lehtinen’s film, the main protagonist Poika works as a border guard in northern Finland, an occupation that keeps him in close relationship with nature. He meets the mysterious Umur and starts a fragile relationship with her. Their relationship is tested by her long absences in the city and it eventually turns out that she has an untreatable disease that has made her disconnect from the world. Poika decides to try to spend as much time with her as possible but her eventual departure will soon come. Poika is left alone in the expansive universe, a connection the film makes through two distinct cultural tropes with clear ecological connections. The first one concerns the use of Sámi culture as an attempt to expand the thematic scope of the film. The repeated use of a voiceover by a shaman in the Sámi language situates Poika’s predicaments in a wider philosophical context as he talks of destiny and projected paths for individuals, suggesting the love story at the centre of the film is part of a wider cosmic play. The second trope used by the film concerns animal symbolism as Umur’s existence is frequently contrasted with that of an owl. When we are first introduced to her, the film cuts between quick dissolves of her and the bird, with the clear intention of evoking parallels between the human and its natural counterpart. The equation can be seen in two ways. For one, it seems that she is as elusive as animals are to the human, the gesture functioning both as a gendered ‘androcentric’ and a more ecological ‘zoomorphic’ idea, the latter of which relies on equating her with wild nature. Effectively, Umur’s otherness is created by relying on both a limited gendered and biological view of the other, at least to the centrality of ‘natural male’. Alternatively, these parallelization techniques can be considered as immersive tactics designed to incorporate her as part of the corporeality of all life, integrating her into the organic constitution of the wider ecosystem. But again, by placing her as the object of a melodramatic romance narrative, the constitutive ideology of the film’s androcentric worldview is established. Umur is not seen as another part of the ecosystem, but instead put on a pedestal by Poika who hopelessly falls in love with her. The affectivity he holds for her creates a boundary between the two, and because the film insists on framing her as both a gendered and natural other, boundaries

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between the human and the more than human invariably emerge in the film’s constituted ideology. While Umur is certainly more balanced than the explicit patriarchal tendencies of A Summer by the River, it is not able to reach the levels of reflexive criticism of the more deconstructive approaches of Steam of Life. Poika’s existence and immersion into the natural environment and the ways the film consistently returns to the theme of natural cycles are certainly evocative. But simultaneously, the film’s reliance on exoticized mysticism and androcentric zoomorphicism evokes the by-­now usual problems of constituted ideology. Umur remains a possession, an element to help the male protagonist realize his magnificent solitude. Such ideological preoccupations are also constituted through its seemingly affirmative politics of othering as this affable border guard, and representative of the state, is so much ‘one’ with nature as to have earned the narration of his life by the ultimate symbol of the national other in Finland – the ecophilosophical abstractions of the Sámi narrator. As a well-­intentioned argument, the film emphasizes many central problems of ecocinema. By choosing to focus on a male protagonist, positioned against a suffering female, and by incorporating exotic impressions of the Sámi, seeing these in context with utopian notions of nature’s cyclicism, the film could be taken as a distinctly powerful ecofilm. Instead, any sense of the ecocritical is contradicted by some of the more ideologically suspect anthropo- and androcentric conventions it chooses to (perhaps unintentionally) emulate. The result is a curiously and appropriately contradictory text in both its reliance on almost stereotypical conventionality and immersive nature evocation. Ultimately, its anthropo- and androcentric content evokes both the limitations and aspirations of cinema that operates as a patriarchal, ecocolonialist form of cultural production.

Ecofeminist perspectives The examples of ecocinema explored so far cover a range of ecological themes, which are often complicated by diverse interests – gender bias, the nation, the state, cinematic conventions. Even the more progressive depictions such as Umur still seem to take it for granted that nature exists as masculine property. The problems of androcentric rhetoric is a theme frequently addressed by prominent ecofeminist critics such as Karen Warren (1996) and Val Plumwood (2002). They criticize the dualistic rationale on which patriarchal thinking is premised,

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concerns that are fully visible in our examples, even the ones that have a deconstructive approach to traditional masculinity. Other ecofeminists such as Mary Mellor (1992) as well as Vandana Shiva and Maria Mies (1993) situate these concerns alongside global practices of exploitation, seeing patriarchal urges as part of the colonialist exploitation between the developed and developing nations. These ecocolonialist perspectives will be explored later in relation to minority and multicultural ecocinema. For now, our interests are to do with unpacking some of the challenges ecofeminist perspectives pose for anthropo- and androcentric approaches to national narration. It is not difficult to identify a range of Nordic films that challenge, at least in theory, normative patriarchal paradigms. This is especially the case with the heritage genre, where switches in gender perspective have enabled more complex approaches to nation. For example, the Danish-Norwegian co-­production I Am Dina (Bornedal 2002) and the Finnish Lupaus/The Promise (Vanne 2003), provide female centric narratives which, at least nominally, refuse to categorize women in the usual subservient roles, focused as they are on strong female heroines taking on some of the patriarchal norms of the times. The focus on a female protagonist is not something particularly Nordic, of course, as cinema has from its inception focused on strong suffering women. From D. W. Griffith to Carl Theodor Dreyer, from Robert Bresson to Aki Kaurismäki, women have held active roles in the (male produced) cinematic national imaginary, even as they are simultaneously subjugated to preset patriarchal moulds of the historical contexts of production. To unpack some of these ideas in the Nordic context, I focus on two films by Jan Troell, an intentionally problematic case for our examination of fictional ‘ecofeminism’. While I could discuss the films of Liv Ullmann or Pirjo Honkasalo, to name a few eminent female directors, the reality is that heritage production has been a heavily male dominated field, and thus the selection of Troell is justified. Having had a long career in Sweden as a producer of socially conscious historical epics as well as ecologically potent documentary cinema, Troell in the 2000s directed two heritage epics that provide, at least on the surface, a clear counterpoint to the prevalence of male centric epic cinema in Sweden, Som Vit Som Snö/As White as in Snow (2001) and Maria Larsson’s Eviga ögonblick/Eternal Moments (2008). Troell’s approach to representing national history through a gender political lens sets the context for a dialogic interrogation of constitutive and constituted ideology in heritage film culture, even as it highlights many of the problematic norms governing heritage cinema.

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As White as in Snow takes the prolific cornerstone of cinematic nation-­ building, the ‘great man’ narrative, and morphs the general conventions of the biopic to focus on the first female pilot in Sweden, Elsa Andersson. Built on a flashback structure, we cut from what will be Elsa’s final train journey to crucial moments in her life, all premised on strict dualities. Among these is her privileged position in society, being from a well-­off background. But even here, her position was of a farm owner’s daughter in a highly paternalistic social order. These contrasts play a central role in the narrative of the film as it not only highlights the roles available to men and women, but much of the thematic material of the film is built on her traversing these roles as well as the contrast between traditional agrarian lifestyles and her more adventurous personal tastes, establishing her rebellions through admiration of modernist art and international journeys. Struggling with society’s expectations, flying becomes the epitome of her rebellious attitude. In an intriguing contrast, the conflict between her father and Elsa is not about her gender but about her roots. He argues that ‘farmers have not been meant to fly’ and talks about his obligation to stay rooted. To emphasize the point, an early scene captures this clash as a plane lands on the Andersson turnip field, with the film contrasting the glamour of the pilots with the backward manners of the farmers. It is not difficult to see where the film’s favours lie as Elsa manages to overcome prejudices and becomes an acknowledged national hero, even making it to Germany as a parachutist. Yet, even here, the roles that are available for women exist mainly for their curiosity value or for the publicity their glamourous appearance may generate. As White as in Snow’s emphasis on binaries extends to its ecopolitical stance, one which is reliant on the conventions of an androcentric gaze. By codifying the different spaces according to gender, and then attempting to unravel this codification, the film functions first as an intriguing example of the ways films appropriate space for political motivations. In the male odyssey films, patriarchal politics are often supported by anthropocentric rhetoric concerning the appropriation of natural space for masculine self-­realization. If we were to achieve a more ecofeminist perspective, attempts at creating a de-­androcentricized gaze would need to be premised on a realistic assessment of the centrality of an anthropocentric worldview, and the fact that this view has traditionally been governed by masculine priorities. Elsa breaches the codified space consistently as the narrative rhetoric of the film struggles to portray such space as both blurred and porous in nature. But simultaneously, what space is won by Elsa (both as a pilot and a land owner) is seen as a space of contestation, not a space

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divested of anthropocentric logic. It certainly goes without saying that to even start to rethink natural space as masculine property, one must challenge the conventions that hold this gendering in place. But to truly challenge patriarchal norms in these sorts of national narratives, it would be necessary to unravel some of the central anthropocentric conventions on which the spatialization of the environment through narration depends. As White as In Snow never achieves this level of critical awareness, but as it addresses the notion of codified space, it becomes a good way to demonstrate how andro- and anthropocentric constitutive ideology operates even in such female centric narratives. As Warren and Plumwood suggest, patriarchal social structures maintain control over society through their normalization of the prevailing power relations as a natural order. Anthropocentric rhetoric is so central to the maintenance of patriarchal hegemony, as is patriarchal ideology to the maintenance of anthropocentric hegemony, that to challenge its premises, one must work within its means. Thus, the de-­androcentralization inherent in this sort of feminist rhetoric cannot avoid retaining the central status of the anthropocentric worldview, resulting in a film that works from the basis of challenging gendered codification of space, only to have its binaries revert back in place due to its reliance on the rhetorical conventions of nature appropriation. As Elsa wins symbolic control over the sky, the film’s convergent take on nature appropriation simultaneously grounds its ecorhetorical content. To use terms mobilized throughout this text, the constituted ideology of the film ultimately provides a convergent take on the relationship between humanity and nature.

The anthropocentric gaze and heritage: Eternal Moments The negotiation over the dual binds of the andro- and the anthropocentric gaze continues in Troell’s Eternal Moments. The film is largely a very traditional telling of hardships in early twentieth century Malmö as Maria and her alcoholic husband struggle with their livelihood and their commitment to one another. In many ways, Maria is a typical maternal caricature, waiting at home while her husband slowly destroys their lives. Much as As White as in Snow operated at a concrete disjunction of gender norms, so Maria’s photography hobby enlivens her status. Her sense of obligation to her husband and the promise of self-­fulfillment and freedom to be had in photography pull her in different directions. Instead of appropriating space for depicting gender politics, Eternal

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Moments takes technological innovations as the boundary to be broken by gender equality. And as with Troell’s earlier film, these battles take place at the interstices of appropriating nature for anthropocentric self-­realization. Such approaches are evident the first time we see Maria realize the power of the photographic apparatus. As she gazes at a set of icicles hanging from the rafters of a building, the film goes in and out of focus momentarily as if it is trying to capture the new perspective embodied by her gaze. The use of her camera perspective is a clear challenge to the traditionalist gaze of the heritage genre and its androcentric worldview. By inviting us to see the world differently, Maria’s camera challenges the male gaze momentarily, but the fact that the form of the film has to change to achieve this perspective switch indicates the pervasive framework controlling the rest of the narrative structure. The film is set in a time when women’s suffrage was taking hold in Sweden and much of the narrative choices of the film chronicle the gradual allowance of women to participate in the construction of national narratives. But as the formative choices chronicling Maria’s newfound empowerment show (or betray), this was a challenge limited by the norms of the day, something which can also be considered to apply to the film’s oscillation between explicit challenges and abidance with conventions. The conclusion of the film further positions it within the realm of constitutive conservative patriarchal ideology as family dynamics overcome all the harm done to her by her abusive husband. While nature plays only a small role in the film’s narrative, its appearance at key moments in Eternal Moments, as in As White as in Snow, positions it as a key symbolic signifier by which the films question (and subsequently realign) androcentric worldviews. Whether this is to do with negotiations over mastery of the sky and the land or reappropriating the anthropocentric gaze for female protagonists, they evoke questions relating to the ways gender relations have been justified by recourse to nature. The chemical formation of the photograph or early versions of the airplane are both dependent on natural conditions, but they also have a more substantial role as weapons in the battle between genders. Yet, any progressive steps in narrative argumentation are undercut by their reliance on the constitutive ideology inherent in the anthropocentric gaze of the heritage film. If the sky is the space in which the woman can make her claim to individuality, the earth is the place where reality (and gravity) set in. The equation of the man with the hard soil and the woman with the heavenly is a stereotypical perspective, a notion that is enforced by the film’s culmination in Elsa’s failed jump and crash onto Earth. Similarly, Maria’s re-­appropriation of the

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active gaze is also a vital move forward in gender politics, but as part of the framework of heritage cinema, any challenge her gaze may pose is reintegrated into the wider genre patterns of the film, where her gaze is only a momentary distraction from the general framework of heritage cinema. Thus, we have to ask if either film does anything progressively new or whether even any progressive gender politics they may pose are neutralized by their reliance on general nature allegories. As part of the heritage genre, these films challenge established conventions, but they are simultaneously limited by the very same representational politics they challenge.

The anthropocentric gaze and beyond One fallacy with much of the heritage cinema discussed above, and indeed, with films such as I Am Dina and The Promise, is that they stay too constrained by the preordained conventions of heritage cinema. As studies by Higson et al. confirm, the use of landscape and nature in these films is rarely for any other purpose than socio-­political representation. Yet, as Koivunen suggestively points out, heritage does not have to mean obedience of patriarchal or conservative norms. Instead, such material can be utilized in ways that provide the sort of critical perspectives called for by ecofeminist criticism. An example of this sort of inquisitive ecocinema is Elina Kivihalme’s documentary Tuntematon emäntä/ The Unknown Woman (2011), focusing on the Finnish home front during the Second World War. Finland’s battles in the war have often been depicted as the tale of heroic self-­sacrificing male soldiers and (occasionally) key support of the female Lotta Svärd organization. The war has also been cast in relation to nature as tales abound about the ingenious use of the wintery conditions by the Finns to confront and beat the Soviets in the Winter War. In much of the genre, from Tuntematon sotilas/The Unknown Soldier (Laine 1955) to Tali-Ihantala, 1944 (Kirjavainen 2009), patriarchal dichotomies are fully utilized as women are relegated to the domain of the household. Indeed, in this sort of narrative, it seems entirely natural that men do the fighting while women uphold their maternal duties. War mobilization had a destablizing effect on the agricultural infrastructure of Finnish society, as elsewhere. As the men were occupied at the front, it was up to women to take care of the farms and the livestock. Farming and cultivation of the soil is an integral part of the rural narrative and the construction of

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masculine identity, but now, this was no longer feasible and resulted in direct challenges to the patriarchal societal order. While women took charge of the farms, their efforts went largely unheeded, eclipsed by the horrors of the front. The Unknown Woman tells of the sacrifices and the hardships endured by the women as they took on the roles previously occupied by men. Based on tales of women who were children at the time of the war, we learn about the ways the war broke families and the backbreaking efforts the women had to do to keep their farms going. These include not only the job of looking after the children, but also ploughing fields and nurturing the livestock. The fact that these sacrifices have gone unheralded is another indication of the prevailing power of patriarchy in national narration – and the role that nature appropriation has played in strengthening this notion. Ultimately, what is at stake in the film is rethinking this myopic view of history and its reliance on ‘naturalized’ national narratives. Through this, The Unknown Woman reverses the tendency to take for granted the different social roles assigned to genders as it shows the important efforts of women in sustaining the agricultural infrastructure of the nation. The point is very clear: if women are as capable of running the farm as the men, then the very foundations of ‘authentic’ masculine identity need to be questioned. As a powerful ecofeminist evocation, Kivihalme’s documentary not only presents vital areas of forgotten national history, but also provides precisely the type of anti-­dualistic rhetoric for which ecofeminist approaches call. Even if it still has to operate within some of the larger structures existing in society, including a general sense of conceiving natural resources as anthropocentric property, its use of interrogative techniques provides a complex ecofeminist challenge to patriarchal nation-­building. In short, by refusing the simplistic notion of gendered nature as a taken-­for-granted aspect of narrating the nation, we get a more balanced view of humanity’s role in the ecosystem. This challenge corroborates the vital role ecocinema can have in rethinking national narratives, and in turn, the role that gender politics can have in questioning the parameters of anthropocentric logic.

Gender, national identity, narrativity and nature While many of the films discussed here are rather conservative in their ecological rhetoric, others, such as The Unknown Woman, point to more complex holistic understandings of the human/nature relationship. Unsurprisingly many of the

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latter are best understood in the framework of ecofeminism. But simultaneously, patriarchal rhetoric maintains a dominant position in heritage cinema via the continued abidance with conservative dynamics and narrative forms, a notion complemented by their anthropocentric conceptualizations of the ecosystem as can be seen from the heritage dynamics of As White as in Snow. As we have seen, nature plays a diversity of roles in cinematic nation-­building. It can act as a fantasized rural utopia, the focus for critiquing nationalist politics, the place of masculine self-­realization, and finally, even as a signifier deconstructing such simplified androcentric narratives. Despite this range of approaches, nation-­ building is an inherently anthropocentric activity and its constitutive ideology has historically been dictated by patriarchal directives. Thus, it is not surprising that films conceptualized as part of this narrative logic continue these patterns, even if they in some ways attempt to undermine them. The wide range of influences and ideological perspectives that emerge from attempts to narrate the nation through nature encapsulate the complex ways that films are immersed in constant negotiation of the relationship between humanity and the ecosystem. Mapping out these diverse approaches and contrasting them against one another is crucial to allowing us to develop the type of holistic hybrid relationality called for by Sarah Whatmore (2003), and which is seen as entirely essential of Nordic cinema by C. ClaireThomson: ‘In mapping out the relations, boundaries and overlappings between human bodies, non-­human bodies, texts and environment, hybrid geographies begin to displace the human as privileged, rational, thinking subject, and move towards an emphasis on “knowing and doing” as corporeal’ (Thomson 2006: 150). While it is an absolute necessity for any analytical work on ecocinema to tease out and uncover hybrid understandings of humanity’s place in the ecosystem, the approach has more direct relevance for my study of heritage cinema and nation-­building. I have charted some of the ways heritage cinema uses iconographic impressions and mythical evocations of nature to cover over the fact that national borders are imposed on the natural terrain and do not emerge out of some sort of prenational mythic essentialist cartography. And because of this underlying flaw in nationalist rhetoric, we are well off to remember that environmental criticism is ‘always in some sense a postnationalist persuasion’ (Buell 2005: 81) as the well-­known ecocritic Lawrence Buell suggests. Such approaches connect with work on the sociology of nations from Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities (Anderson 1983) to Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial deconstruction of hegemonic national narratives (Bhabha 1994).

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As much of the scholarship on transnational ecological cultural production demonstrates (Gustafsson and Kääpä 2013), national myths are not only challenged by the cross-­border flow of culture and capital, but by the more fundamental notion of natural systems that refuse simplification. If hybrid understandings remain elusive to many of the films discussed here, critical work on their convergent logic of narrating the nation through nature at least gestures towards unravelling conventional paradigms of nature appropriation. Yet, these convergences of nature under nation do not remain the same but transform according to context and mode of appropriation. One such determinant is the use of genre conventions in Nordic film productions, which is an area I now discuss, especially concerning the ways heritage appropriations of nature transform when applied to different popular genre conventions.

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Ecovariations of Genre Film The role of nature as a key symbol in narrating (or visualizing) nationhood takes on multiple forms as it is applied to different cinematic contexts. Many of the films discussed in the previous chapter fit very loosely within the parameters of heritage cinema as a distinct ‘genre’, especially if we consider genre in the light of Higson’s (2003) emphasis on historical settings and origins in literature. While films such as As White as in Snow would certainly fit this notion of the heritage genre, in this book I consider heritage to connote an area of the film’s constitutive ideology – that is, one of its fundamental organizing principles – an approach that sees it as a tool for representing socio-­political hegemony and anthropocentric ideology. The latter consideration is especially central to ecocritical analysis and to address the diverse modes in which such problems appear, the next three chapters will focus on Nordic adaptations of popular genre patterns and the ways they repackage the convergent connotations of heritage culture. The extent to which popular cinema and ecocriticism intertwine is not surprising as most of the groundbreaking work in the field has sought to address the ways environmental understandings are communicated to the public at large. These focus on studies of individual film series such as The Lord of the Rings (2001–3) (Cubitt 2005) to Hollywood productions in general (Brereton 2005) and are complemented by work on animation films (Murray and Heumann 2011) and production initiatives (Bozak 2011), which assess the resources used for film production. Popular cinema – and especially the roles of genres as a set of normative frameworks for conducting cinematic discourse – is a central, urgent consideration for ecocritical studies and has been a key area in ecocritical analysis from Brereton (2012) to Neri (2013) and beyond, with studies focusing on ecocritical takes on the road and the disaster movie, respectively. Similarly, genre as a form of popular cinema has certainly been much discussed in Nordic film studies (see Nestingen and Elkington 2005; Hjort 2006; Larsson and Marklund 2010; Gustafsson and Kääpä 2013 among others). This is not surprising as much of the contemporary film policy in the Nordic countries supports the

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resurgence (or in many cases emergence) of genre. As governmental domestic funding for film culture has increased substantially over the past decade (Salmi 2003; Nestingen 2005; Bondebjerg 2010; Kääpä 2012b), one of the results of increased production budgets has been a wide embrace of genre film-­making in all of the five Nordic countries. Popular and populist genre in all these countries ranges from war adventures to popular comedy, from thrillers to the heritage film. But perhaps the most intriguing academic approach to Nordic genre cinema is Andrew Nestingen’s notion of medium concept production (Nestingen 2008), operating as specifically Nordic combinations of art and genre dynamics. They often foreground socially committed relevance and auteurist aspirations in response to the high concept productions emanating from the Hollywood studios. While contemporary genre productions from the Nordic countries, such as the Finnish Iron Sky (2012) and Swedish Låt den rätta komma in/Let the Right One In (2008) may seem high concept in approach, they also show evidence of a distinctly sociorealist tract, even as they adapt alien invasion narratives or vampire lore to the specific conditions and cultural forms of the country in question. Despite these adaptations to the context, the use of popular genre formats is a contested matter as Ib Bondebjerg and Eva Renvall contend: ‘Only a few thrillers, horror films or action movies are produced in Scandinavian cinema. They are not considered culturally and artistically “kosher”, since they almost always carry with them an air of commercialisation, Americanisation and financial speculation’ (Bondebjerg and Renvall 2010: 79). But while commercialism is certainly a problematic idea for state-­sponsored cultural production, the films also function as inventive combinations of cultural heritage and supranational genre formulations. Through this, they not only indicate the global framework in which contemporary Nordic cinema operates, but also the ways in which the nature appropriation inherent to national narratives transforms. Yet, even as these academics acknowledge the social commitment inherent to these productions, the contributions of the films to wider environmental debates have been left to mere mentions. This is especially intriguing as many of the key genre films discussed in the above mentioned works are so explicitly ecological or environmentalist. One need only consider films such as the Sámi adventure Pathfinder (discussed by Nestingen 2008 and Iversen 2005) to note how even the most well known of these films avail themselves to environmentalist critique. In contrast to the existing studies, I combine ecocriticism with interrogation of the populist dimensions of genre, allowing me to rethink some of the ways

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these combinations of popular narrative structures and ecological themes adopt the convergent logic of anthropocentric national narratives. In this chapter, I focus on two particular genre variations, the Western and the road movie, as these not only provide uniquely Nordic interpretations of ‘universal’ genre forms, but also often conduct their variations through nature appropriation. In Chapters 3 and 4, I move to the horror film and children’s cinema and the various subgenres these entail.

The Nordic deer western In the previous chapter, I suggested that gender plays a key role in Nordic heritage cinema, a notion that is integrally connected to its ecological content. Shooting the Sun and The Guy from the Grave Next Door may be prototypical illustrations of anthropocentric correlations of nature and gender, but the caricature of the strong man as a natural phenomenon emerges even more productively in Nordic responses to the Western genre. The Western in the American context has provoked wide-­ranging coverage in ecocritical analysis with works such as The Landscape of Hollywood Westerns: Ecocriticism in the American Film Genre by Deborah Carmichael (2006) and Brereton’s discussion of Hollywood cinema (Brereton 2005) exploring such themes as border myths, livestock politics, land ethics and conquest of the natural space. The relationship between ecology and elements central to this genre has not gone unnoticed in the Nordic context. Björn Sørenssen, for example, has called Hrafn Gunnlauggson’s Icelandic Viking adaptations such as Hrafninn flýgur/When the Raven Flies (1984) ‘cod Westerns’ (Sørenssen 2005). These adaptations of elements from the traditional sagas feature outcast heroes reclaiming the wild frontiers from usurpers and exploiters and often consciously evoke the iconography of the American Western. In contrast to Iceland, the environments of Norway, Sweden and Finland are open to other types of herding and are less reliant on fishing, with the frontier in this context concerning the northern hemisphere, especially Lapland (or Sámiland) that spans the three countries and Russia. This results in suggestions that Norwegian films like Ofelas/Pathfinder (1987) should in fact be considered ‘northerns’ (Iversen 2005). Cattle politics are a key issue in these northerns and act as important signifiers of frontier myths and masculine self-­realization – both elements central to the Western genre. By comparing two examples of what I call the deer Western,

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Tapio Suominen’s Finnish Mosku – lajinsa viimeinen/Mosku – the Last of His Kind (2003) and Daniel Alfredsson’s Swedish Varg/Wolf (2010), opposing perspectives on Nordic conservationist politics emerge. While these types of films have been discussed as examples of national narration (see Iversen 2005, or Nordfjörd 2010b), adopting a more ecocritical approach enables me to interrogate the ways national narration and anthropocentric logic combine in these genre products. The focus in the Finnish Mosku is on the eponymous protagonist Aleksi Hihnavaara, also known as Mosku, a border guard whose job is to prevent illegal poaching of species such as the reindeer. Key elements of the Western genre prevail throughout the film as Mosku works as both a guide and a tamer of the wild frontiers. It is not surprising that he does this alongside border control as nature and the nation intertwine to build a glorified impression of an ‘authentic’ Finnish masculine need to tame the wild frontier. Throughout, Mosku is effectively an eco-­warrior in his protection of the unspoiled environment from the destructive influence of the humans, who are here largely poachers from Russia or part of the indigenous Kolttasámi minority. Both the real Mosku and the film adaptation have met with criticism and contestation as in many of the Finnish narratives Mosku is depicted as a hero, but historical facts also reveal his oppressive and often violent tactics especially against the Sámi. We focus more on these sorts of neocolonialist politics in Chapter 8, but for now, what interests us the most is the way the film intertwines conservationist ethics with nation-­building. By working together with the Finnish army, Mosku not only protects the animals from poachers, but also effectively stamps these cattle as the property of the state. While the film does also show ‘ethnic Finns’ as poachers, Mosku’s activities are largely targeted at external threats, or ones coded as external due to their ethnic difference. Through this, the film provides a doubled sense of appropriation. First, it is based on a distinctly conservationist approach to the human/environment relationship with no consideration for the non- or the more than-­human as anything other than as resources. Thus, human kind is envisioned as the protector (and thereby the master) of the environment. Secondly, appropriation and conservation is done as part of national protectionism, providing both an instance of conserving natural resources for the nation-­people and strengthening the idea of the masculine ecohero as an authentic national character. Through engaging these multilevel discourses, the film participates in narrating the nation and, perhaps paradoxically, by appropriating the natural environment, reinforces the separation of the human from nature. From an ecocritical

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perspective, the film, despite its clear ‘green’ values, enforces a more or less anthropocentric worldview. In contrast to Mosku’s convergent projection of the ecohero as an assertive protector of the anthropocentric nation, Wolf is a lot more complex in evoking the utilization of nature as a cultural and material repository of resources. Mosku’s role as the masculine ecohero was achieved and maintained precisely because he was able to protect domestic natural resources. In contrast to the adventure schematics and binaries occupying his cinematic world, Wolf provides a more nuanced evocation of the contemporary resource politics of reindeer herding in the rural communities of the north. The herder is a lifestyle that is on the verge of extinction with mass farming and changed consumption patterns threatening the role of individual herders. The protagonist of the film, Klemens, hails from a long line of herders who have grown up in close connection with nature. Meanwhile, he has lost half of his inheritance to a disastrous marriage and is currently struggling with the depletion of his livelihood. He tends to his reindeer herd persistently but frequently faces the scorn of his family for sticking to his outdated ways, especially as his nephew Nelja is following in his footsteps. He comes face to face with the species protection laws of the state as a wolf attacks his herd and destroys much of it. Nelja tacks along as Klemens decides to go after the wolf. They chase it down to a riverbank and Nelja splits its skull with his axe. Klemens has to burn the remains of the wolf as the punishment for an unlawful killing can include imprisonment. But a group of environmental conservationists discover the burning remains and Klemens is soon charged with killing the wolf, while it is up to Nelja to wrestle with the guilt of implicating his uncle in the crime. The film takes a dialectical perspective on the relationship between the wolf and Klemens. First, it suggests that Klemens shares many attributes with the animal. Both are the masters of their environment and live off the reindeer herd and they both in some ways embody the eponymous ‘lone wolf ’ (a very problematic phrase in its own right). But the film tries hard not to position the wolf as some sort of anthropomorphic creature as the depiction of the wolf is often precisely as an animal, not a supernatural threat or personalized nemesis to Klemens. By aspiring to a balanced depiction of the animal, the film is able to gesture to what ecocritic Brian Massumi suggests is a more immersive approach to the ecosystem: ‘The concepts of nature and culture need serious reworking, in a way that expresses the irreducible alterity of the non-­human in and through its active connection to the human and vice

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versa’ (Massumi 2002: 39). While a penetrating sense of irreducible alterity emerges in the desperate struggles Klemens and the wolf conduct over the deer as well as their need to act out of necessity in a mutual cycle of violence, the film draws barriers between the human and the animal world as the legal machinery turns on Klemens, showing some of the consequences these actions can have. As part of its ecopolitics, environmental laws are depicted as nonsensical and fundamentally out of touch with the nature they aim to protect. While Klemens, the representative of ‘good old fashioned’ private property, may live in a sensible relationship with nature, environmental protectionists, in comparison, are faceless bureaucrats who only care about the symbolic status of the animals and not the actual damage they may pose for the deer. Helping them is the legal apparatus of the state and Klemens eventually receives a long jail sentence for the killing. Yet, the film is clearly on the side of Klemens and Nelja and presents the wolf as a dangerous aggressor on their private property. Because the wolf becomes a tool through which the ecopolitics of the film are conducted, it is appropriated into its narrative through what Jennifer Ladino would call a ‘speciecist lens’ (Ladino 2012: 130), a view which distorts its ‘behaviors with a social lens that is fraught with both ideological and generic expectations’. This is taken further as the rest of the film continues Klemens’ battles with the law, consolidating his role as a potentially outdated, but vital part, of the national imaginary. While old dogs like Klemens may die (as happens in a very symbolic manner to his dog), the youth can take up the mantle and continue their ‘authentic’ forms of life. Ultimately, the film stays true to its roots in the Western genre as the outlawed hero maintains his grizzled sense of righteousness against the callous morality of the wider society. To truly understand what is at stake in these ecopolitics, we must turn to the film’s context of production. As economist Hans Sjögren suggests (Fellman et al. 2008), the constitutive ideology of contemporary Sweden can be characterized as ‘welfare capitalism’. This is a society premised on state-­sanctioned economic competition and private property even as it supports welfare state projects with its rhetoric of egalitarianism. The Nordic model of the welfare state has faced constant discussion of downsizing and privatization, especially since the 1990s and the increased privatization and neoliberal models have increased Sweden’s GDP levels, but caused substantial consternation among different political parties and social groups. It is in this context that Wolf makes its ecological arguments as the constitutive ideology of welfare capitalism inflects its contributions

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to contemporary ecopolitics – and inspecting the film through an ecocritical lens reveals the ways any national narrative is inherently inflected with a distinct anthropocentric dimension. While the film is clearly anthropocentric in approach, it does indicate some of the complexities with which conservationism and environmentalism must be debated. Its criticism of environmental laws suggests that conservationism does not meet the demands of a balanced environmentalist approach. Real environmentalism is based on sustainable consumption of resources whereas myopic laws are only interested in the ideological value of animals for environmental politics. The failure to account for private property is another area in which these laws fail. While ecomasculinity is preserved by Nelja’s decision to take up the herder’s role, this is no longer in service of the nation. Where Mosku was concerned with asserting nature as collective property, Wolf is much less focused on the state than it is with underlining the importance of private property. Klemens’ predicament not only consolidates an anti-­statist perspective, but it also harkens back to conservative myths about frontiers that emerge in the Western genre. Whereas this sort of anti-­establishment rebelliousness has a long history in Nordic culture, the stubbornness with which the rights of private property are asserted in relation to both nature and the state is revealing. Impractical nature conservation and resource management is criticized as an unfair and myopic view that exploits the herd owner as well as their right to manage their property. According to this logic, the legal bureaucracy of the state shatters humanity’s relationship with the environment and moves society in a denaturalized direction. Thus, the film seems to argue that the contemporary form of human nature relations of the bureaucratic welfare state is a fundamentally perverted and disconnected one, despite its extensive efforts of green policy management. Absent from this logic is the negative impact of neoliberal privatization that reflects wider transformations in the Nordic welfare state structure, and which, when present in Wolf, is shown as an entirely sensible orientation. Whereas assertions of individualism and sovereignty vindicate the notion of national culture and identity in Mosku, Wolf evokes both a rejection of state operations and a paradoxical embrace of its contemporary neoliberal transformations. Through this, it encapsulates an anthropocentric approach to natural resources, which not only perfectly illustrates the operations of the welfare capitalist ideology, but also consolidates this through its patriarchal politics.

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Denaturalizing nation-­building and masculine identity While Mosku and Wolf appropriate natural resources to strengthen their respective claims about the state of the nation, correlations between masculine identity and nature can also be used to deconstruct national ideologies. In contrast to these more conservative, convergent depictions of ecomasculinity, Kjell Sundvall’s two part Jägarna/Hunters (1996, 2010) takes many of the conventions of the deer Western and mixes them with the Nordic detective thriller. The first Hunters concerns Stockholm detective Erik who returns to his homestead in Norrland where he gets embroiled in conflict with a gang of reindeer poachers. Erik’s brother is the frontman of the poachers, but the conflict soon escalates as witnesses to the poacher activities start dying. Continuing to narrate the divide between the countryside and the city, the second instalment focuses on the murder of a young woman during a hunting exposition in deep rural Norrland. Erik returns to investigate and, as with the previous case, exposes deep personal secrets that led to the murders. While both instalments of the Hunters series feature many elements of the rural utopia narrative, they challenge the explicit nostalgia of the heritage films and the anti-­urban statements of films like Guy in the Grave Next Door. Instead, the depiction of the countryside is considerably bleaker and even consciously disassociated of its conservative appropriations. This is not to imply that the Hunters films do not operate within the parameters of the constitutive ideology of masculine national narration as they both depict two essential aspects of Nordic culture, masculine identity and the notion of wilderness, often intertwining the two in their characterizations of ecoheroes and villains. They mobilize a range of familiar themes and iconography familiar from Swedish cinema, such as the expansive forests and fells of northern Sweden which serve as an elastic, reciprocal context for the violence. According to this logic, natural elements are not mere spectacular landscape, but essential components facilitating the crimes, with the reclusive locations playing a key part in driving the villains to their misdeeds and also collaborating on hiding evidence of their activities. Both films are closely associated with the deer Western especially as conflicts between poachers and the law are embodied in two powerful protagonists representing the blurring of lines between wilderness and civilization. But what makes these films particularly interesting as Nordic variations of the Western is the ways they deconstruct the hunter ethos. They both focus on perversions of this

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ethos and especially the sense of distance these individuals build between themselves and sustainable hunting. These perversions soon cross over to killing humans and blur the line between hunter and prey. This is especially evident in Hunters 2 as the early scenes of the film cross cut between lines of men walking across the unforgiving terrain, and Elin, the soon-­to-be-­dead young woman, running away from an unidentified foe. It is immediately evident that a testosterone culture of masculinity runs deep in this community. Leading this pack is Torsten, adoptive father to Erik’s nephew, Peter. Torsten is a caricature of hypermasculinity, all cigar chomping bravado and aggressive emphasis on the hunt as an essential rite of passage for boys. As Erik investigates Elin’s death, this hypermasculine culture is increasingly revealed to be the cancerous growth in the midst of the community. Torsten embodies this perversion as his affair with Elin resulted in her death at his hands, a matter made worse by his role as the head of the community’s law enforcement. Slowly revealing the insanity lurking behind these patriarchal structures enables the film to deconstruct the central role of masculine identity as national identity, that is, the constitutive ideology at the heart of the conservative nation-­building project. The evocation of masculinity as authenticity is revealed as little more than a façade, a conscious form of rhetorical ‘naturalization’ covering a dysfunctional or even animalistic self. It is this deconstructive turn that allows both films to question the history of anthropocentric approaches to society and nature. The gun, as the instrument that enables humanity to find sustenance and tame the wilderness, is turned back on itself as Torsten is confronted with his crimes, resulting in him shooting himself. No longer the icon of social control, the gun has now become the technological fallacy that results in the destruction of the masculine figurehead of nation-­building. It is intriguing to note that actor Peter Störmare plays both Wolf ’s Klemens and Hunters 2’s Torsten. His performances use identity characteristics familiar from the Western genre to convey a sense of masculinity threatened with challenges to its traditional role. As these two figures of Nordic masculinity are destroyed by social progress, we are made to question some of the taken-­forgranted assumptions about the social contracts that tie such societies in place. The interrogation of the self-­righteous role of the patriarchal male extends to questioning the use of the natural resources for constructing these national narratives. Instead of vindicating the taming of wilderness that has acted as an important sign of consolidating the centrality of the nation, the wilderness myth in itself becomes critiqued. But most importantly, we come face to face with the

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constructed origins of national narratives as well as their convergent anthropocentric rhetoric based on designations of natural authenticity. Instead of the mirror in which we see the psychological reflection of national identity, the contemporary deer Western shows this as anything but a self-­evident process. Moreover, much of the ways such films depict masculinity correlates with Koivunen’s arguments regarding the performativity, and hence, multiplicity of meanings to do with gender roles in the Niskavuori series. By operating challenging the taken-­for-granted notions of the patriarchal social order often implicit in the Western genre, these revisionist representations emphasize the sense that ‘authentic’ masculine identity is a construct, a performance.

Revisionist masculinity and the natural mirror The deer Western genre is a good indicator of some of the ways in which masculinity and nature intertwine in constructing the necessary impression of authenticity for national cinema. But as with any production immersed in their constitutive ideologies – patriarchal national narratives in this case – contradictions are rife in their textual features, even becoming the main theme of films such as the Hunters series. If an ecocritical perspective on the deer Western is particularly illuminating for unravelling the ideological paradoxes prevailing in the genre, it proves to be as intriguing when applied to the road movie. Brereton (2012) suggests the road movie is a particularly productive genre for analysing the uses of landscape in cultural representations. Much of the academic discussion of the genre agrees on several of its key features. Road movies focus on travel as a form of identity politics with the road as a way to inspect cultural conformism and rebellion. The culminations of the films are especially important as they often contain the ideological consensus of the text, with the end of the road often conforming to social conventions (Cohan and Rae Hark 1997). For Cohan and Rae Hark, the genre is a continuation of the Western, inspecting frontier myths and contributing to the formation of national narratives, thus making it particularly useful for our analysis. Others such as Mazierska and Rascaroli (2007) have interpreted the genre in terms of its gender politics, seeing it as a way to, for example, explore masculine crisis in the films of Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki. For us, the most productive example is based on Tommi Römpötti’s comprehensive analysis of the Finnish road movie (Römpötti 2012). In a particularly

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intriguing turn, Römpötti draws on ecocritic Jennifer Ladino’s discussion of the ways landscape can operate as a form of ‘counter nostalgia’. Ladino’s (2005) argument is based on a distinction between ‘official’ and ‘counter’ nostalgia, where official forms are consolidated by the appropriation of nature for places such as national parks. Counter forms are more reflexive and open to diverse interpretations of natural spaces. Römpötti suggests that the road movie can operate as a form of counter nostalgia, allowing us to see iconography conventionally reserved for heritage politics in a different way. By evoking the multiple uses of natural space, Römpötti’s discussion fits neatly with Brereton’s suggestion that the role of landscape in the road movie acts as a ‘performative sensorium and source of cultural meaning in its own right’ (Römpötti 2012: 215). This provides a particularly productive ecocritical way to interpret the heritage politics of the road movie and the ways the landscape can take on multiple guises. In Finland, Dome Karukoski’s Napapiirin sankarit/Lapland Odyssey (2010) uses all the conventional tropes of nature appropriation and landscape narration which it incorporates with the conventions of the road movie. The film takes place in northern Finland, where the protagonist Janne has received an ultimatum from his girlfriend Inari to buy a digibox or end his relationship with her. He sets off on an impromptu road trip with his two hapless friends and the three adventurers run into nymphomaniacs, Russian hunters, car trouble, and, even literally, deer. Lapland Odyssey works on the cusp of two significant transformations. The first is to do with the contemporary information age society where ‘losers’ like Janne seem to be relegated to the rural backwaters of northern Finland. As technology and means of communication change, people like him are mercilessly left behind. To complement this sense of criticism, Janne’s masculine sense of self is challenged by his inability to acquire even the most basic of household appliances. By centralizing these identity politics in the framework of the road movie’s exploration of frontiers and traversing borders, the film provides a sort of Foucaultian heterotopic inversion of social conventions. According to Foucault (1968), the concept of heterotopia describes the ways certain spaces, such as cemeteries or libraries, can generate alternative or even subversive perspectives on social order because they are able to gesture to multiple modes of existence and meaning. If the road forms such a space – and it does as Kääpä (2010a) and Römpötti (2012) argue – it has the potential to generate complex ecocritical perspectives that can lead to alternative mappings of the national psyche in transition. This can be achieved by highlighting the powerful

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traditionalist structures emphasized by national cinema discourse, but in ways that reposition them and question their validity in contemporary society. The setting of Lapland Odyssey enables a number of interesting potential avenues for such interrogative, even ecocritical forms of analysis. The arctic environment of northern Lapland contrasts with the technological transformations at the centre of the narrative and Inari’s former tech-­head boyfriend. Information technology is shown as ephemeral and transient, all based on simulacra. In contrast to this, Janne works with the material reality of a cold, frozen world to win back his love. The frozen surfaces and endless snow act as literal obstacles in this game of finding oneself. They stand in the way of the protagonists, who are all caricatures of different sets of losers – the momma’s boy, the spaced out ‘individualist’, the technology-­obsessed geek, and Janne, the loveable couch potato. The female roles are similarly cast into conventional stereotypes – mothers, prostitutes, hysterical girls and lusty divorcees. The world is neatly linearized into convenient binaries – men and women, the human and the natural. According to this logic, the landscape is neutered into the background of a conservative narrative about masculine self-­realization, whereas the material connotations of snow and ice are only there to prove the extent of Janne’s love for Inari. Most, if not all, areas of the film rely on exoticized forms of nature appropriation, from frozen roads to wayward deer. This equates to a sort of distanced exoticism that sees the nature on screen as simulacra, as the sort of ephemeral depthless imagery the film seeks to criticize with its digibox politics. Once Janne and his friends meet a group of Russian hunters and have to prove their Finnish masculinity to them by draining the corpse of a moose, it is clear that the film does not so much inspect social conventions from the perspective of the heterotopic road as to reinstall them, proving that even if the landscape acts as a sensorium of cultural meanings in its own right, as Brereton would have it, certain depictions can restrict the emergence of such meanings by sticking closely to conservative structures. Instead of providing a transvergent take – that is, a perspective of a society in transformation towards something new and alien, Lapland Odyssey needs to be understood in more convergent terms as a traditionalist, largely anthropocentric depiction of a transforming society desperately harkening back to an illusion of more conventional and stable times, all emphasized by its politics of nostalgia in which the natural environment plays a key role. Instead of counter nostalgia, which would seem more conducive for eco­ critical exploration, Lapland Odyssey seems more comfortable to work with the binaries and conventions that form the foundations of anthropocentric logic.

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Towards an ecocritical approach: North In contrast to this evocation of traditionalist tactics in nature appropriation and patriarchal identity politics, the Norwegian road movie Nord/North (Langlo 2009) provides a much more complex depiction of the relationship between the human and the natural environment. It focuses on Jomar, a former ski athlete who now works in a ski resort as a lift operator, having suffered a devastating mental breakdown. He is in a fragile state, watching National Geographic documentaries focused on various disasters as a way to offset potential panic attacks. This haven of insane stability comes crashing to an end as he finds out that he is the father of a child born way up in the northern hemisphere of Norway. Jomar takes off on a moment’s notice, literally burning the past behind him as he takes on the role of the road movie navigator. The road movie provides a dynamic interface for studying the relationship between humanity and nature, especially as its heterotopic connotations challenge societal binaries and categories. Similarly, the emasculated male is an ideal character on whom to base such narratives, as the character type is a result of the challenges posed to the often taken-­for-granted trappings of conservative society. Having lost his livelihood and his ability to compete in physical competitions, it is not surprising that Jomar’s journey of self-­discovery takes on an almost mythic quality. This is not only about an individual at a loss, but an existential crisis involving considerations from gender conventions to national identity, a crisis that subsumes the whole of Norway and its distinct demographic groups. Jomar takes only five litres of alcohol and a snowmobile as he heads up north, a gesture embedded in extreme caricature and irony evoking the kind of quirky art cinema for which Aki Kaurismäki is known (Nestingen 2005; Kääpä 2010a). But in sharp contrast to the somewhat passive landscape of Lapland Odyssey or even the films of Kaurismäki, nature takes on a fully active reciprocal role as Jomar navigates through its obstacles and its opportune places of reflection. What would an ecocritical take on the road movie entail? After all, these are narratives integrally premised on consumptive forms of travel, often not for absolute necessity with clear direction, but the goal of aimless wandering. While the road movie inspects societal norms from its heterotopic perspective, sometimes questioning, at others validating them, ecocritical takes on the genre focus on the ways the human protagonists navigate the terrain and its environmental realities. Such contributions would question the centrality of human logic in the

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ecosystem, not take it for granted as arguably happens in many examples of the genre including Lapland Odyssey. To facilitate such a perspective, environmental conditions in North constantly ridicule our hero’s attempts to use them for self-­ realization. Jomar’s snow blindness sets in, it is clear that masculine conquest of nature with only alcohol and attitude as weapons is an anthropocentric myth. Instead of storming north Norway as he intended, Jomar has to stay put and sleep in the closet of a farmhouse for two days. Constantly balancing a narrative urge to construct a mythical sense of ecomasculinity and emphasizing its unrealistic aspirations, the film provides an intriguing take on the collision of an anthropogenic urge to narrate nature and the resistance this faces from ecosystemic realities. To enforce this sense, Jomar’s pure macho bravado is undercut by another instance as he discovers an old hunters’ cabin and takes shelter. But even here, Jomar is out of his element as he soon burns down the shelter by accident and has to flee into the wild cold night. Every attempt to conquer nature persistently fails as the film unravels all the conventions and iconography that normatively hold up these sorts of national narratives, including another key element of the Nordic national narrative – alcohol. Jomar meets another typical embodiment of Nordic masculinity, a skater youth who proceeds to question him about his potential gayness. The closeted mind of the Nordic male becomes caricatured as the two find new increasingly bizarre ways of getting drunk. Following this line of parody, Jomar encounters an army training operation and eventually runs into a Sámi village, allowing the film to discuss two potent symbols of cultural and political nationhood – the force of the state, and ethnic diversity. But these, also, turn out to be approximations of the ‘real’ thing, as authentic as national symbolism derived from nature. After almost shooting Jomar, the army turns out to be largely incompetent reservists doing the bare minimum for their country. The Sámi, an indigenous minority inhabiting the northern parts of Norway, Sweden and Finland, are shown in a different light from the usual exotic mysticism in which they are conventionally represented. Instead of the typical iconography of, for example, reindeer sleighs, the Sámi now use snowmobiles, which they have to lock to the kota – the traditional hut – to prevent any thefts. While we will focus on the Sámi in Chapter 8, their appearance in North is significant in its attempts to deconstruct the symbolic appropriations of ‘natural’ elements for the construction of national narratives – especially as the lack of modern technology in conventional representations of the Sámi is often used to imply their ‘natural’ state.

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That is not say the film does not include its share of traditionalist iconography. A tribal elder sits peacefully in his kota waiting to die, as according to him, the old ways are in transformation and all life faces extinction from global warming. To emphasize this point, the floor of the kota gives way and both him and Jomar sink into the lake. While the kota and traditional lives may sink back to Earth, for Jomar this is a chance for his rebirth. Through this oscillation between traditional iconography and emergent ways of life, the film works at the intersections of constitutive and constituted ideology, where its arguments are best understood as a transvergent perspective on a transforming society. This takes place initially as its heterotopic road movie conventions set loose all conventional societal moorings. Secondly, this impression of a world on the move complements its ecological dimensions, depicting a planetary ecosystem on the cusp of massive transformation. Through this, the film provides an impression of the sort of hybrid cartography Thomson (2006) and Whatmore (2003) discuss as the world of the film is an inherently transforming space, where only the constant performance of change, enacted through perseverant travel and the destruction of places already visited, makes any sense. It is this performance of change that allows the film to gesture to a transvergent perspective of a world metamorphosing into something new. By capturing the extinct variations of the ‘natural male’ – that is, a stereotyped form of male identity conceptualized as an authentic embodiment of national identity – in a more cynical, ironic road movie setting than the more conservative impressions of Lapland Odyssey, the film unravels the very act of the naturalizing national narrative, showing us both how this narrative act is achieved and how it is anything but a self-­evident given fact.

Conclusions The role of heritage culture and ideology in the Nordic deer Western and the road movie reveals complex approaches to both the convergent logic of nature appropriation as well as its deconstruction. While many of the films discussed in these two initial chapters are often commended for their abilities to reflect authentic national culture by being ‘in touch’ with nature (for examples, see several chapters in Soila 2007, and Nestingen and Elkington 2005), these appreciations often overlook the limited role afforded to nature. While some of the studies see national identity as arising from nature, the purpose of the analysis is

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clearly anthropocentric. While convergent understandings of nature are elemental aspects of both traditional heritage films as well as texts that follow established genre conventions, films such as North highlight the mechanisms through which the natural environment is consumed and appropriated. In this, the film’s perspective is as close to a transvergent approach as we get within the general confines of films that use conventions and iconography of heritage cinema. By evoking a hybrid sensibility, especially their emphasis on fracturing anthropocentric logic, transvergent approaches on the level of representation provide vital interventions to the dominant means of nature appropriation. These approaches continue in the horror film genre, the topic of the next chapter, a mode of production that harnesses the sublime power of nature to terrify the human as it challenges or displaces their anthropocentric sense of superiority. Thus, I now address the ways in which nature’s ‘difference’ is used to consolidate anthropocentric logic, appropriated both for the purposes of national narration as well as entertainment.

3

The Horror Film in an Ecological Context If the deer Western and the road movie provide exemplary case studies for interrogating the ways gender politics, environmental considerations, anthropocentric logic and national narratives intertwine, the horror genre amplifies these considerations to a more metaphoric level of political demand. As Brereton has noted (Brereton 2005), Hollywood cinema has been especially active in producing ‘ecohorror’ films with nature as a challenge to human civilization. Seminal works such as Jaws (1975) and Grizzly (1977) or more contemporary Hollywood tales such as The Happening (2008) and Contagion (2011), envision threats from different aspects of the natural world, including a range of predatory species, viruses, contaminations and nature in its own right. Nordic producers have not been as active in envisioning or confronting natural terrors, though it is not difficult to identify an increased interest in such themes in various different Nordic film cultures, with the different cultures exhibiting their own variations of central themes such as mythic monsters and natural predators. The combination of ecological concerns and the conventions of the horror film are relevant for my study as not only do they evoke key themes in ecocriticism, from depictions of rural spaces to exploitation of natural resources, but also touch on historical particularities of the different Nordic countries, from the history of eugenics to welfare ideology. With this, they give rise to reinterpreted versions of national narratives, where nature appropriation combines with the conventions of anthropocentric logic, but in often different ways to the heritage films, as well as the deer Western and the road movie. I will now explore Nordic ecohorror, moving from the central role of the human in the slasher genre to more abstract evocations of nature sublime.

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Norwegian slashers Norwegian film producers have been at the forefront of horror production among the Nordic countries, corresponding to a production strategy that has as its basis the Norwegian industry’s transforming relationship with the popular genre film. Iversen (2005) has identified at least three distinct cycles of popular genre production in the past thirty years or so, the first of which is exemplified by action-­oriented films such as Orion’s Belt (1985) and Pathfinder (1987). The second one occurred in the 1990s and combined action with survivalist horror in ways that highlighted differences between rural and urban Norway. The third cycle continues the survivalist horror theme but now combines it with elements of the slasher. Iversen considers Pål Øie’s Villmark/Wilderness (2003) the instigator of the third cycle with its story of a group of youths being slaughtered one by one by a masked killer in an isolated cabin setting. I will also focus on the third cycle here as this corresponds to our general time frame of the films of the 2000s. In addition, many of the films feature a distinct environmental dimension that has been largely ignored to date in scholarship on Nordic cinema. Øie’s Wilderness is an appropriate place to start this discussion as the film was a massive success on its release and resulted in films such as the Nazi zombie slasher Döda Sno/Dead Snow (2008) and the Fritt Vilt/Open Season trilogy (2006–10). The film draws heavily from the cabin horrors of Sam Raimi to The Blair Witch Project, demonstrating the transnational applicability of the genre. But crucially, it combines these with domestic frontier myths as well as references to horror productions such as De dødes tjern/Lake of the Dead (1949). And accordingly, the tale of television producer Gunnar taking his employees to a remote cabin in the Kaupanger mountains to shoot a television show about survival in the wilderness, provides such a case. As soon as the protagonists settle in, they see a glimpse of a masked creature in the forest and find an abandoned tent next to a dead body in the lake. In true genre fashion, they are soon picked off one by one as they struggle with their inability to climatize to the wilds. The narrative of the film follows conventions set by its American predecessors but contextualizes these with specifically Norwegian cultural elements as Gunnar discusses the ways the lake would never freeze over in the winter and how the location used to function as a Nazi camp during the Second World War. It is this use of domestic cultural tropes that makes the film particularly useful for our exploration of the appropriation of nature for national narration.

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The cultural indicators, however, take a back seat in this case for a more profound ecological mystery. We find out that the murderer is a hiker whose girlfriend died of poisoning after drinking from the lake. But this culmination is left open with the film suggesting a wider context for the events as the local community is complicit in facilitating the murders. Furthermore, the culmination suggests a mythical element to the hiker’s insanity as there seem to be forces operating in the mountain waters over which humans have little control. Ultimately, the juxtaposition of humans divested of their trappings of civilization facing a mythical primordial immensity of nature emerges as the key theme of the film, challenging some of the inherent anthropocentric foundations of the genre. While nature does remain an inexplainable antagonist to humanity, this suggestion at least questions the typical paradigms through which conventional anthropocentric narratives often operate. As Gunnar’s aim to shoot a National Geographic type exposé of survivalism is shown as an example of appropriating nature for one’s own benefits as well as domesticating it through mediation, the film foregrounds the process of anthropocentric appropriation. In Wilderness, the unexplainable comes to show Gunnar and the crew the overwhelming complexity of the nature sublime, which refuses to abide by human appropriation and rationality. The normative convergent logic of nature appropriation is thus askew, setting the scene for nature’s treatment in the next contributions to the Norwegian ecoslasher.

Open season on anthropocentric logic Wilderness began a cycle of Norwegian ecoslashers that would continue with Roar Uthaug’s Open Season (2006). Filmed at the mountains of Jotunheim, the film and its follow-­ups take full advantage of the isolated landscape, painting it in mythic tones as an extreme absolute wilderness. But whereas Øie’s Wilderness constructed a depiction of humanity’s inability to rationalize nature, Open Season is a more traditional slasher in the vein of Hollywood films such as Friday the 13th (Cunningham 1980). Again, a snowboarding trip to the mountains turns into a desperate struggle for survival as the youths are killed one by one by an insane hooded man. The murderer is the deranged, severely mutilated son of the managers of a hotel, burnt down years ago, who now unleashes all the pent-­up anger into our protagonists. In contrast to the all-­encompassing and hostile magnitude of nature in Wilderness, Uthaug’s film conceptualizes a more

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interactive relationship between human and nature. Instead of an overwhelming opponent to our protagonists, nature presents a means of survival for the ‘final girl’ of the film, Jannicke, as she uses tree branches, snow, wind and ditches in this combat of the human against her inhuman antagonist. Through this appropriation of natural resources for human survival, Open Season provides almost an ‘anthropocentricizing’ response to the more existential insignificance of the human seen in Wilderness. Part of this response concerns the ways the fight to the death – an anthropocentric yell of existence – suggests the fragility of anthropocentric conceptualizations such as civilization. As her assailant ‘went wild’ after being isolated in the wild for too long, so Jannicke must also embrace her roots and violently confront the menace of untamed nature. And to a large extent, the first of the Open Season films conforms to a more ecological understanding of this process with the confrontations taking place and strictly following the rules of the environment. But by the second instalment, the madman transforms into a superhuman foe as he inexplicably resuscitates in a hospital and resumes his rampage. Jannicke’s earlier use of natural resources is now turned on its head as the wild man uses his hands and other instruments, while Jannicke uses traps and ultimately a gun to kill her assailant. This survivalist ethos ultimately maintains the barriers between her and the animalistic human killing machine with her use of the gun to finally destroy her opponent positioning this as a conflict between wild nature and human civilization. While barriers between human and nature are firmly in place by the conclusion of the second episode, the narrative of the duology, at least, shows awareness of the fragile surfaces of civilization under which the protagonists hide. As the experiences of the wild man and Jannicke’s initial encounter with him show, an animal sense of self is waiting to erupt through human logic at moments of extreme threat. But on the other hand, the duology never takes this too far as its survivalist narrative embraces anthropocentric rhetoric that emphasizes human domination over nature with the possibility of return to civilization as the ultimate reward. It is to investigating these human animals that I now turn.

Human animals Whereas Wilderness poses nature as something more than human, and the Open Season films foster a largely anthropocentric re-­appropriation of untamed

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nature, other Nordic ecoslashers, such as the Norwegian Rovdyr/Manhunt (Syversen 2009), focus explicitly on blurring the distinction between human and non-­human. As part of the ecoslasher genre, Manhunt unravels the thin line that separates the human from the animal as yet another group of hikers are slaughtered by a pack of hunters. The boundaries between the human and the less/more than human become challenged as the antagonists, with almost superhuman abilities to navigate the terrain and act as a part of the natural ecosystem, treat their captured victims as cattle. The kills are especially revealing as they are performed with methods more akin to butchering than the fetishistic gore explosions that are part of the genre (though we get those as well). Indeed, they do not focus on the fashionable slow torment and torture of the captured animal but start with a maiming shot and end quickly with a knife to the back of the neck. In contrast to this sort of business as usual, when the lead girl turns the tables on the hunters, her kills are clearly instinctive – this sort of ‘becoming animal’ contrasts vividly with the ‘already animal’ of the hunters. Civilization is only a veneer that strips away as instinctual survival mechanisms take over when confronted with a life or death situation. My use of the term ‘becoming’ draws from two well-­known ecocriticial conceptualizations, including Deleuze’s ‘becoming-­animal’ (Deleuze 1987) and David Abram’s ‘becoming animal’ (Abram 2011). In Manhunt, the Deleuzian challenge to the boundaries of human identity – that is, the human as a sovereign, distinct entity conceptualized as apart from the ecosystem – integrates with Abram’s ecophilosophical urging to appropriate non-­anthropomorphic ways of thinking to understanding the human as part of the ecosystem. The point is to confront the anthropocentric mindset that continues to drive even ecoslashers like Open Season and divest the human of all the safety harnesses that prohibit them from plunging too deep into the wild. In this way, the actions of the final girl of Manhunt are not ‘as’ anthropocentric as most of the other contributions to the genre – if such a comparison is possible. Instead, they can be considered as depictions of the ways in which the human can effectively be shocked into assuming a hybrid position that questions the structures that centralize human rationality as the societal norm. The actions in this position may lack logic, but that is precisely the point. Becoming animal is a state where the human is able to attain a more advantageous position in terms of survival in nature, suggesting that the human could, in fact, be better off by divesting civilization. These Norwegian contributions to the ecoslasher genre progress from a sense of mastery in human nature relations to blurring distinctions between the

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human and the ‘primitive’. The depiction of wilderness in Manhunt, with its typical uncivilized hillbillies, maintains boundaries between nature and civilization and could thus be seen to vindicate the conventional logic of anthropocentric civilization. Safety is to be found in the comforts of urban life and the regressive act of becoming animal is only a survival mechanism. Granted, much of the pleasure of films such as these arises from the uncomfortable situations in which the becoming animal process places the protagonists and, by extension, the spectators. Such positions also confirm the superiority of urban civilization as one only has to become an animal if one foolishly ventures beyond the boundaries that uphold civilization. Yet, even as these ecoslashers vindicate anthropocentric safe distance from the wilderness, they, at the very least, blur the normative relations between the human and nature, designated as other by the cultural logic of late capitalism – that is, as repositories of natural resources ready for exploitation. The primitive ethos of the hunter gatherer mentality in the Norwegian ecoslasher can thus be considered as an attempt to chronicle humanity’s fraught relationship with the environment, which often draws on base needs and explodes into excessive violence. Through this, they embody the ways commercial cinema both takes advantage of nature and relies on the entertainment value its challenges pose. Simultaneously, they challenge some of the fundamental principles of the convergent, anthropocentric approach seen in heritage cinema and other genre formations. While they do rely, of course, on a certain degree of nature appropriation, challenges to human isolation from the ecosystem include a transvergent perspective not unlike that of North, where the principles of ecosystemic existence are a constant topic of interrogation, not simplistic facts or assumed dominance.

The Icelandic ecoslasher: Ecotourism and resource management While Norway undeniably holds the leading role in Nordic slasher production, its negotiations between anthropocentric survivalism and hybrid perspectives take on different variations in other Nordic contexts. The Finnish–Icelandic co-­production The Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre (Kemp 2009) is one such case and takes a more self-­conscious approach combining national narration with the conventions of the ecoslasher. The focus is on whaling, a concern closely

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related not only to ecocriticism, but also to Iceland’s domestic resource management. Industrial whaling has been a controversial topic for Iceland due to opposition and pressure to cease from various governments and organizations, including the International Whaling Commission. The confrontation between Greenpeace and Icelandic whalers sets the scene for the film and recalls the infamous Rainbow Warrior boat incident, concerning an Icelandic whaler which shot a harpoon at the activists’ ship. Appropriately, Harpoon is the alternative title of the film, connoting both its horror genre credentials as well as the history of whaling in Iceland. Much of the film is in English, headed by the Finnish actress Pihla Viitala and featuring a cameo by Gunnar Hansen, whose aggressive performance as Leatherface contributed much to the success of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Hooper 1974). Indeed, the film is a clear homage to its American predecessor and comes with a set of commercial expectations that necessitate that we take its ecopolitics with a grain of salt. To establish its focus on both national narration as well as ecocritical inspection of the means through which this narration happens, The Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre’s opening credits run over documentary footage of a whale hunt and the subsequent decimation of the whale carcass. These are underscored by mournful music providing the scene a lamenting tone, suggesting that not only is this a sensitive issue to the Icelandic people, but also that the film aspires to a considerably serious take on the issue. But this tone is soon dismantled as we meet the human ‘cattle’ of the film, composed of a multicultural group of character types, all with heavily caricatured national and ethnic stereotypes. The protagonists are all in Iceland to conduct ecotourism and see the whales, an activity that ends up costing most of them their lives. It turns out that the sighting expedition is a tourist trap and effectively a form of vengeance by the fishing industry whose livelihood the anti-­whaling decisions threaten. As we meet our antagonists – a mother and two sons – the radio broadcasts the International Whaling Commission’s decision to enforce the ban on whaling. This has a clear impact on the Icelandic industries as one of the sons states: ‘These American whale huggers have turned our government into a bunch of whale loving sissies leaving us with nothing but debt.’ The villains are xenophobes who rant about foreigners, both tourists and anti-­whaling commissioners, who, according to them, are all Greenpeace ‘green piss’. For them, whale hunting has been key to the nation’s industries and fishermen who have been ravaged from their jobs now have to turn to other types of activities to survive.

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It seems the film wants to create a dialogic perspective on whaling as the captain of the tourist boat describes how Iceland used to be number three in the world for whale hunting, but now, he is proud that a more sustainable approach has been found with ecotourism. These two indigenous perspectives run the gamut of Icelandic opinions on whaling, though it is ultimately foreign meddling into the country’s affairs that emerges as a distinct negative. Most of the tourists are depicted in a negative light, characterized as both selfish and exploitative, or as one of the locals puts it: ‘It is only idiots and fascists that go whale watching. No one ever thinks of it from the perspective of the whales.’ While comments such as these are highly sarcastic, rational suggestions that the boat engines cause the whales distress and lead them to abandon their mating habitations suggests that whale watching is not an entirely ecosensitive activity either. Whale watching, as both a form of cultural imposition and an exploitative anthropocentric activity is seen as a similar life out of balance as whaling. Both types of anthropocentric activity are thus seen in negative terms, being as they are ways of utilizing biological lifeforms as consumptive or entertainment resources. In contrast to the Norwegian variations of the genre, context-­specific ecopolitics are a central concern in The Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre as the film both outlines the centrality of whaling for Icelandic culture and shows its ultimately detrimental impact on the whale population. Appropriately for such a dialogic eco-­narrative, the film culminates in a bizarre turn as a whale turns the tables on two of the surviving tourists, attacking and capsizing the vessel in which they float. In contrast to the final girl triumphing over nature or descending into a state of animalism, she ends up floating in the ocean as potential game. As the whale watcher now becomes the watched and the hunted, the film suggests a fundamentally inverted and darkly comic impression of humanity’s place in the ecosystem. Divested of the anthropocentric defence mechanisms that enable the assumption of a dominant species position, ecoactivists are made to experience the unpredictable and unmerciful wilderness that they seek and admire. To evoke this ecological dualism, The Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre takes pleasure in putting victims in place of the whales as they are killed by an assortment of harpoons and sharp prods. The genre form revels in the destruction of the human body while it also asks us to root for the same humans. Through this, it reflects the duality of whaling as part of Icelandic culture and economy – it is, at once, considered a part of its national narrative, but it is also a detrimental act, both morally and economically dubious in form.

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A further level of complication emerges as the human in the ecoslasher – both Norwegian and Icelandic – is positioned against other humans in a slow process of becoming animal, of achieving a state of ‘creatureness’, of attaining a firmer connection with ecosystemic relations, as David Abram (2011) puts it. Yet, this creatureness is rarely liberating as, instead, it becomes a violent traumatic process, a sort of de-­birth back from the civilized ‘cult of the expertise’ Abram identifies as the principle logic of contemporary society. The immersion of Whatmore’s (2003) hybrid cartography – of attaining a more elaborate level of consciousness, of being in nature – is here seen as a traumatic process, a violation of human barriers. Attaining a sense of creatureness is thus both an ecological project, putting the human in touch with the natural self, and also simultaneously, it is one that remains restricted to the conventions of the cinematic form through which the process is envisioned. After all, the threat to civilization is a crucial part of these films’ entertainment value as well as the ways they confront the viewers, who, in turn, remain confined to their safe positions as ‘civilized’ spectators of the film. In this way, the films and their implied spectators remain bound to the cultural logic underlying their viewing positions – they are made to attain hybridity only for the fleeting moments the film runs, but ultimately come to attain the largest of pleasures from returning to conventional civilization. The necessity to conduct the process of becoming animal through the painful violations of the ecoslasher genre indicates the extent to which the urban and the rural, or civilized and the natural, are considered to be dichotomous opposite poles. Furthermore, as the ecoheroine’s beliefs in her moral certainty is shaken by her ultimate immersion into the ecosystem – and potentially the food cycle – it would not be too difficult to suggest that ecoactivism is a redundant and ultimately an ignorant pursuit that does not take into account socio-­economic or ecological realities. Reflecting the conservative rhetoric of national self-­ determination, whaler industrialists such as Kristján Loftsson would certainly agree with the latter. As such, the genre plays an integral part in Nordic ecocinema’s negotiation and questioning of humanity’s place in the ecosystem and the barriers that maintain separation between human and nature. But simultaneously, the multiple ways in which its ecological content can be interpreted indicate the fallacies in attempting to both engage national politics as well as the anthropocentric foundations on which they are premised. The result can be a text as contradictory as The Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre which continues the convergent anthropocentric logic of national narration – it is, after

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all, a film about Iceland featuring whaling – even as it rejects some of the founding principles on which such narratives often rely.

A divergent take on the ecohorror genre: Dead Snow The role of nature in the Nordic ecoslasher is both part of the genre’s anthropocentric roots and also a means to include ‘indigenous authenticity’ to these imported formulas. While this use is thus not quite as conservative as is the case with some of the heritage appropriations of nature, it retains many of the basic principles of convergent uses of nature. A more postmodernist version of nature appropriation appears in Tommy Wirkola’s Döda Snö/Dead Snow (2008), which concerns the outlandish notion of a troop of Nazis becoming reanimated after having been frozen in the Norwegian arctic climate for fifty years. We never find out the mechanics of the reanimation process as the soldiers come back to life to stalk a group of snowboarders trekking to a remote cabin. Dead Snow is a combination of elements: it starts out as a slasher film, features zombies, draws on historical facts, and combines this with the sort of gunplay familiar from action cinema. Very little of the film is directly related to Norwegian culture as, for example, the history of Nazi occupation is glossed over in a short speech and a few signifiers. Furthermore, the depiction of the zombified stormtroopers is more akin to the type of pop culture Nazism seen in the Indiana Jones films (Spielberg 1981–2008) or in self-­conscious parodies such as the Finnish Iron Sky (2012), a comical exploration about a Nazi invasion from the Moon. If different forms of national culture have a specific horror heritage, Dead Snow does little to evoke this beyond its immediate setting in the Norwegian mountains. Indeed, Norwegian film historians Moseng and Vibreto conclude that the film provides the ‘international audience with an overload of stereotypical Norwegian images and behaviours’ (Moseng and Vibreto 2010: 38), while it also aspires to satisfy a domestic thirst for internationally competitive genre cinema. If nature is harnessed for national narration as part of the heritage genre, its ideological role in ecohorror is not much different. After all, the use of nature as a signifier of authenticity in these genre films is often consciously targeted at the domestic and international marketplace, positioning it as a similarly appropriated aspect of convergent anthropocentric logic. Yet, nature is an understudied part of Dead Snow as academics have mostly focused on its cultural politics. This is somewhat surprising as ecological considerations are part of the film’s thematic

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structure from early on, ranging from the local ‘village idiot’ ranting about the futility of ecological thinking to the ways the victims and the villains interact with the environment. In a key scene, one of the snowboarders has to climb a tree to escape the hulking stormtroopers. Fearing detection, she stumbles on a bird’s nest and has to kill the protective mother by biting its head off. The crude and even animalistic killing creates a forceful contrast between human survival mechanisms and conservationist idealism often emphasizing the purity of nature. When push comes to shove, creatureness takes over and ensures the survival of the human species over the other weaker ones. If survivalism and conquest of nature form the basic ethos underlying the Norwegian ecohorror, what exactly is the role of nature in a film like Dead Snow? By providing a reinterpretation of the ecoslasher’s survivalist becoming animal strategy of immersing the human in the ecosystem, Dead Snow provides an almost Darwinian take on this integral genre trope. In most of the Norwegian ecoslashers, it is the physical propensities of the Norwegian environment that made and enabled the villains, and it was up to the protagonists to negotiate their relationship with a simultaneously threatening and enabling nature. Both Wilderness and Open Season envisioned nature as a means of survival for the protagonists (if they were able to grasp these qualities). In Dead Snow nature is first and foremost an obstacle that the human protagonists must overcome to survive. In addition, it is also the factor that enables the Nazis to sustain themselves over the years. Nature in Dead Snow operates almost on a divergent logic, acting thematically as a way to separate the human from non-­human nature. As guns once more prove to be the way to survive (as was the case with the second Open Season), technological superiority is established as the primary arbiter of human mastery over the threat posed by nature. If thematically, the film poses a divergent take on nature, it also uses many convergent tactics in nature appropriation. First of all, the ironic tone required by the transnational genre format results in a postmodern approximation of both historical and ecological material – the Nazis are clearly lacking in historical substance and the mountainous snowy landscape is first and foremost a commercial signifier. Secondly, nature provides the film with its ‘stereotypical’ Norwegian material and effectively acts as a form of cultural capital in breaching both domestic and international markets. It enables these genre products to differentiate themselves from imported competition when connecting with domestic audiences, as well as allowing the film to distinguish itself in competition abroad. Thus, what may at first seem like an active role for the natural

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environment is revealed to be part of the logic of appropriation that operates in both heritage and genre national cinema, here conducted to evoke a more global relevance for the film instead of constraining it to the limiting politics of heritage cinema.

Of elves and trolls: Mythical ecomonsters and commercial national cinema The juxtaposition of popular aspirations, domestic history, genre formulations and ecological considerations characterizes much of the ecohorror genre in Norwegian cinema, moving from negotiations over humans’ ecosystemic role to more explicit appropriations of nature as cultural capital in Dead Snow. Many of these films gesture to the national past, finding in it a source of cultural reference and a way to provide marketable variations of genre formulas. Other films continue this politics of appropriation but find more explicit ways to combine historical references and ecological connotations. Films such as the Norwegian Trolljägaren/Troll Hunter (2010) and Finnish Rare Exports (2010) explore, often self-­consciously, the continued relevance and use of traditional myths in contemporary twenty-­first century society. As many of these myths are in one way or another premised on different degrees of nature appropriation, they provide exemplary case studies for more transvergent takes on the Nordic ecohorror. To explore the ways national myths integrate with ecological concerns, I start out with trolls, who play a key part in Norwegian mythology. Troll Hunter is a mockumentary take on these myths and the ecohorror genre and follows a group of student reporters investigating the trail of an infamous troll hunter, Hans, whose job it is to contain the misbehaving trolls. He apparently works for the Norwegian Wildlife Board and with his supervisor Finn, pushes all of the limits in conservationist action in attempting to contain any troll problems. Not only does he work to maintain them within their specific stomping grounds, but he also uses sunlight and other weapons to destroy any trolls who get out of control. The students soon discover that Hans actually works for an entirely different government agency, the secretive Troll Security Service, which devotes its activities to ensuring that the existence of trolls never becomes public. For example, if a troll goes wild, the organization will cover it up with indicators of an attack by another wild species. But this all comes to an end as while investigating troll sightings, one of the students is bitten by the three-­headed Ringlefinch. He

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becomes ill and soon develops the first signs of rabies which has also infected the troll population. The climax of the film takes place deep in troll territory as Hans attempts to subdue a gigantic Jotnar who has been breaking down the power lines containing the troll population. This not only provides a spectacular climactic showdown mandatory for the genre, but instils the film with a conservationist dimension. Hans’ job is to act as a wildlife guardian who preserves nature from itself. In this conservationist activity, the Troll Security Service uses power lines to herd the trolls in ways that divests them from their role as mythic creatures of national significance and positions them as wild natural creatures. Through this imaginary positioning, the film notes the anthropological organization of biological creatures into cultural categories, especially the ways animals are appropriated as cultural capital and exotic paraphernalia for national narratives (think of, for example, the role of the deer in the deer Western). The move suggests an alternative critique of the harvesting of natural resources for domestic consumption especially through narratives with distinct culturalizing ambitions, which are not able to capture the biological essence of these animals. But simultaneously, it critiques the conservationist actions of Hans’ organization as by treating trolls as effectively wild animals; the rabies infection ravaging the population indicates that they are being corrupted by proximity and coexistence with humanity, with human obsession on kennelling the trolls proving to be especially conducive for spreading the disease. In constructing this bifocal critique of humanity’s negative influence on the ecosystem, Troll Hunter takes on transvergent connotations. While much of its content is somewhat conservationist in tone – ‘we should leave the trolls alone’, seems to be its message – it also includes more self-­reflexive material to indicate the complex ways in which this appropriation takes place. The film explains the role trolls continue to play in the contemporary hyper-­saturated media culture as while the governmental forces shut down the students’ operation, their attempts to contain the footage of the trolls fail. It is distributed widely and the film culminates with a statement from Prime Minister Jen Stoltenberg revealing accidentally the existence of the trolls on television. However, the domestic audience remains entirely indifferent, suggesting that trolls are important for national narratives only if they are allowed to remain a myth. The construction of barriers between the human and the natural world is the essence of anthropocentric logic and this is exactly what Troll Hunter interrogates through its transvergent take on naturalized national narration. Emerging

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as a play on fictitious national narratives, the climax with Stoltenberg and the use of mockumentary and found footage influences throughout the film reveal a self-­reflexive exploration of the cultivation of (invented) national resources for global consumption. By using a range of cinematic means with connotations of realism, the film both reveals the ways fictional narratives appropriate nature while it also uses this very appropriation to provide itself with cultural capital. The symbolic significance of the trolls has been essential for Troll Hunter’s domestic and international success and, thus, the use of ecological material as entertainment both exploits nature while it also confronts the viewer with this exploitation and indicates to them their key role in maintaining the normative constitution of anthropocentric logic. Through its use of ‘realistic’ conventions and exotic exploitation, the film provides a crucially self-­aware contribution to the ways in which popular Nordic ecocinema both addresses and accentuates the problems of engaging with ecocritical issues in cinema.

Natural resources for the international markets: Rare Exports The appropriation of nature in Nordic horror films has so far ranged from questioning the role of the human in the ecosystem, to divergent conquests of nature in Dead Snow to the self-­reflexive approach of Troll Hunter. The Finnish Rare Exports continues to question the appropriation of mythical monsters, depicted as indigenous natural resources of their respective nations, for narratives of nation. In contrast to Troll Hunter’s ironic take on Norway’s troll politics, Jalmari Helander’s film foregrounds the idea of indigenous natural resources being harvested for the global markets. The resource in question is the indigenous elf, which resembles an old man in appearance, and which is dangerous if provoked, not unlike the trolls of Norway. Rare Exports takes its self-­aware representation of exploitation of natural resources even further than Troll Hunter and confronts the convergent logic of the cultural industries head on. In a set of short films preceding the release of the feature film, we find out that a group of Finnish hunters capture, clean, teach and package these elves as ‘authentic’ Finnish Christmas commodities. The elves are then shipped out to customers worldwide to act as Santa Clauses. While the commercialization of Christmas is certainly a target of criticism in these short films, they also lay claim to the Santa Claus myth, emphasizing the conception that Santa Claus is said to originate from the Korvatunturi fell in northern Finland. This is a paradoxical instance of

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reclaiming Santa back from its ‘coca-­colonized’ image, but also repurposing it as an indigenous cultural resource – all in a self-­referential ironic package. The feature film takes place before the short films and tells the backstory of the Rare Exports business model. An exploration excavating the Korvatunturi fell uncovers something strange and soon the local reindeer population is destroyed. The herders of the region face bankruptcy, and to make the matter worse, naked old men start to haunt the children of the village at night. A local boy, Pietari, captures one of the prowlers in a wolf trap and soon faces a horde of elves which are in the process of defrosting Santa. But once the hunters take on the hordes and blow up the defrosting Santa, the elves are left without purpose to wander the plains of Lapland. The elves are depicted as a dangerous but manageable resource much like the trolls of Troll Hunter, but the conventional role of these anthropomorphic creatures as of both mythical significance as well as cultural capital is twisted by their resemblance to humans. These packaged old men, complete with the stereotypical red coats of the Americanized Santa, are an impression of Finland’s cultural exports, much like the myth of the authentic Finn, a male of little communication and stern outlook on life, whom the protagonist hunters here embody. Blurring the line between the human and natural resource, Rare Exports takes to task the building of Finland’s cultural brand image which relies on subjugating aspects of its culture to international demand. Yet, the film, of course, relies on appropriating nature as a marker of authenticity for its own cultural brand – as much as Troll Hunter does – as its genre trappings and bombastic visual style, complete with snowy helicopter chases, comes to reflect its own exploitation of national iconography and stereotypes for more commercial purposes. If both Rare Exports and Troll Hunter are guilty of convergent anthropocentric logic, why not see them as part of nation-­building cinema where ecological argumentation is used as another factor vindicating the natural bases of national narratives? While they do continue the construction of national cultural brands – in this case, quirky takes on indigenous horrors – they are also deconstructions of this idea as they show the ways states and other organizations consciously manage ‘natural’ resources and their role in national branding. While they rely on appropriation of ‘nationalized’ resources, this does not imply that they operate without a thoroughly critical perspective on this process. If natural (and by extension national) myths are inventions and appropriations, foregrounding the ways they are commercialized (as in Rare Exports) or mystified (as with the case of Troll Hunter) divests them of their often taken-­for-granted role in the construction of the national culture.

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Ecophilosophical understandings of national narratives: Sauna Rare Exports and Troll Hunter negotiate the complex ways in which national film cultures package nature for, first, nation-­building purposes, and, secondly, for addressing audiences from a variety of contexts. In this, they take on the type of transvergent perspective I outlined in the introduction of this work – that is, a perspective that amounts to an ecocritical questioning of the use of nature in national narratives. Targeting the explicit commercialization of national myths and natural resources is not the only way to attain such a perspective. Certain productions investigate this relationship from a more philosophical perspective. Finnish director A.J. Annila’s ‘tarkovskian’ (meaning evocative and even abstract) horror film Sauna (2008) is a case in point. The film is set in the fifteenth century and focuses on two brothers who have been tasked with drawing the border between the Swedish and the Russian empires, situated roughly in the same region where the contemporary Finnish border with Russia now resides. The elder of the brothers, Erik, is a professional soldier and has taken many lives in the wars fought for his empire. Knut, the younger of the two, left a young girl to die in a farmhouse and thus holds a guilty conscience. They come to a village in the middle of an expansive swamp which at first seems deserted. Soon a few inhabitants emerge and talk only in fear of a sauna which will wash away the brothers’ sins. The sauna is a concrete hut in the middle of a small body of water with no markings and it is not long before they are forced to enter the building and come face to face with their darkest fears. The narrative of the film merges national cultural myths with a transcendent philosophical tone which it uses to deconstruct its focus on (in-­formation) transnationalism. As Sauna chronicles the bloody and painstaking work of solidifying borders, any understanding of transnational contact is based on a sense of liminality and complemented by the unformed schisms that emerge at these meeting points of cultures. At these nodes characterized by uncertainty and ongoing transformation, national iconography takes on alternative connotations. Instead of its conventional role as part of the preferred national imaginary of the Finn, the sauna here is divested of its inclusive qualities (seen in the Finnish Steam of Life, for example) and becomes a Foucaultian heterotopia that inverts and reflects societal mores back on itself. In this case, this is to do with showing us the lives lost in the construction of national community and the

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imposition of human-­made structures on the natural world. Not only a societal mirror, the sauna’s relationship with nature brings up an important facet of Nordic ecocinema rarely touched upon yet – it seems as if nature resists the process of appropriation and objectification seen in some of the ecoslashers and, in more complex form, as part of the mythic horrors of Rare Exports and Troll Hunter. The evocation of a nature more powerful and mysterious than the human takes us back to the beginning of this discussion and to the unexplained sense of fear of nature in Wilderness. The film’s transnational dimensions provide an alternative level of meaning to nature’s resistance to national appropriation. Refusing the aggressors’ attempts to subjugate nature to political control via borders – the village is situated in a transcendent uncultivated no-­man’s-­land – or to appropriation as part of national culture, the sauna of the film turns all aggressors into faceless creatures who lose their main way of expressing their humanity – their face and voice. Dehumanizing the human that attempts to foster a sense of anthropocentric control over the environment raises powerful questions about the ways nature is used as part of the logic of nationhood. As there is very little that is natural about nations, Sauna, as a commentary on the interaction between nation and nature, provides an ambiguous evocation of a transnational imagination that challenges any easy correlation between the two.

Ecotopic understandings of human nature relations: Thale If Sauna’s transnational ecophilosophy points us in a transvergent direction that displaces anthropocentric logic, other contributions to the genre extrapolate on the potential of transvergence for understanding Nordic ecocinema. The Norwegian mythical ecofantasy Thale (Nordaas 2012) provides an intriguing philosophical counterpoint to Sauna’s attempts to dismantle human superiority. Following its protagonists Elvis and Leo, a pair of crime scene cleaners, Thale, predictably, takes place in a cabin in the woods where an old man’s body has been discovered. We are soon introduced to Thale, a mythical and potentially dangerous creature. According to a lengthy explanation via audio tape, we learn that Thale is part of a tribe of creatures who separated from the humans long ago. Having maintained and evolved a set of distinct features, namely a tail and an ability to harness energy that has life-saving capabilities, the creatures have been experimented on by government forces. Elvis makes a connection with

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Thale, whose tribe eventually comes to their rescue when a private military closes in. Many of the above discussed ecological considerations emerge in this multifaceted contribution to the genre. We have the uneven relations between the human and the more than human, humanity’s obsession with controlling nature for its own needs, the evocation of a nature more powerful than human, and a powerful coda where the film positions the necessity to let nature be one with itself. What makes this example particularly intriguing is its evocation of the spatial ‘ecotope’ between human and the more than human. In biology and ecology, the ecotope is a space where different organisms and lifeforms share space. In the case of Thale, the ecotope is the meeting place where human-­ centric views are confronted by ecosystemic realities as, literally, the humans come face to face with their others and realize the limitations of their worldviews. In this case the ecotope is not about finding harmony or even understanding of one another. It is not a point of synergy, or hybridity even, but more a space of ecosystemic friction. Any attempt of the human to control its others results in destruction of both the human and its others, as happens in the battles between the army and the tribe, and it is only by letting go that we get a sense of convalescence. The forces of state control are destroyed by their lack of understanding but healing takes place as Thale consumes the cancer draining Leo. Rhetorically, it could be argued that this narrative turn distances the human from ecosystemic integration as the conclusion both conserves nature (Thale goes back to the wilds) and indicates the mythical healing abilities of creatures more in touch with nature than the human. But it also provides a complex argument that integrates humanity into nature by asking for a pardon for past misdeeds and indicating the perversions the cultural logic of late capitalism poses for ecosystemic relations. Such arguments are not, of course, entirely novel as this sort of ecoawareness is standard rhetoric for many documentaries revealing environmental misdeeds (discussed in Chapter 9). But the ways Thale combines many different elements, like that of genre and art house ambiguity, and conservationist and hybrid perspectives, indicates the provocative and unsettled directions in which contemporary Nordic genre film can work. Challenging the conventional definition of the ecotope as consisting of either a space of binaries or of immersivity and hybridity, the film provides a transvergent perspective on the human in the ecosystem. Such a perspective attempts to evoke a more profound sense of being

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than simplistic outsiderness or insiderness, gesturing to a more abstract space in between. Conforming neither to mythic narratives of nationhood, or conventional modes of genre exploitation, the film facilitates an unfinished provocation that challenges the conventions of ecohorror in Nordic cinema. Its approach is all the more suggestive when we consider it alongside horror films that combine national myths with more or less explicit anti-­environmentalist arguments, to which we now turn.

Discrediting the environmentalist ethos through ecohorror: Body of Water If nature appropriation in the mythical ecohorror genre is often conducted for the purpose of philosophical introspection over the use of nature as cultural capital, it can also be used to counter the transvergent ecocriticism these films often evoke. Such is the case with the Finnish Syvälle salattu/Body of Water (Tena 2011), a film combining mythic monstrosities with contemporary environ­ mentalist themes. Its troubled protagonist, Julia, is an environmental lawyer presenting the interests of local plaintiffs of her old homestead. The lakefront is being appropriated for private housing development and to protect the region Julia takes residence in her childhood home. There, she is increasingly disturbed by nightmares of the monstrous Näkki, a spirit of the lake well known from Finnish folk tales, and to make matters worse, her son seems increasingly fascinated by the lake. Julia’s father Leo, a local development consultant and businessman, turns up urging her to leave the village. Family secrets start to unravel as the increasingly unbalanced Julia discovers the existence of a brother she never knew she had. Reading about the legends related to Näkki, combined with the unexplained visions, leads her to fear that the brother was sacrificed to the water spirit to enable her father to become rich and provide a good life for the family. The narrative of the film plays with well-­known genre conventions with the evocation of a monstrous presence and dark secrets from the past emerging to haunt the present. What sets Body of Water apart from the rest of the mythic horrors explored here is a twist in the narrative that reveals that the threat from Näkki is all in Julia’s imagination. The father Leo, previously depicted as a neoliberalist entrepreneur intending to privatize the lake region, is revealed as the real voice of reason as Julia’s own carelessness in the lake resulted in her

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brother’s drowning. The spirit she saw is a memory reflection of her mother wandering the shore destitute and all her other visions are related to her fragile mental state and repression of her past. This twist in the tale and the avoidance of a fully realized monster narrative by the revelation of an unreliable narrator/ protagonist is a common tactic of the genre. While such considerations are used to evoke gender and class arguments in films such as The Others (Amenabar 2001) and The Orphanage (Bayona 2007), Body of Water foregrounds this exploration in an environmental framework through its setting and Julia’s occupation, with the very notion of environmental activism emerging as a point of question. By suggesting that Julia’s psychological defence mechanisms and borderline insanity are the cause of the narrative undermines any environmentalist rhetoric the film may seek to project. For one, the depiction of Julia is not unlike a range of negative stereotypes circulated by sections of the mainstream media about environmental activists, a notion complemented by her hysterical, often out of control behaviour. Stereotypes of emotional femininity and dangerous activism combine in a negative representation that not only questions her identity but also her professional integrity. This is compounded by the revelation that Leo, the businessman, is the rational party in the opposition between environmental justice movements and corporate interests, especially as he represents the interests that aim to develop the lakefront property. The combination of both patriarchal rationality and capitalist business practices contribute to a thoroughly conservative take on the ecohorror genre, endorsing the discourse of cultural appropriation and ownership of nature often questioned in other examples of the genre. To make the matter worse, the infiltration of conservative propaganda is made more forceful as the anti-­environmentalist turn takes place via a twist ending, challenging spectator identification with Julia’s cause and proving to them, at least in theory, the impractical and unrealistic dimensions of environmental activism. Through this, Body of Water provides a thoroughly divergent take on nature appropriation. Whereas the use of nature in national narratives can be characterized as a convergent approach as they consider humanity and nature as intertwined in the process of human self-narration, the divergent take of Body of Water discredits any such approach and only sees nature as a resource to be used and exploited by capitalist interests. Ultimately, it does not even try to pretend that a convergent correlation exists – all nature means is another source to keep humanity at the top of the heap.

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Conclusion: Convergence, divergence and transvergence in ecohorror This chapter has focused on ecohorror films from Norway, Finland and Iceland, exploring the ways national traditions and myths combine with imported genre conventions. I have not focused on examples from Sweden and Denmark even if productions such as the Danish alien tale Vikaren/The Substitute (Bornedal 2007) and Swedish vampire comedy Frostbiten/Frostbite (Banke 2006) are ripe for ecocritical readings. The cases I have explored consciously focus on national myths, often in rural settings. Even though they very clearly expand on the ideological connotations of heritage cinema, the constitutive ideology of anthropocentric national narratives remains a substantial part of their content. By interpreting the implications of culturalized natural elements, the films make conscious interventions that update certain strands of these film cultures to more global standards. This process of dialogue between national narratives and global cultural industries takes on a multitude of functions, especially the ways the films foreground the convergent logic of nature appropriation. Often, films that combine traditional myths and ecological discourse are more aware of the cultural capital to be drawn from nature than the examples of the ecoslasher genre, even if the latter also pose fundamental questions over human relations to the ecosystem. Mythical ecohorrors are more upfront about the fact that these elements function as attractions and superstitions created to evoke social cohesion instead of some integral naturalizing parts of a national narrative. In this, they attain the qualities of transvergent eco-cinema, even if these mythical ecohorrors are fundamentally contradictory. On the one hand, films like Rare Exports and Troll Hunter seem entirely aware of the imagined, even invented correlation between nation and nature, as they make use of these sorts of appropriations as frequent sources of comedy. But on the other hand, even these predominantly invented elements are appropriated for commercial reasons both on the level of narrative and also in the cultural industrial circulation of these products. Through this, we see both exoticization and capitalization on natural resources, which may even extend to justification of anti-­environmentalist rhetoric as seen in the divergent narrative manipulation of Body of Water (and to a lesser extent in the anthropocentric mastery of Dead Snow). The appropriation of nature is, of course, a fundamental part of ecocinema, but the uncritical adoption of such methodologies reflects the emergence of neoliberalist, anti-­environmentalist argumentations that are increasingly accepted as part of the philosophical and cultural landscape of some of the Nordic countries.

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Education or Indoctrination: Children’s Cinema The different approaches in ecological representation – the convergent, the divergent, and the transvergent – find multiple variations in the Nordic context. From the predominantly convergent logic of national narration in heritage cinema to the divergent celebrations of anti-­environmentalist rhetoric in certain ecohorrors, the ecological scope of these films is as wide as are Nordic approaches to ecological policy. Yet, many of these films attain a transvergent perspective in that they suggest new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between human and nature. As they do this, they have the clear potential of encouraging new types of understanding and learning about environmental considerations. Such pedagogical aspirations of nature learning are especially prevalent in the production of children’s films – in this case, educating their young audiences. But simultaneously, we must remember that cinema is invariably an anthropocentric, commercial institution, the aims of which must be carefully interrogated. And indeed, as we have seen, heritage- and even more explicitly entertainment-based films often demonstrate educational aspirations, even if these are predominantly concerned with anthropocentric moral or societal guidelines. Regardless, the role of nature in children’s cinema is a topic of immediate concern for ecocritics. Robin Murray and Joseph Heumann, in their book-length study (Murray and Heumann 2011), have analysed a range of animation films produced by Hollywood studios, films that are replete with environmental imagery and explicit messages about conservation and animal rights. The explicit environmentalism and anthropomorphic dimensions of films like Open Season (2006) and The Lorax (2012) have, certainly, inspired media attention on environmental themes. Deidre Pike’s study (2012) suggests that Hollywood animations have also met with plentiful criticism for simplifying and trivializing vital ecological considerations, requiring ecocritics to adopt a more reserved stance towards their content as well as the use of such messages as part of an inherently

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wasteful capitalist system. These exploitative strategies and production practices work not only on the textual level, but extend to the production and distribution practices of large scale media companies like Disney and Dreamworks as Molloy’s study of the greening strategies of Disney (Molloy 2012) suggests. On a surface glance, there is not much difference between Nordic animated films and the contradictions of the Hollywood industrial mode identified by Molloy. They simultaneously evoke ecological and anthropocentric perspectives, even as they aim to educate their audiences of the dangers of unsustainable actions, of course, through the means of a hyperconsumptive mass communications industry reliant on consumerist ideas. Yet, Nordic cultures have a long history of environmentally connected children’s literature and include stories ranging from anthropomorphic tales to more ‘realist’ moral narratives. Cinematic productions continue a long cultural heritage that extends back to the fairytales of Hans Christian Andersen and Zacharias Topelius, and film adaptations of works by Tove Jansson and Astrid Lindgren. These narratives provide their own takes on combining social ideologies and environmentalist conceptions. While children’s films in Nordic film cultures have been the topic of extensive studies, often focusing on moral and educational concerns (see Sihvonen 1987), they have not been explored from an ecocritical angle to date. The fact that Nordic children’s ecocinema is a largely unstudied field reflects the imbalance of interest in Hollywood among ecocritics, even if the works of Ghibli studios, for example, have received some ecocritical exposure (see Smith and Parsons 2012). This chapter aims to fill this gap, at least to an extent, as I do not have sufficient space to engage with all the different variations of Nordic children’s film. I will thus explore only some representative cases that mostly focus on concerns extrapolated to date – namely, films that combine some of the constitutive ideologies identified so far, including the role of national culture and its diverse integrations with capitalist practices. Others, such as the Norwegian Twigson and the Finnish Rölli series, certainly deserving of ecocritical analysis, have to be relegated for later exploration. To capture the ways the different degrees of nature appropriation work in children’s film, I focus on anthropo­ morphic CGI animations as these illuminate the many differences and occasional similarities between Nordic and Hollywood films. I am especially concerned with the ways these anthropomorphic depictions reflect constitutive forms of cultural and societal politics even as they integrate them with environmental messages.

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Ecoanimation as a transnational practice: The Ugly Duckling and Me and Disco Worms To assume a simplistic parallel between national narration and children’s ecocinema is fraught with difficulty. Nordic examples of the animation genre are often international co-­productions, and while artistic and production decisions are dictated by Nordic directors – enabling them to attain the label of Nordic cinema as well as funding from domestic sources – the execution of the production is accomplished internationally due to the availability of resources and the often limited budgets of the productions. Such a predominantly transnational production context is relevant as it positions from early on the complexities of national narration in these productions. While these productions often rely on certain basic traits of their ‘originating’ domestic culture to differentiate them in the highly competitive marketplace, such signifiers of national cultural identity are as implicated in the processes of commodification and commercialization as those seen in the mythic ecohorrors. Accordingly, this section will explore some of the ways national culture and animation production modes intertwine from an ecocritical perspective. Den grimme ælling og mi/The Ugly Duckling and Me (2006), an adaptation of aspects of Hans Christian Andersen’s well-­known fairytale, provides an entry point to discussing the dynamics of Nordic children’s ecocinema. Conceived as a co-­production between France, Germany, Ireland and Denmark, the film takes the basic premise of the fairytale – a duckling is picked on by his peers and transforms into an awesome swan by the end – and focuses on the scheming entertainer rat Rotto who adopts the egg of a swan as a way to make money in a touring circus. Predictably with such moralistic narratives, Rotto finds his conscience and learns to love the hatched duckling, simply known as Ugly. As is often the case with children’s animation, moral messages underline the narrative of The Ugly Duckling and Me and its world occupied by a range of anthropo­ morphic creatures living in distinct class positions. The film’s class politics provides one moral compass for its narrative, enabling the film to operate as a commentary on the equalitarian principles of contemporary Danish society. Locating the film in Denmark is also made possible by Rotto’s journey across the countryside, which evokes the sense of a Danish pastorale. While landscape functions as a way to situate the film within the general realm from where Andersen’s narrative originated, anthropomorphic species differentiation becomes another aspect through which the film partakes in

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reflecting Danish societal structures. In the narrative, multicultural politics evoke a positivist sense of multiculturalist rhetoric as Rotto is recognized as Ugly’s father despite his clear biological difference. Class politics of an anthropomorphic variety are especially prominent in the conclusion of the film as the royalist swans – Ugly’s own line of heritage – are shunned in favour of his new ‘multicultural’ family. Consisting of different species, the community as the new adopted family for Ugly indicates that a sense of affinity and belonging is more important than genetics. Reflecting both a sense of universal morality and a pointed version of Danish equalitarianism, the anthropocentric qualities of the film partake in constructing an affable version of Nordic sociopolitics and a sense of multiculturalist utopia. While the main narrative of The Ugly Duckling and Me may evoke a distinctly positive sense of multicultural politics, its ecological aspirations are more conflicted. As with many of the convergent examples of national cinema, nature acts as a simultaneously exotic and localizing tool, and even a means to narrate a utopian sense of communality. Even as the film takes place in the natural world, among the non-­human world, we should not mistake it for an ecocritical tale. Instead, it never moves beyond the anthropocentric and anthropomorphic logic of its ideological messages, depriving the different species of their unique propensities. In this, it works as part of a long heritage of children’s animated cinema that relies on anthropomorphic animal caricatures to reflect the constitutive and constituted ideologies of their context (see Murray and Heumann 2011, for more). Any educational or environmentalist value it may profess to have is thus distinctly part of the convergent logic of an anthropocentric worldview. To emphasize the ideological similarities of Nordic animation films with those of Hollywood, another Danish animation, Disco ormene/Disco Worms (Nielsen 2008) can emphasize the ecocritical limitations of these productions. As with The Ugly Duckling and Me, the protagonist of the film is an individualized part of the collective who wants to fulfil his potential and become something more than a desk clerk at Dung Heap. He is not popular at school as he is from a lower social class than the beetles and other forms of insect. Instead of the multiculturalist egalitarianism of The Ugly Duckling and Me, Disco Worms is concerned with class politics. This theme is established in its prologue via grainy documentary footage about worms who live at the bottom of the food chain. The inspiration for the inclusion of class politics can be sourced to Hollywood films such as the Dreamworks production Antz (1998), though the class and social politics of Disco Worms differ substantially. For example, in Antz, the individualized ants

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take on the military machine that has perverted the collective mentality of the hive, a narrative that pits the people against a corrupt establishment. Disco Worms, on the other hand, shows clearer distinctions between the classes. If American society, as envisioned in its different forms of ecocinema, does not want to admit to its class structures and upholds its myths of equality, the social categories in Disco Worms are a lot more pronounced as a result of the equalitarian rhetoric of the welfare state. This is not to say that the film does not evince its share of debt to imported pop culture. All its individualized protagonist worms are moulded as typical Western teenagers who imitate American pop culture trends and aspire to overnight success by playing in a band. In evoking Denmark as a typical Western society, Disco Worms is upfront about the problems inherent to a society where species and class distinctions are based on appearances. The whole of society is prejudiced against the worms who are only good for digging dirt and producing soil. The worm band even has to dress up as insects to appear respectable. And as is conventional for films emphasizing a positive impression of individualistic difference, the larger community comes to appreciate the worm band’s difference and accept them as their own. The politics of the film thus provides a narrative progression for a class-­based multiculturalist ideology as all the distinct species are united under the rubric of imported popular entertainment, evoking a sort of diversity in homogeneity. All in all, The Ugly Duckling and Me and Disco Worms continue the strategies of appropriating nature (though in this case, this concerns the anthropomorphizing of animals) for national narratives or exotic cultural capital. They contain small instances of cultural localization, but overall are more at home with the conventions of the supranational entertainment industries, processing the environment for the purposes of convergent (importable) national narratives and consumptive practices. In this, they evoke what Claire Molloy has identified as one of the key tactics in Disney green branding in that the narratives act out environmental fantasies in attempting to project green values. But instead of envisioning new consumption patterns or ways of life, the ‘corporate penetration legitimizes—and indeed, promotes—capitalist consumerism as an environmentally responsible activity’ (Molloy 2012: 170). As with the Disney brand, it is not entirely surprising that films like The Ugly Duckling and Me and Disco Worms do not incorporate ‘radical environmental messages into their products’ (Molloy 2012: 183) as most of the narrative emphasizes the potential of consumerist self-­fashioning as a way to attain an authentic identity. In the case of Danish

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ecoanimation, we see a typical mobilization of basic national iconography to allow the films to make gestures to the countries of their origin. But these nods are just that – nods that act as indications of the appropriation of nature for a wide range of anthropocentric, convergent purposes.

Animism as a convergent tool: Help, I’m a Fish and Niko – The Way to The Stars As established by Disco Worms and The Ugly Duckling and Me, one of the clearest ways in which anthropocentric logic operates in animation film is through the appropriation of animals as stand-­ins for human society. This is a tactic used by Hollywood studios as well as Nordic ones, where a range of species are ‘cast’ into roles based on human perceptions of their physical qualities and ecosystemic roles. In contrast to the largely excessively anthropomorphic perspectives of Disco Worms and The Ugly Duckling and Me, other forms of Nordic ecoanimation from Danish-­led productions such as Hjælp, jeg er en fisk/Help, I’m a Fish (Fjeldmark et al. 2000) to Finnish ones such as Niko – lentäjän poika/Niko – The Way to The Stars (Hegner and Juusonen 2008), use different forms of ‘animism’ – that is, comprehension of the animals as animals instead of as only anthropomorphic cultural signifiers – to consolidate and expand their convergent logic of national cultural production and their aspirations to global distribution. Niko is a clear case in point as it consciously includes both anthropomorphic animal characters and national iconography in a tale with both entertainment and moral overtones, aspiring to the sort of eco-­cosmopolitan, universal relevance Heise (2007) discusses. Young reindeer calf Niko and Julius, a squirrel with parental aspirations, form the pair at the heart of this anthropomorphic tale. Niko considers himself different from the other reindeer as his absentee father is one of the famed Santa’s Flying Reindeer. Against the instructions of the herd elders, Niko goes in search of his father and attracts the attention of a wolfpack, leading them inadvertently to the secluded home of his herd. The reindeer herd is forced to relocate, but Niko goes off in search of his parental heritage. Finally reaching his father, Niko discovers that reality is not quite what he had been told. The father, all macho superficiality and immaturity, cannot take responsibility for his son. But both of these flawed characters have a chance to undo their past mistakes, providing compact moral lessons for the audience.

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In contrast to the social casting of animals in simplistic anthropologic patterns, Niko showcases a more balanced approach in its use of animals and nature. Most of the character behaviour has its basis in natural patterns as, for example, the pack and herd mentality of the deer community and much of the film’s depiction of family dynamics adhere to the general dynamics of reindeer behaviour (such as male mating habits and growth patterns of newborns). But this behaviour – and the fact that the reindeer is often considered an animal closely tied to the Finnish cultural imaginary – still works on two levels of anthropomorphized convergent narration. For one, the reindeer provide the film with socio-­political content that has both local and universal relevance. In the case of Niko, the theme concerns the impact of fractured families and immature parental behaviour on young children as well as the social malfare they generate. Secondly, its use of expansive and visually attractive landscapes of northern Finland provides cultural capital, which lends the film cinematic panache that enables it to distinguish itself in, again, the domestic and global markets. These strategies in nature appropriation have worked in the film’s favour as Niko met with a largely positive reception from domestic critics, who commended it as an instance of authentically popular domestic cinema. Subsequently, Niko received international distribution from Miramax and remains the most successful Finnish film of all time internationally. This ability to cross borders is a facet Niko shares with the other Nordic CGI animations as most of them have benefitted from diverse production and distribution arrangements. The ability to erase cultural specificity with vocal dubbing is, of course, integral to this, but accessibility is also to do with the narrative and aesthetic qualities of the films. Almost as if to support the notion that nature knows no inherent cultural specificity, the films aim for universal standards in both appropriating animals and landscape as key elements of an anthropocentric cultural industry. Paradoxically, they also need to rely on impressions and the rhetoric of cultural specificity and environmental sensitivity to maximize their audiences in certain contexts – especially with domestic audiences and in educational settings. But in a further level of the paradox, the focus on ‘universal themes’ often results in the marginalization of any sustained ecocritical interrogation, be it of consumption patterns or the place of species in the ecosystem, to the ways climate change has impacted on deer herding grounds, to name a few potential and urgent considerations. By noting a few key environmental considerations, such as reindeer herding patterns and the physical qualities of the northern

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landscape, the films use easily consumable and linearized patterns as cultural capital to attain the impression of an environmentally aware text. Instead of representing consumption and conservation politics, for example, as the difficult choices they really are, audiences may be diverted into accepting fantastical and anthropomorphic conceptions of the animals and the role they play as part of this fantasized ecosystem. If most ecoanimations fall prey to the anthropocentric logic of the cultural industries, should we consider these films as proposing divergent takes on human nature relations – that is, suggesting that the environment comprises a comprehensively different part of the ecosystem from the human sphere, only useful as material for metaphoric social narratives and ideological vindications  of consumerist practices? Literature critic Jonathan Bate suggests that discounting anthropomorphic entertainment as completely lacking in any conscious-raising value is not entirely productive. According to him, the investment of human values in and as part of the animal world ‘functions to break down the distinction between the human and animal being’ (Bate 2000: 178). Instead of only separating the two, they may be able to foster identification with animals beyond their value as resources or as commodities of the entertainment industries. Certainly, such perspectives have a point in fostering basic identification with the non-­human animal, but anthropomorphic appropriation of animals remains, at least from an ecocritical perspective, highly problematic as they inevitably impose human behavioural patterns and societal logic on the animals. Assessing the state of depicting human and animal relations in narrative cinema, Chris Crews suggests that we need an entirely new approach to depicting animals: At the level of ontology, it would require expanding the starting assumptions about the nature of being to include non-­humans and animals as ‘proper’ beings, a supposition which underlies the basic belief system in most forms of animism. Animism provides a philosophical and theoretical alternative to the lingering human-­animal matrix derived from this Western onto-­ theological tradition. Crews 2010: 70

It is clear that an animist approach would entail rethinking the normative foundations constraining even professedly green ecoanimation tales. An example of this sort of alternative envisioning of humanity’s embeddedness in nature – as part of the ecosystem, not superior to it – can be seen in Help,

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I’m a Fish. The animation film is set in a maritime world of sharp contrasts between the humans and the fish that inhabit the sea. In this case, the immersive narrative is set into motion as a scientist comes up with a potion to prepare humanity for the flooding caused by global warming. The potion turns the humans into fish, which happens accidentally to the children protagonists of the film. Soon, other fish are inundated with the potion and develop a ‘civilized’ organized society, as envisioned by their leader Joe. The explanation for the existence of the anthropomorphic fish works well enough as a self-­reflexive acknowledgement of the basic fallacies of ecocinema to provide animals with human characteristics. But once Joe starts to develop his plans for world domination, typical tendencies of societal logic and organization override any consideration for the existence of a world free of human logic. Of course, such anthropomorphic narrative trajectories are an integral part of animated ecocinema and do not in themselves propose anything radically different. By implying comprehension of a world of diverse ecologically complex systems that do not only exist according to anthropocentric logic, and then ultimately reversing to anthropomorphic fish as symbolic substitutes for human society, the film indicates the extent to which anthropocentric thinking facilitates the depiction of the ‘non human’ world, especially in productions that work as part of the commercial mainstream. In contrast to the anthropocentric and anthropomorphic philosophy embedded in most of these ecoanimations, Markku Pölönen’s historical drama Koirankynnenleikkaaja/Dog Nail Clipper (2004) functions as an example of alternative animist rhetoric. Albeit its inclusion here is something of a tangent as this Finnish production is not children’s cinema, the film provides a crucial alternative to the anthropomorphic assumptions on which the ecoanimations discussed above are premised. The film’s protagonist, Mertsi, wounded in the head in the Second World War, tries to make peace with a society he does not understand, and which does not understand him. He hears a story about a mythic dog who has never had its nails clipped. Mertsi constructs an impression of the mythical dog in his mind as a form of salvation for himself, an anthropocentric metaphoric means via which he is to find a compatriot as different as he is. Upon arrival, the dog turns out to be an ordinary animal that bites his hand. While this sort of depiction establishes the animal as an ‘other’ from the human, it is also of vital importance that this particular dog is simply allowed to be a dog and not some sort of mystic totemistic healing object. Instead, Dog Nail Clipper demystifies the appropriated animal to reveal it as a real breathing part

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of the ecosystem. While the film otherwise works as part of heritage cinema, the potential of animistic depictions is potentially immense for rethinking the normative constructions of national narratives and other forms of anthropomorphic appropriation of nature for socio-­political means. Ultimately, Pölönen’s film can only function here as a contrastive example to some of the systemic fallacies of contemporary Nordic ecoanimation, and must only be considered as a ‘starting place’ for proper ecocritical work, echoing the assessment of Lynne Dickson Bruckner of the ways animals are used in Disney films (Bruckner 2010: 202).

Anthropomorphic objects as narrators of ecocinema The representation of animals in Nordic ecoanimation continues the appropriative logic of many other forms of ecocinema, designed to vindicate a range of socio-­political rhetoric, including that of nation-­building. In addition to animals, objects are a frequent human substitute in ecoanimation. But do inanimate, human-­produced objects receive the same treatment when they are anthropomorphicized, especially as they have a more immediate and even self-­evident relationship to anthropocentricism, being as they are objects made by humans? I start out with the Norwegian Elias og kongeskipet/Elias and the Kingship (Osroll 2007), a film that continues anthropomorphic nation-­building by using ships as its human substitutes. As with most other examples of animated ecocinema, the film shows awareness of the particularity of its context – in this case Norwegian nature – as it tells the story of Elias, a rescue ship from a small harbour. Its main focus is on exploring the contemporary organization of the nation state by making royal trouble its main narrative consideration – though whether this is a particularly Norwegian version of royalty or a more universal fairytale kingdom is debatable. Regardless, the kingship of the Norwegian seas is feared to have gone amiss following the disappearance of the princess ship. The industrialist and shipping tycoon Gabrielsson aims to collude with the paparazzi to make sure the public loses confidence in the royalty, allowing him to establish his new presidency. It is up to Elias to find the princess and establish the public’s confidence in their ‘righteous’ leader. Elias and the Kingship is premised on two key discourses set at the opposing ends of social benefit for the Norwegian nation state – royal allegiance and the threat capitalism poses to it. Royalty is a metaphor for the authentic nation, a

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righteous form of governance, which the film establishes with its affective ecological portrayal of the kingship. Subjects loyal to the king include the local ships inhabiting the community of small vessels at Lunn Harbour where Elias, our protagonist, resides. They enforce sustainability and understand that industrial levels of export not only harm the local economy, but destroy the natural resources of the immediate ecosystem and beyond. While they take a sustainable approach to the maritime ecosystem, consumerist capitalism has caused increased shipping, which now endangers all areas of Norway’s coastline. This is especially the case with industrialist Gabrielsson’s thirst for more revenue, which conflicts with the king’s views on sustainability. The consumerist complacency of the public is inherently a part of this, emphasized by the paparazzi’s lust for pictures of royal grief. The message is very clear – a democracy of the public would be manipulated by corporate interests. In contrast, royal forms of inherited leadership can guide the nation to more sustainable and ‘authentic’ ways, supported by loyal subjects like Elias and his down-­to-earth community. The way the film attempts to address issues of sustainable consumption and resource trade is certainly commendable. But they are for the most part positioned along a simplistic paradigm of neoliberalism/localism, resulting in a conventional recourse to a valorization of the local that elides other considerations like the Norwegian economy’s dependence on oil. While the film could be argued to attain a transvergent perspective through its attempts at rethinking Norway’s environmental economics, it resorts to many of the fallacies that permeate heritage cinema. For example, the patriarchal trajectory of the narrative extends not only to the immediate protagonists but to the Norwegian state, with nature as the prime means to strengthen this assertion. The use of the anthropomorphized ships – ultimately vessels for human-­led harvesting of natural resources – as points of identification for audiences also indicates its inability to move beyond its anthropocentric constitutive ideology. Elias’ first adventure is thus thoroughly embedded in convergent thinking, extending even to appropriation of environmentalist discourse for its traditionalist, local utopianism. Elias og jakten på havets gull/Elias and the Hunt for Treasure (2011) continues the appropriation of green politics established by its predecessor. Following threats of closure to the Lunn Harbour, a group of fishing boats sets off for the winter harvest with the aim of gathering enough catch to make it through the winter. But before they can commence their fishing, industrial fishing boats arrive to harvest all the catch. Elias follows the boats to the floating factory of the Napa Queen, a private entrepreneur specializing in

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industrial mass-­produced canned fish. Elias describes the factory of the Napa Corporation as a ‘big dumb machine’ whereas the personalized fisheries of the Lunn village offer the ethically correct choice, especially as the Queen is revealed as the villain of the film. Contrasting what is effectively small-­scale resource cultivation and micromanaged consumption practices with the profiteering of large corporations, the film takes a distinctly moralizing and educational stance. Elias and the Hunt for Treasure complements its localization rhetoric with criticism of the outsourcing activities of neoliberal corporations, a notion made explicit as the Napa Queen sends the ships of the Lunn Harbour to be harvested for spare parts in China. The actions of the Napa Corporation work as signposts intending to communicate a negative impression of contemporary corporate activity reliant on cost efficiency and outsourcing of domestic resources. Much as with Elias’ first adventure, Lunn Harbour provides a space for both national and local valorization as a literal sanctuary from the exploitation of neoliberal globalization, providing clear coordinates for navigating towards authenticity and morality in one’s ethical behaviour. In contrast, neoliberalist globalization is a one dimensional and directional process, suggesting that both commercialization and exploitation lead to the restructuring of the patriarchal welfare state. As much as the nation provided the basis for the convergent logic of heritage cinema, the salt of the earth folk (ships) are the antidote to this sort of unthinking restructuring of the manufacturing basis of contemporary Norway. Taken as a form of ecocinema, is nationalization a solid response to the problems of outsourcing or can it, in fact, be a problem in its own right? Nationalization and localization do not in themselves offer much of a sustainable ecological message. Certainly, the recourse to small-­scale fisheries and sustainable consumption are distinctly ‘green’, but as they are evoked as part of the utopian localization of the Elias series, their ecological qualities do not have much to offer beyond more or less surface-­based evocations of balanced consumption practices. If the act of gathering and consuming resources is the implicit norm for the film, the use of green values in support of nationalist-­royalist content takes on darker shadings when inspected alongside the film’s coding of the ethnic identities of its characters. Elias and the majority of the Lunn boats are distinctly white and part of the hegemonic population of Norway. In contrast, one of the fishing boats is an egregiously stereotyped Spaniard who has a fiery temper and is extremely protective of his female siblings. While this is problematic enough, the tugboats hauling the scrapped fishing boats to China are orientalist caricatures, generating impressions of the Chinese menace complete with

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squinty eyes and a Maoist red star cap. In contrast, the Queen is a typical soft spoken upper class individual, projecting a sense of superiority and condescension against others. Through these caricatured identities, the film continues to vindicate a sense of authentic localism that resonates on a global level, a notion consolidated as the coastguard chief congratulates Elias for his righteous victory in exposing Napa’s plans and safeguarding the domestic fishing industries. All in all, both of the Elias films provide plenty of environmentally conscious rhetoric, but as they rely on problematic anthropocentric modes of constitutive ideology, and even fail to touch on Norway’s reliance on oil for its prosperity besides a fleeting mention of ecodiesel, their ecological contributions must be taken with some scepticism. Arguments attacking the resource economy of the context of production are not obligatory, of course, but for a film proposing a clean dichotomy between neoliberal capitalism and state-­mandated socio­ politics, more elaborate and pointed interrogation of the connections between state economics and resource consumption would be, if not totally expected, at least beneficial. Furthermore, as these are films with distinct educational aims, the assumptions they make about consumption patterns and lifestyles need to be even further interrogated. And as most of the films’ content relies on anthropocentric assumptions, they become part of the convergent logic seen in other forms of ecoanimation, including narratives focusing on appropriated animals. Organizing the world according to cultural logic, they strengthen the notion of an anthropocentric worldview in all its areas, giving a human face to even things that are less than human, that is, they are produced by humans out of the resources of the planet. Through this, the result is a holistic, thoroughly self-­ satisfied impression of a human-­made world for the human race.

The Magic Crystal and the fallacies of commercial animated ecocinema If the ship as an anthropomorphic object continues to maintain the attitudes that sustain the anthropocentric logic of appropriating animals for animated cinema, other productions take this logic to more cynical extremes. In much of the ecoanimation explored so far, the appropriation of natural resources has functioned as both an educational and a commercial venture, with especially the educational aspects complementing the commercial aims of these productions. While it is often imperative that children’s films make such educational claims,

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I have demonstrated that these are often complicated by a range of factors, including taken-­for-granted valorization of consumerism and anthropocentric worldviews. Accordingly, despite all the thematic connotations of Nordic egalitarianism and green values, the products are not much different from their Hollywood counterparts. To consolidate this impression, I turn to the first 3D animation produced in Finland, Maaginen kristalli/The Magic Crystal (Haikala 2011), a film that provides perhaps the most explicit implication of how these productions mine nature for explicitly commercialized purposes. The typical dynamics of providing sensible moral lessons, while endorsing certain normative modes of behaviour and attitudes, characterizes the film. Yotan, abandoned as a young boy, embarks on an adventure to the North Pole, where the heritage of Santa Claus is in peril due to his brother Basil’s schemes to get hold of the magic crystal of the title. The crystal is the secret to Santa’s power as it multiplies him and enables him to be present globally at the time of disseminating all the world’s gifts. Basil intends to use it to gain control of children around the world and it is up to Yotan to rescue Christmas. The focus of the film is on securing the children with their gifts, with safe moral lessons complementing the consumerist incentives that it otherwise endorses. The educational and ethical lessons in The Magic Crystal can be seen cynically as similar greenwashing strategies as the environmentalist ideas embedded into the Niko and Elias series. Produced as part of the Red Caps brand – focusing on a group of elves led by Yotan – the final product is aimed at the child consumer. The series of animated shows preceding the film includes twenty-­six episodes following the Red Caps group who journey all over the world to help children. The episodes often have a message about important topics such as labour laws, protecting the environment, equality, and oppression and have received support from UNICEF and the Ministry of Environment in Finland, among others. The Red Caps has the education value and history of publicizing clear messages about conservationism and global responsibility that make them commendable as forms of ethical consumerism. Simultaneously, these are the types of value systems and arguments that have led to criticism of the Disney Corporation for their greenwashing efforts, especially when it comes to producing narratives that validate certain types of consumptive behaviour as the norm, complemented by a range of associated paraphernalia, including merchandise. As Molloy has demonstrated (Molloy 2012), the educational value of the environmentalist messages may be offset by other aspects of the content.

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Such considerations also apply in the case of the Red Caps and The Magic Crystal, as while their ecological content showcases a certain level of awareness, the brand creation positions the film as part of a fundamentally commercialist value system. The narrative of the film underlines this as it ultimately consents to normalize consumerism by making the fundamental jeopardy of the film the absence of toys. The theme of The Magic Crystal evokes many of the conventions of the consumerist Christmas film, a problem that is compounded in its choice of cinematic form. The majority of the film is devoted to showcasing its 3D effects by immersing the spectator in its natural scenery. Snow effects come to the forefront as the expansive vistas and icy caves show off the illusion of depth to emphasize consumption and lessons about individual self-­fulfillment in its narrative areas. The landscape is a manufactured landscape, all surface-­based simulacra, providing this Finnish-European co-­production with required levels of exoticism. Much as with films like Niko, natural resources are mined for virtual commercialism to complement its dubious thematic resonance, all to complement its aggressive franchising. Through this, the film provides a largely negative example of how children’s products can be simultaneously awareness generating and ideologically suspect.

Conclusion The complex ways in which environmental themes and ecological rhetoric emerge in Nordic ecoanimation indicates yet another type of convergent logic. As we have seen in the earlier chapters, heritage and genre films use a wide array of methods for representing ecological concerns, with the majority of them explicitly appropriating nature for national or other social narratives. The majority of popular genre films use nature as a form of cultural capital, often with the goal of providing authenticity for domestic audiences and exoticism for the international markets. This is part of the convergent logic of seeing nature as property that can be culturalized and repackaged as a commodity. Animations, despite the often explicit educational environmental content, are not much different. Utilizing anthropomorphic techniques and landscape exoticization, Nordic ecoanimations are produced in international collaboration, often for the markets abroad. Thus, the lack of national narration is often minimized, even if it does play a key role in films like Niko. Instead, these productions are most interesting as part of the commercial logic of the creative industries where

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individual producers may have a moral or an ecological approach in mind, but they also have to operate as part of a fundamentally commercial system. This certainly does not invalidate them as relevant ecocinema, but their educational value must be approached with a measure of scepticism. On the one hand, this can lead to a cynical mobilization of green rhetoric in the creation of a commercial brand. But on the other, in a best case scenario, it can lead to awareness-­generating discussion and increased knowledge of crucial environmental issues. The three preceding chapters have focused on various manifestations of popular genre cinema and have come to a range of somewhat negative assertions regarding the ability of these films to generate ecocritical awareness. These readings emphasize the extent to which genre is a framework that constrains the production of ecocritical meanings, often consigning them to set narrative patterns or ideological, largely commercial expectations. We have now discussed a range of nature-based ecocinema, challenging readings of these texts as somehow environmentalist or ecological purely based on the fact that they take place in nature. Only a few of these films attain the sort of transvergent perspective outlined in the Introduction – that is, perspectives that try to conceptualize new ways of integrating the human in the ecosystem beyond convergent appropriations or divergent separations. As must be evident by now, ecocritical studies of film culture must be prepared to work with a much wider range of themes than simply films with an environmental connection or a set of green agendas. To continue this exploration of the role of constitutive ideologies in anthropocentric cultural production I turn to perhaps the most anthropocentric of cinematic forms – representations of urban spaces.

5

Urban Ecologies of the Nordic Welfare State A key consideration in any analysis of the political dimensions of Nordic cinema is the constitutive ideology of the welfare state. Numerous studies in sociology, culture, economics and politics explore the diverse manifestations of welfare politics and ideology on the populations and constitution of these countries (for historical overviews and discussion of ongoing transformations, see Kautto, Fritzell, Hvinden, Kvist and Uusitalo 2001; Kvist, Fritzell and Hvinden 2012). The Nordic model of the welfare state is characterized primarily by the strong co-­operation of the state and private enterprise. A sense of egalitarianism and aspirations to universalism are supplemented by high taxes, comprehensive social and health care mechanisms, emphasis on the rights of individuals, and some of the highest GDPs globally. While differences in historical development and policy are clear among the five states, identifying similarities is not particularly difficult, and the idea of the Nordic model pervades social policy discourse globally, causing both emulation and criticism of certain exclusivist tendencies (and diverse perspectives on what exactly comprises this model, as Kautto’s work suggests). The idea of the ‘People’s Home’ (inspired by the Swedish Folkshemmet conception) faces considerable challenges in the twenty-­first century as increased privatization, outsourcing practices, immigration, tax competition and ever visible differences in income distribution challenge any notion of egalitarianism on which the welfare state is premised (see Leibfried 2001; Heikkilä et al. 2002; Dahl and Eriksen 2005; Kettunen et. al. 2011, for discussion of these challenges). To summarize this argumentation, globalization and the integration of markets and politics are largely considered the wider causes behind the structural transformations that signify the increased adoption of neoliberal policy and the consequent dilution of welfare functions. It is to debating the particularities of this context that many of the films examined in this chapter contribute. On an industrial and institutional level, welfare ideology has had a substantial effect on the film politics of the Nordic countries. As all of these film cultures

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can be considered small nation cinemas (Hjort and Petrie 2007) with small­scale domestic audience sizes and production resources, they have an integral relationship with public funding. This is predominantly implemented through governmental organizations such as the various national film institutes and media production programmes, which include the Nordic Film and Television Council (for more on these industrial structures and developments, see Bondebjerg and Renvall 2010 and Sundholm et al. 2012). National cinema rhetoric underlies these structural support mechanisms, with the need to protect the particularities and sovereignty of domestic culture conceptualizing cinema as an integral part of national cultural well-being. The establishment of film institutes to safeguard the cultural health of the film industries means that they have been able to dictate the directions of domestic cinema at least to a considerable degree. As Pantti demonstrates in her comprehensive analysis of Finnish film politics (Pantti 2000), the welfare state is – at least on the level of ideology – a constant and transformative presence in the directions of Finnish film culture. To caricature this process somewhat, the slow but escalating dilution of the welfare state into a more mixed economy, combining both socialist and capitalist principles, and lately into neoliberal politics is mirrored in the role of the Foundation whose policies are increasingly directed towards integration with other (read commercial) funding sources. The forty year development of the Finnish Film Institute (established 1969) sees it go from strictly supporting art and politicized film production to encouraging both commercially competitive film as well as more art house based ‘difficult’ cinema (see Kääpä 2012b for more on these developments). While it would be overstating the case that the Finnish film industry has been moulded according to neoliberal principles, Pantti’s work shows that rhetoric criticizing the excessive paternalism and dependency of cultural production on the state is increasingly consolidated into policy (Pantti 2000: 317). Indeed, if we look at the contemporary state of the Nordic funding institutions, their directives and operations more than ever resemble the characteristics of the particular combination of welfare ideology and capitalism associated with the region, that is, a mixture of state support and private enterprise, as the adoption of new policies encourages producers to presell rights or find sponsors from the business world, while they also continue to guarantee a certain level of support for less commercial content. Pantti’s analogy between welfare state politics and the requirements of small film cultures seems very sensible and suggests that, ultimately, the film cultures of the region are largely embedded in the constitutive principles of welfare ideology transmutating into more neoliberal concerns.

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The welfare state is a central concern in most, if not all, contemporary publications on Nordic cinema (for examples, see Soila, Widding and Iversen 1998; Nestingen and Elkington 2005; Nestingen 2008; Kääpä 2010a and b for particularly relevant analyses). They discuss the above mentioned permutations of art, ideology, individual and the state from a range of critical angles and demonstrate the absolute centrality of welfare ideology for any analysis of Nordic film culture. Perhaps surprisingly, these works focus mostly on those depictions of the contemporary welfare state which view it in a mostly negative light. One could ask why this would be the case, especially considering all the glowing assertions of the exceptional advances of the Nordic welfare model. In part, this is a result of austerity programmes such as those implemented by the Danish state in the 1980s or a sense of scepticism at the ideological underpinnings of welfare capitalism following severe crises in Norway, Sweden and Finland in the 1990s, often as a direct result of mismanaged credit booms and adoption of dubious fiscal policies. Cultural critics like Pertti Karkama (1998) capture well this disillusionment, debating the ways neoliberal politics feed into every facet of society, diluting the very ideals on which the welfare state is premised. These critical perspectives continue to be evoked in the above publications of Nordic cinema, yet while discussions of nature and environmental considerations do feature in some of these explorations (often related to the ways nature is appropriated for nation-­building), their conceptualization of the wider ecosystemic relations of the human ecology of the Nordic countries remains only a side concern. The concept of human ecology in this context refers to the ways the human-­made environment (and its individual and organizational agents) live alongside and interact with the other organic lifeforms that occupy it, as well as the ecosystem that underlies it all. In such a model, we are not only preoccupied with the human-­made world and its social relations (as the divergent argumentations of most studies to date have been) but also conceptualize and contextualize these ideas in relation to their wider ecosystemic relevance. Ignoring or even refusing to see the ecological connotations of human habitations is a divergent mode of discussing the environment and cinema’s role within it. For us, to understand the human in a wider ecological context necessitates interrogating cinematic representations of urban life and, specifically in the Nordic context, welfare politics from an ecocritical angle. As we will see, the challenge posed by this approach to taken-­for-granted assumptions of difference between ‘human environments’ and natural ones is again a transvergent turn.

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Consumption patterns and the contemporary Nordic malfare society While Nordic societies hold some of the most affluent GDPs on a global scale, this does not always equate to welfare, but results instead in considerable problems with marginalization and different forms of psychological illness. These are all relevant areas for ecocritical studies as the role of human welfare and health are key parts in any study of human ecology. Alcoholism is a particularly problematic symptom that characterizes problems in the welfare structures of the majority of the Nordic countries. According to statistical evidence, Finland and Denmark have the highest levels of alcohol consumption among these countries with over ten litres of pure alcohol per capita in annual purchased consumption (Østhus 2011). While Sweden, Norway and Iceland consume less, and Nordic consumption levels overall are not exceptional globally, cultural narratives of alcoholism remain pervasive. General history books such as Tony Griffith’s Scandinavia: At War with Trolls (2005) brings alcohol and national identity to the forefront by relating stories of the drunken inspirations of famous writers and artists such as Ibsen and Sibelius. Such stereotypes are not only the property of historical overviews of cultural traditions and feature centrally in many sociorealist films from the region. Aki Kaurismäki’s Mies vailla menneisyyttä/The Man without a Past (2002) – to be discussed later – contains a particularly expressive indication of the central role alcohol plays in these cultures. The protagonist of the film meets his new neighbours for the first time and is asked a set of questions about his past, the first of which concerns his unemployment. Before answering, his inquisitor already puts forth his assumption – ‘drink’. It is a basic assumption that if a man from Finland does not have a job or is made redundant, it is due to alcoholism. In films, as in real life, shattered individuals and broken families are the result of alcoholism spiraling out of control. Narratives springing from alcohol abuse seem most frequent in Finland and Sweden, though the other Nordic countries have their fair share of these. It is a factor that tears apart loving families in the Swedish and Finnish suburbs in, for example, Reza Bargher’s Capricciossa (2003) and Zaiga Bergroth’s Skavabölen pojat/Last Cowboy Standing (2009), with invariably the father of the family turning into an abusive figure. The films do not try to find excuses for this behaviour as alcoholism as depicted seems almost natural as if it were in their blood or part of their DNA. If production and consumption of food occupies an important cultural role in representing

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national identity (Hjort 2000), alcohol consumption has a fundamentally contradictory role in society. While alcohol is often linked to masculine identity and occupies a role as a material element in heritage nation-­building of the type discussed in Chapter  1, rarely do these films show it in anything like a positive light. Furthermore, films such as Svinalängorna/Beyond (August 2010) or Minä ja Morrison/Me and Morrison (Helstedt 2001), once more from Sweden and Finland respectively, focus on women alcoholics, and show that alcoholism is not the property of masculine self-­realization and self-­destruction nor a taken-­for-granted aspect of national culture. Instead, they suggest that alcohol, when appropriated for narratives of national identity, specifically of the masculine kind, is only another material element used to maintain social paradigms, even in more affable depictions like those of Kaurismäki and Griffith. By depicting its devastating social impact on any sense of well-being, these films take part in vital questions over human ecology, chronicling a deep corrosive malaise that unravels the individual and their communal context. Especially sociorealist texts like Capricciossa describe the destructive role that alcoholic parents have on the children, affecting social cohesion and welfare of the future generations. Alcohol is thus another indicator of the ways in which chemical processes are appropriated for cultural roles, in this case to construct different ideological imaginaries and national narratives. Capricciossa shows the alcoholic attempt to explain away his disease as a natural part of who he is, creating a sort of Homo primitivus, a form of rhetoric connecting individual addiction with stereotyped approximations of alcohol as part of national identity – as just who ‘we’ are. But through his actions and his ability to rehabilitate, he shows that this ‘natural’ aspect needs to remain under some form of control, as it only contributes to fostering a further disconnection of not only individuals from one another, but also humanity from the rest of the ecosystem. Whereas many other films focus on consumption as both a cultural practice and a life philosophy, these films undermine the constitutive role given to alcohol. Initially, we are made to listen to excuses about how controlling alcohol abuse suppresses the natural primitive man, even suggesting that it is human nature to consume. But on the other hand, this idealized primitive man is shown to be a cultural construction and a fabrication that deserves no valorization. Ultimately, as these protagonists from the bleaker fractures in the Nordic welfare structures attest, the alcoholic human is only a chemical induced disorientation, and not a more authentic version of itself.

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Well-being and human ecology This brief overview of alcoholism in Nordic cinema reveals fragments in the façade of the welfare state as these representations focus on the corporeal impact of infrastructural and interpersonal failings. Alcoholism is only one part – albeit a very symbolic one – in the ongoing negotiations over Nordic welfare politics, including the role of the universal health care system. This system is another aspect that provides the Nordic countries with their claims of egalitarianism as well as operating as a key aspect of the welfare state. Films rarely show health care in negative ways, understandably, as the comprehensive and professional services of a multicultural industry provide precisely the type of ‘background understanding’ which forms the basis for considering these countries as the ‘People’s Home’ (Nestingen 2008). For example, the Finnish Kohtaamisia/ Heartbeats (Cantell 2009) features a narrative strand involving a black immigrant nurse tolerating and overcoming the racist abuse of one of her patients. This depiction not only draws on background knowledge of what contemporary Finland is supposed to be like, it also contributes to the ‘instituting’ of multi­ cultural ideology as part of the essential fabric of contemporary society. Yet, other forms of ecocinema take a more critical approach to the health care system, or more appropriately, its contemporary form, as happens in the Norwegian documentary Health Factory (Bustnes 2010). In Norway, a reform of the hospitals took place in 2001 and resulted in the privatization of most health services, leading to competition between care providers. Bustnes’ documentary film is an example of the sort of polemical documentary that is seen as vital to ecocinema’s social relevance, evoking the fundamental schisms that emerge when welfare state ideology transforms into welfare capitalism. Chronicling the ways the privatization of health care moves the focus away from individuals to profit margins, the film provides an important update of one of the key aspects underpinning egalitarian projections by the Norwegian state. Crucially, the film does not only stay in Norway, but expands its scope to cover different parts of the world. Starting out in Iceland, we hear about the increasing privatization of health care in this once prosperous country. The ideological allegiances of the film are certainly clear as the Minister of Health criticizes the International Monetary Fund for dismantling the welfare system and implementing strategies supporting privatization. Providing a transnational comparison, the film correlates this critique of Iceland with domestic politics as it compares the Norwegian Health Minister Bjarne Håkon Hanssen with

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Margaret Thatcher, showing how neoliberal policies dismantle the founding principles of the welfare state. A consultant from Ernst & Young comes to offer a new ‘smarter’ way to do things which is based on the Toyota factory model. The shifting of focus to quantifiable items and synchronized processes erodes the premise on which the contemporary health care system is based – humans caring for one another. The move from an interpersonal system to a health processing factory is conveyed visually by recurring shots of bodies hoisted on to a factory line. If Nordic conceptualizations of welfare are premised on egalitarianism and a sense of societal togetherness, the film makes for a compelling warning call over these fundamental transformations. While the connection being made is entirely obvious, it creates an impression of the ways the anthropocentric world is dismantling its own basis for survival in a desperate race to the profit line. Health Factory is a good example of a documentary exploration of human ecology in that it presents a coherent argument about contemporary human health management and encourages activist participation in solving its current problems. Fictional films often take a less pointed approach to depicting bio­ cultural concerns, but their contributions to ecopolitical discussion of the Nordic welfare systems are no less valid. Much of the discussion in this volume has focused on appropriations of nature for the purposes of constructing national narratives, seeking to construct the imagined communities of Anderson’s description, or to capitalize on the exotic connotations of such imaginaries. Such appropriations take on alternative roles when explored as part of a pervasive tendency in Nordic cinema to focus on bleak urban settings in narratives evoking nihilism and existential despair. Such themes are by no means restricted to the Nordic countries, but their prevalence in Nordic culture warrants further exploration, especially as such ideas are often integrally connected with the human ecology of these societies as well as their projections of welfare ideology. It is to these projections I now turn, focusing especially on cases that depict the welfare state ecology in ways that refuse to take its promises for granted.

Roy Andersson’s cinematic suspension Documentaries such as Health Factory focus largely on factual techniques to assess the state of welfare ideology in Norwegian society, only deviating from them with evocative shots of human bodies as cattle for the health industries.

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Others take such symbolic means as their main way of assessing the state of society, providing vital material for reassessing Nordic cinema from an eco­ critical perspective. One such case is the Swedish Roy Andersson, who started out with the New Wave inspired En kärlekshistoria/Swedish Love Story (1970) before experiencing something of an artistic meltdown with the dark comedy Gilliap (1975). Since then he perfected his idiosyncratic approach with commercials before returning to feature films with Sånger från andra våningen/Songs from the Second Floor (2000). The immediately noteworthy aspect of this idio­ syncratic style is the focus on worlds that resemble reality, but are somehow separate from conventional understandings of it. To explain this lapse in realist logic, Ursula Lindqvist suggests that Andersson’s cinema is ‘concerned with dynamics of domination, separation, and alienation in modern society. He locates these dynamics in society’s collective, post-­industrial blind faith in “the market”: that nebulous moniker for global capitalist systems’ (Lindqvist 2010: 206). Andersson’s films, constructed out of what initially seem like unconnected vignettes, work as metaphoric encapsulations of societal malformations. To explain how these films project a sense of an immobile society somehow freezing or slowing down, I draw on two examples from Songs from the Second Floor. The first is Kalle, the closest the film has to a protagonist. He is a furniture salesman who burned his shop down in an insurance scam. We first see him standing on the metro, staring at the camera with his clothes and face covered in ash. All around him, fellow passengers break into song, operating almost as if in an involuntary harmonious performance. This large-­scale synchronization pervades the society of the film in a mockery of egalitarianism as envisioned through the co-­operative spirit of the Nordic welfare state. While everyone in this society is equal in theory, individual success and forward progress are something that, at least for Kalle, are not possible unless a neoliberal opportunistic system is put in its place. But as his ashen appearance testifies, such individuals will soon be pulled back to rank. In Andersson’s dystopian world, laissez faire individualism and consensual democracy contradict one another and slow society down to non-­existence with interminable traffic jams – while everyone may want to get ‘there’, no one seems to know where exactly there is or how to actually find it. To understand the ideological positions the film poses, we must understand it as a critique of contemporary Sweden as a capitalist welfare state. This paradoxical constitution is clear from the premises of many of the vignettes as they focus on insurance scams, individuals being made redundant after years of devoted service, stockbrokers flogging themselves in a parade through the city, and

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endless traffic jams. In one way or another, all of these cinematic pointers gesture to what Hans Sjögren (2008) has described as the Swedish model of ‘welfare capitalism’. This model is based on a strong sense of co-­operation between the state and business, a middle way, in its ‘balancing of capitalism and socialism . . . [where] concepts such as corporatism, compromise thinking, consensual democracy, low corruption, high taxes and an egalitarian spirit are often associated with the Swedish type of welfare economy’ (Sjögren 2008: 22). But in Andersson’s world, the overwhelming reliance on the markets seems to have driven society to the edge of despair and left everyone stagnant. Individuals and communities exist at different speeds, indicating that certain individuals are able to move more effectively in this flux, yet no one ever actually gets anywhere. All in all, the world encapsulates the compromise thinking and corporatist strategies of welfare capitalism perfectly, albeit in an inverted, twisted way. The world of Songs from the Second Floor seems to be one where the laws of physics have been altered permanently by human conduct – or alternatively, where the physical world is reacting to human ‘progress’ and consequently impacting on the human life cycle. This evocation of the ecosystemic effects of human-­led society destroying itself from within is key to reading Anderson’s films ecocritically. If capitalism and individualism form the constitutive ideologies of this society – as well as the society in which Anderson produces his films – their contributions fragment the taken-­for-granted logic of this world in two ways. First, societal rules have imposed a framework of expectations and normative behaviour on humanity that have made them controlled organic machines. Secondly, it is only this decomposition in speed and perception that may form a model for survival. It is a world going out of balance – to quote the subtitle of Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi (1983). The second floor of the title of the film illustrates this well as humanity now lives on the second floor of the holistic ecosystem, completely cut off from any organic flow enabling life. All forty-­six vignettes of the film depict a different side of this psychological dysfunction. On the one hand, we have the pale zombie-­ like organic machines, slaves to the capitalist system. On the other hand, these machines can communicate with the dead who exist all around them, indicating the pervasive blurring of boundaries between life and death. Yet, this is not a religious sentiment as Kalle buys a truck-­full of crucifixes from a fellow salesman with the aim of cashing in on the current millennia craze. His estimations of the demand are ultimately hugely optimistic and Kalle has to take them all to a landfill site for recycling. There is no opium for the people of the broken down welfare capitalist society.

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All aspects of Songs from the Second Floor gesture to the ultimate futility of human existence. As a large building moves past the windows of a boardroom meeting, it becomes apparent that all rules governing society are up to question. The spectre of a murdered Russian boy from the Second World War haunts the protagonists, suggestively gesturing to Sweden’s neutrality in the war. Meanwhile the egalitarianism of society crumbles as a ‘foreigner’ looking for an ‘Allan Svensson’ is inexplicably attacked by the people in business suits. If all the fundamental aspects of this advanced Nordic society are easily broken, what point is there to try to maintain an impression of egalitarianism? The markets and religion exist like the opium that supposedly provides substance for the fragile lives of the people. But all of the images of self-­realization, whether crucifixes or the mass penitence of capitalists, are collective delusions designed to provide profit for this society without any depth. They are only superficial façades, the simulacra of an unethical society going through the motions to appear rational. This sort of existential crisis uncovers a truly transvergent understanding of human existence where the dystopian pessimism of the film gestures towards the unsustainable logic of anthropocentricism. If Songs from the Second Floor depicts in a state of deletion, suggesting that it is in fact human ideology that poses the most substantial threat to human ecology, Andersson’s follow-­up Du levande/You the Living (2007) continues to gesture towards the sort of alien motions and perversions of organic existence that provide his productions with their transvergent ecological perspective. The targets of You the Living’s critique of the Swedish human ecology concern the psychological techniques used by humans to disconnect themselves from the world. The film opens with a Goethe quotation: ‘Be pleased then, you, the living, in your delightfully warmed bed, before Lethe’s ice-­cold wave will lick your escaping foot.’ In Greek mythology, Lethe is one of the rivers of the underworld and embodies forgetfulness and oblivion. It is this oscillation between meaning and oblivion that is key to unravelling the implications of the film, as according to Lindqvist, it ‘examines how human beings in Western society fumble towards meaning in a fragmented and nonsensical world’ (Lindqvist 2010: 205). This is a futile pursuit by individuals deceiving themselves as well as those around them or having dreams which they try to analyse to provide their existence with some level of meaning. The fifty vignettes of the film revolve around individuals who try to inter­ connect with the wider society, but all areas of the contemporary material world that the humans have designed for themselves prohibit their actions. This is

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encapsulated well in the image of an old man and his Zimmer frame dragging a suffering dog down the street. It seems that the man is going through the motions of what he is meant to be doing, but he has forgotten the reasons for his actions. This world of ignorance embodies the society of delusion – all individualistic preoccupations with meaningless social conventions and avoidance of the wider, even ecological, problems emerging around them. While efforts may be made to generate connections, these constantly fail due to differences of opinion, well encapsulated by the repeated scenes of characters playing rhythmic music. The performances are intended as a way for them to connect with society, but instead of finding acceptance, they are only shunned for making too much noise. Ultimately, the problems are to do with a fundamental disconnection between appearances and intent, a notion once more tied to Sweden’s past as a bourgeoisie feast is ridiculed by one of the waiters pulling the tablecloth to reveal Nazi swastikas covering the table top. Illusions of stability may be sustained through constructions of a public image, but fractures also constantly appear in the façade of the constitutive ideology of welfare capitalism. To provide an almost literal illustration of this world weariness, a psychiatrist underlines his disappointment with the selfish humanity by prescribing his patients with pills, as this will lull them into ‘the warm bed in which humanity slumbers, unaware of any impending doom’, as he puts it. Yet, even in this state of oblivion, the humans are absolutely unable to be content with their lives. The final scene of the film makes the almost redundant sense of an apocalyptic threat real as we see warplanes descend on the film’s city. The humans gaze passively at this spectacle as they have done throughout the film. The paralysis of the screen protagonists is counterpointed by the emergence of upbeat Dixieland music on the soundtrack, which Andersson suggests is about opposition and an awakening call for the spectator (Gustafsson 2007). The point is about finding a totally new approach to human ecology, designed to make the spectator rethink the complacency characterizing the ways they approach their surrounding environment. This suggestion is complemented by the film’s experimental visual and narrative form. With this, You the Living evokes the type of reorientation of the cinematic gaze called for by McDonald (2004), and while it veers from the conventional topics of ecocinema, its persistently bleak view of the human ecology of contemporary Sweden and its deconstruction of welfare capitalism are suggestive of the many concerns that pervade ecocinema studies. Andersson’s world is a nihilistic extreme that confronts the spectator with its minimalist camera movements, drab colours, allegorical

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imagery and seemingly banal narrative elements. The allegorical and suggestive tone is nevertheless important for reorienting the typical ways appropriating nature for national narration operates. While both of the films are set in wholly constructed environments moulded after Andersson’s idiosyncratic concerns (most of both films were shot in his studio), they still provide narratives of contemporary Sweden. Yet, they challenge the convergent logic of such narratives with allegorical and philosophical gestures that displace the human in favour of a wider ecosystemic sensibility.

The man without a natural past Anderson’s dystopian world provides a challenge to the ways the human ecology of the Swedish welfare state operates. Similarly evocative takes on the ecological dimensions of Finnish society emerge in the works of another master of the urban environment, Aki Kaurismäki. Many of his early films, such as Rikos ja rangaistus/Crime and Punishment (1983) and Tulitikkutehtaan tyttö/The Match Factory Girl (1990) show us the Finnish welfare state in its worst light. These films construct a sense of urban claustrophobia as we never leave the city and rarely see any aspects of the world not made of concrete. The sense of immobility extends to Kaurismäki’s idiosyncratic characters who rarely communicate with one another or react to anything, not unsurprising as there is very little to react to. The mid-1990s pose a clear shift for Kaurismäki as not only did his films start to culminate with a sense of optimism, but the resoluteness of their urban dystopias seems to also have relinquished (Kääpä 2010a). The key film here is Mies vailla menneisyyttä/The Man Without a Past (2002), a text with a relatively optimistic conclusion and a lot to say about contemporary Finnish society. The protagonist of the film, M, is attacked upon arrival in Helsinki and loses his memory, and thus his identity. M is found washed up on the shore and taken to a village of the homeless, where he takes up residence in an abandoned shipping container located next to the harbours. In many ways, it seems that Kaurismäki has passed through the looking glass, and in the ecologically and politically destabilized Europe of the late 1990s, despair is already everywhere. To engage in despairing socio-­political and environmental criticism seems pointless in this world that is so distant from any sense of the natural that it can only be usefully, and paradoxically, done through recourse to optimistic reinvigorations of social convalescence, an optimism that

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also extends to their ecological dimensions. Andrew Nestingen suggests Kaurismäki’s films work as part of what he calls ‘the melodrama of demand’ (Nestingen 2008) in that they use affect and audience identification to make demands on the constitution of the contemporary social order. For Nestingen, it is important that these films work within the national order to be able to suggest alternative means of conceptualizing directions for domestic politics. If the contemporary Finnish socio-­economic order is structured along the principle of the ‘competitive state’ as Susanna Fellman et al. (2008) state – that is, a society where the state is extensively involved in supporting private firms and industrial sectors in their competitive practices – then Kaurismäki’s films deconstruct its societal structures and taken-­for-granted values. To achieve this critical vantage point, the films use a range of visual means that combine everyday realism with displaced historical references, as well as surreal inflections with minimalist aesthetics. The combination has been described as ‘displacement poetics’ (Bacon 2003), which refers to the ways the films twist reality to their own purposes, even as they still resemble everyday domestic society. Implicit in this approach is the ability to accommodate multiple political inflections and appropriately, Kaurismäki’s artistically complex films provide an ideal means by which to unravel the constitutive ideology of the competitive state in Finnish welfare politics. According to these films, welfare politics and capitalism operate hand in hand in contemporary Finland in ways that allow the state to support neoliberal ideology while espousing the virtues of collectivism. The melodrama of demand criticizes such combinations by taking apart some of the fundamental virtues espoused by the hegemonic order, including the state-­sponsored prioritization of economic growth rhetoric. Other critics go further as they see the films as so divisive in their politics as to criticize the whole notion of national belonging (Kääpä 2010a), or they argue the films recycle national gender and class stereotypes in such a way as to prohibit any realistic discussion of these aspects of society (Kivimäki 2012). Whatever the case, Kaurismäki’s depiction of contemporary Finland avails itself to multiple interpretations and combines aspects crucial to this chapter, namely, welfare society, capitalism, cultural heritage and ecological understanding. Taking an ecocritical approach allows us to identify a further level of signification in them, especially when it comes to the films’ use of national iconography and the ways they depict Finnish nature. Here, we have to also be mindful that Kaurismäki’s films are often considered postmodern in their use of irony and nostalgia (Koivunen 2006) and not a prescription or a solid answer to

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the problems posed by contemporary society. More obviously than in many other Nordic films, the nature and landscape imagery of Kaurismäki’s films are self-­conscious forms of simulacra – that is, the types of postmodernist shallow imagery discussed by David Harvey (1990), which maintain a fragile, often deliberately exploitative, connection to their original referent. For example, the rural landscape of 1960s Finland in Kaurismäki’s Pidä huivista kiinni Tatjana/ Take Care of Your Scarf Tatjana (1994) appears both as an exotic commodity for international audiences and a material element that has long since evaporated, that is, a signifier of nostalgia. The landscape imagery maintains a distance to ‘reality’, necessitating that we be sceptical about any such ‘natural’ images found in these films, especially when and if they relate to the relationship between the competitive state and human ecology. In critiquing the metamorphosis of the welfare state into a neoliberalist conglomeration, Nestingen suggests The Man Without a Past shows ‘the containerization’ of the welfare state, whereby the container – the habitat of M – is to be read as a ‘cipher of neoliberal globalization . . . an object of circulation’ (Nestingen 2008: 151). The container functions as a suggestive metonym for the humiliating and inhuman treatment of the labour force (human capital as the backbone of the welfare state) and its increasing outsourcing, all while corporate agents continue searching for expanding profits – the topic of many a contemporary Nordic film. As a melodrama of demand, the film needs to be understood as a politicized contribution to discussions of the Nordic welfare state, where the container as a home calls for a moral response to the type of socio-­economic displacement seen in the film. ‘Home in this melodrama is built on the refuse of the infrastructure of the global sea trade . . . the shipping container is made an aesthetic object so as to elicit a moral response that has political connotations concerning homelessness and labour’ (Nestingen 2008: 151). If the promise of the welfare state is characterized by a strong sense of socio-democratic universal equality among its citizens, provided by a powerful public sector (Jokinen and Saaristo 2002), the contradictions of the competitive state result in the Finland of these films becoming what Eduard Bustelo has characterized as a malfare state, premised on: the exclusion of a major sector of the population from the benefits of social policy, as well as inefficient allocations of social spending. Seen from the perspective of the poor, the welfare state is absent, or its presence is circumstantial, fragmented and/or limited. This becomes the basis for criticism of the state’s presence in guiding social policy. Bustelo 1992: 125

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What form does ecological criticism of the malfare state take? While containers are one of the instruments with which capitalist ideology sustains itself (and depletes the environment), Kaurismäki’s film demonstrates how individuals displaced outside of the system can re-­appropriate these instruments for alternative, more beneficial purposes – that is, as homes. Thus, the rusting and useless piece of scrap metal becomes something which can find an alternative purpose in the ecosystem. The recycling of the container is an example of the ways in which ecologically conscious texts can operate. If we understand contemporary Finland as a space of excessive consumption where things are discarded in gaining and sustaining the competitive state, the container, as a tool for fostering ecocritical perspectives, becomes connected to wider critiques of globalization and its exploitation of resources, which, at least in studies of human ecology, include the human body. The uneven dialogue between global capitalism and welfare society envisioned in The Man Without a Past demonstrates the ways human ecology rarely remains isolated by borders. By critiquing the constitutive ideology of global capitalism from very local focal points, the competitive state is seen as part of a wider acceptance of neoliberal ideology. This expansion necessitates that we consider the film’s ecological rhetoric in light of Heise’s eco-­cosmopolitan argumentation. In accounting for the interrelations of the global and the local, it becomes clear that nature does not comply with human logic. While local conditions may be an effective way to get things done, many of the reasons for ecological depravation and exploitation cross anthropogenic boundaries. But simultaneously, the evocations of local communality and national nostalgia of The Man Without a Past seem like a sensible approach to critique the global and planetary implications of neoliberal ideology and capitalist practices. The film shows how the effects of global capitalism are felt on the ground, where alternative perspectives generated by the schisms in the competitive state structure enables these individuals to find a new type of self-­worth as they mould the discarded containers into habitable accommodation, and through this rehabilitation, discard the constitutive ideologies that govern the conventional thinking of the surrounding society. From this perspective, the film’s depiction of containerization gestures to the role that social equality has played in Nordic ecological modernization at least since the so-­called Brundtland Report of 1987. This UN organized commission, chaired by the Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, played an important part in launching key environmental projects such as the Earth

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Summit in Rio and the Kyoto Conference. While such inspirational activity is only tangentially related to Kaurismäki’s film, and Brundtland, as well, to Finnish politics, the model provided by the Brundtland Report, even as part of a wider UN initiative, was vital in consolidating some of the aspirations of the Nordic countries in their attempts to assume a leading position in proposing solutions to global environmental factors. The report is often credited for consolidating the term sustainable development, an aspect that received criticism from commentators for highlighting social justice and predominantly addressing the conditions and concerns of developing countries from the perspective of the developed ones. Another aspect of criticism was also found in its prioritizing of economic logic over environmental concerns. This aspect takes on intriguing shades when considered as part of the developmental politics of the Nordic welfare state. As Kaurismäki’s film shows, social justice is hardly an agreed upon factor of the competitive state. The politics of containerization cast dubious light on sustainable development as it is explicitly (at least in this report) connected to economic progress and maintaining standards of living in the industrialized West. In contrast, The Man Without a Past suggests that the peripheries of the Finnish state are not so much in a state of development but regression. And in a further affront to the logic of constant economic growth and expansion, the community of outsiders implies that regression may not be such a bad thing. While its depiction of social and class-­ based containerization can be considered unrealistic, and its clear message of recycling and rehabilitation a form of utopian communitarian politics, Kaurismäki’s film nevertheless contains a powerful humanitarian and environmentalist call that refuses to discard material goods including the human body in unthinking ways. M and his community of outsiders make a pointed stand against the competitive state logic: If Finland and the other Nordic countries wish to lecture other parts of the world about sustainability they need to address their own human ecology first of all.

Global Iceland and ecosystemic rehabilitation A film such as The Man Without a Past opens the parameters of ecocinematic analysis by directly relating its ecocritical aspects to the wider societal structures of exploitation and ideological transformation. The containerization the film critiques connects its politics to a wider sense of global relevance, which in turn

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touches on a key facet of Nordic cinema – that is, the global dimensions of its film cultures. As Andrew Nestingen (2008) and Mette Hjort (2006) point out, Nordic popular culture can be considered to consist of reciprocal responses to the transnational circulation of ideas and media images, responses which comprise what Hjort calls ‘alternative’ or ‘reactive’ globalizations. According to this logic, each contribution has its own agency and can be considered a part of a global dialogue from a local basis with the very process of globalization becoming a multidirectional process. These contributions are valuable from an ecocritical perspective as they allow us to rethink the nationalizing appropriation of nature in a wider, even global, scope. Another example of such reciprocal activity emerges in Baltasar Kormákur’s Reykjavik 101 (2000), which focuses on the directionless and lazy Hjylnur, who fills his days with excessive sleeping, alcohol, casual sex and internet pornography. Isolated and moribund, the Icelandic environment seemingly provides Hlynur an additional reason to withdraw into stimulated sensual experiences and inebriation. His mother provides him with a roof over his head and the state an income in the form of a welfare cheque, so Hlynur is left with little to motivate him. Many of the key elements of a typical Nordic exploration of existential angst and nihilism are at play here, but Hylnur is thrown into turmoil with the arrival of the Spanish Lola (Pedro Almodovar’s muse Victoria Abril). Hlynur has a very close relationship with his mother, but now it seems that Lola has taken over this taken-­for-granted aspect of his life. By introducing the cosmopolitan Lola as an instigator of the challenges globalization instils, the film aims its criticism towards the complacency engendered by the affluent welfare state. By divesting our Icelandic protagonist of this safety net, Reykjavik 101 provides a re-­examination of the clashes of the welfare state and global circulation. The film has generated considerable discussion of its global dimensions, with Nordfjörd (2010b) considering it as an indicator of new directions for Icelandic cinema, and Møller suggesting the film ‘frames Iceland in the global daze’ (Møller 2005). This discussion of the ways Reykjavik 101 operates on a transnational scale is certainly vital for advancing our comprehension of the film’s scope. Both studies also mention the role of the Icelandic environment as the wider material context in which these processes are negotiated, though neither study expands much on these suggestions. Thus, an explicitly ecocritical approach can clarify some of the ways cosmopolitanism and a more traditional sense of Icelandic identity are in constant dialogue, especially as it seems that nature isolates the Icelanders, but it also brings tourists over to gawk at them. Indeed, the film

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consciously builds an image of ‘Cool Icelandia’ with esoteric and reclusive impressions of the country utilized for cultural capital aimed primarily at international consumption. From the perspective of the outsider, the environment is entirely different – it is an exotic part of the uniqueness of the nation and acts as a facilitator of communication, not an isolating element. The film thus provides an angle for exploring the ways cultural appropriations of nature can work differently according to one’s perspective. This relationship is a constantly developing one as ecological concerns play a key role in Hlynur’s progression from an isolated misanthropic recluse to a more functioning part of society. Every one of his initial activities can be considered a means for him to move away from nature. He clearly has no love for the cold environment and he hates what he calls the ‘countryside’. He even buys a fake Christmas tree, not for its ecovalue, but because it is convenient as it does not require any care and does not make a mess. Hlynur is an urban individual, detesting nature (‘no insects, no trees’) in an equal measure to his neighbours, who only seem capable of sprouting affinities to their nation. In contrast to what he perceives as a society frozen in (and taking paradoxical advantage of) its own reclusiveness, Lola emerges as a new species, a ‘lesbian bird’, according to him, capable of reinvigorating this ‘nothing kind of nothingness’. In a key scene, compelled by a rejigged version of The Kinks’ ‘Lola’ (performed by Damon Albarn and Einar Örn Benediktsson), Hlynur walks out of his urban emptiness to the expansive wild. He lies down in the snow intending to end his life. As the snow buries him, it also extinguishes his cigarette and his gaze is dismayed by the bright sun. Creating a sort of natural reawakening, the scene provides Hlynur with a tangible connection with nature, which seems to have healed his dysfunction. In contrast to the freewheeling attitude of the majority of the film, the conclusion takes a distinctly conservative turn. Hlynur had sex with Lola earlier in a drunken haze and she now gives birth to his son, to be taken care of by his mother and Lola. Hlynur’s nature experience has made him realize his active role in the ecosystem, suggesting that urban existence has cut off his lifeline. This rehabilitation is not only about reproduction but also about taking a more proactive role in the welfare society. Whereas previously he had expressed his somewhat ironic admiration of welfare state ideology, Hlynur has now taken on a respectable job as a parking attendant instead of utilizing welfare to enable his dysfunction. Does this indicate that Hlynur has submitted to the demands of conventional societal respectability and betrayed his earlier abidance with

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hipsterism in favour of national rehabilitation? Or is this a part of the film’s more or less ironic negotiation between rigid social structures and its distinctly liberal politics? Whatever the case, none of this should be taken at face value, as is made clear by the tragic-­comic display of Hlynur attempting to smoke in the snow, and compromising his disdain for parking attendants by becoming one. The country may need a new beginning by rethinking some of its more traditionalist factors, but this is a beginning possible only by opening up to new experiences, including the ways the natural environment is appropriated for anthropocentric narratives. Whereas heritage representations often implicated nature reconciliations as part of the convergent impetus of nation-­building, Reykjavik 101 provides a more eco-­cosmopolitan approach to nature’s role in the contemporary Icelandic imaginary. The notion of eco-­cosmopolitanism here indicates not only border crossing and cultural openness, but also conceptualizing nature in more complex terms than as mere property of the nation or as a utopian opposite of urbanity. Hlynur’s immersion into the ecosystem and its invigorating effect may be environmental utopianism at its simplest, but it is also an approach that gestures to a transvergent understanding of the role of nationalized nature in ecocinema. This perspective certainly appropriates nature for human identity politics, but does so in such a way that nature is able to retain its independence from strict existence as a human repository of meaning.

Conclusion: Human ecology and Nordic ecocinema Most of the films discussed in this chapter, from The Man Without a Past to Reykjavik 101, focus on areas that may seem tangential to ecocinema. But under the often ‘displaced’ worldview and their focus on sociopolitics, their critical work focuses on many key ecological themes including resource exploitation and inequality within the welfare state, noting crucially that the human body is also such an exploited resource. While these urban forms of Nordic ecocinema certainly make a range of politicized demands, they are also premised on complex modes of affect, interrogating the relationship between societal inequality and ideology, or they may connect the different manifestations of the welfare state to global capitalism, all with significant ecological connotations. For example, Kormákur’s focus on cosmopolitan emancipation and hybrid immersion show Iceland as an ecosystem in transition, whereas The Man Without

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a Past shows us a more localized version of globalization with its focus on recycled habitations and the meagreness of the protagonists’ lifestyles. Combined with the provocative dystopian worlds of Andersson, we get a sense of the complex interrelations between economics, politics, urban studies, ecology and film, through which calls for individual and collective action are made. Reading films by these idiosyncratic Nordic auteurs from an ecocritical perspective is important for my emphasis on expanding the study of Nordic cinema beyond appropriating or appreciating nature in nation-­building. Part of this expansion is to challenge views which see ecocinema as only concerned with the natural world or explicitly environmentalist rhetoric. This chapter has explored some of the ways in which the constitutive welfare ideologies of the Nordic countries are questioned by placing them in context with wider ecosystemic connectivity. Yet, I have only barely touched on the ways the urban environment can be reconceptualized ecocritically, especially in genre cinema. This will be the focus of the next chapter of this book, which explores the human ecology of the urban environment more explicitly.

6

Brownfields of Late Capitalism The previous chapters have addressed the ways national narratives use nature as a cultural resource, often vindicating traditionalist or even conservative politics. If urbanity was a concern in these films, it was constructed as the opposite of the authenticity to be found in nature. Studies in human ecology call for understanding humanity’s role in the ecosystem on a more complex level than this binary. Such approaches include studies of the ways human habitats function as part of the complexity of the contemporary planetary ecosphere. Indeed, conceptualizing human habitation as entirely different from ‘natural’ ecosystems would resort to the sort of anthropocentric binaries much of contemporary ecocriticism aims to undo. Thus, while the ecological purpose of urban portrayals is not as evident as those of the more ‘natural’ variety, we must also consider these films in ecocritical terms. The interrelations of urban spaces, the natural environment, humanity and the biotic community, as well as their cultural representations in a ‘realist’ mode, are key to what Lawrence Buell identifies as ‘second wave ecocriticism’. Studies in this rhetorical advance may focus on, for example, conceptualizing different areas of the city space in more complex forms than simply considering them as degradating, unsustainable forms of human accommodation. As Buell productively suggests, the city is filled with a diversity of natural spaces in interaction with more ‘unnatural’ habitation. While these may be terraformed greenfields – golf courses, parks – they can also be toxic or contaminated sites, often industrial or highly congested sites, encapsulated as brownfields. Identifying different ‘brownor greenfields’ within the city – terms denoting the diverse ways in which natural spaces are used in the city – allows us to recognize ‘the city as something other than a non-­place’ (Buell 2005: 88) in terms of human environment interaction. According to this logic, the city has to be understood as another space in which contemporary battles over ecosystemic understanding may be conducted. While we have seen some of these battles in the films of Kaurismäki and Andersson, for example, their connotations are even more complex when we

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take out the ‘displacement politics’ of these more artistic representations. The focus of this chapter is on a range of Nordic thrillers that take place in banally realized urban spaces. The attraction of these films is in their indexical relationship with the real world, whereas the case studies of Chapter 5 are more reliant on the absence of the immediate real. Despite this realist bent, they remain important contributions to ecocinema studies as they evoke ways of seeing human structures in a more planetary and thus more ecosystemic perspective, despite their immediate disavowal of such concerns. As we will see, they are also particularly useful contributions in assessing the green economy that remains a particular point of pride for most Nordic countries (as discussed in the Introduction).

Liminal spaces between the urban and the rural: Jar City Baltasar Kormákur’s Icelandic thriller Myrin/Jar City (2005) is a particularly good case for initiating this discussion, focused as it is on biopolitical concerns surrounding the experimental DeCODE genetic archive and the decomposing brownfields of contemporary Icelandic urbanity. The film is, on the surface, a procedural detective thriller concerning buried secrets that emerge to have a shocking impact on present day Iceland. To understand its ecocritical potential, we must turn to the ways it responds to existing uses of the landscape in Icelandic cultural self-­conceptualizations. While landscape is a key aspect of all Nordic cinemas, the Icelandic topography opens unique possibilities for ecocriticism due to the constantly morphing volcanic activity of the soil and its expansive splendour and bleakness. C. Claire Thomson’s (2006) exploration of Friðrik Þór Friðriksson’s Cold Fever (1995) discusses the Icelandic landscape from a trans­ national angle, especially the ways the film mobilizes typical touristic impressions of depicting Icelandic culture from geysers to boiled sheep’s head, from spirits roaming the backroads to Black Death vodka. For Thomson, the film is significant for its attempts at creating a hybridized view of the human body merging with the natural environment: Giving the body its place in the process of imaginative involvement in a national community opens up a space in which to undertake the first sketchy mappings of a more holistic understanding of the nexus of culture, material world and affective belonging. Thomson 2005: 152

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As an attempt to represent a hybrid account of the human and nature as part of the same ecosystem, the film challenges our culturally-­located sense of self by focusing on dislocation caused by transnational interaction. It then resituates this sense of confusion by providing repeated imagery emphasizing tactile and haptic connectivity through emphasis on sensory elements like wind, fog, snow and mud. The hapticity generated by the constantly shifting geomorphic environment and the repetition of self-­aggrandizing questions (’how do you like Iceland’), aimed at the Japanese protagonist, foregrounds the self-­conscious strengthening of a collective national identity by, first, mirroring it in nature and, secondly, by verifying its peculiarities through a transnational prism. The blurring of boundaries in the film evokes forms of identification that supersede or dismantle cultural priorities and thus deconstruct the self-­evident role of nature in conventional ‘naturalized’ national narratives. Haptic hybridity and a transnational sense of affect combine to create powerful frameworks of cultural understanding. Thomson’s discussion of Cold Fever is one of the first comprehensive eco­ critical discussions of Nordic cinema and lays the groundwork for exploring Jar City from the angle of haptic engagement. The discovery of the murdered body of the criminal Holberg in a Reykjavik basement propels cynical detective Erlendur on a tour of not only the dark secrets of a mysterious family heritage, but also the national past. The connections between the death of the five-­year-old Aude thirty years ago and the recently deceased body lead Erlendur to Orn, a geneticist mourning his recently deceased daughter who passed away from a genetic disease. Meanwhile, Erlendur discovers the role his own drug addicted daughter plays in Iceland’s criminal world. The interconnections between different generations and families shifts focus to the ways the genetic heritage and actions of individuals pass from generation to generation, causing unknown permutations and deep wounds that may be buried in the turbulent soil, but which break to light without fail. Orn works at the Icelandic Genetics Heritage Headquarters, which archives not only the genetic information of the different generations of the nation’s population but also the brain of Aude. The jar in which the brain is held is one link to the film’s English title as is the suggestion that the population of Iceland is like an experiment – it is small and secluded, making it an ideal specimen pool. It turns out that Holberg was the illegitimate father of Orn, who unknowingly transmitted the genetic flaw to his offspring, explaining the original English title of the novel on which the film is based, Tainted Blood. As Orn takes his own life after revealing that he killed Holberg, one particular line of corrupt heritage is put to rest.

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The notion that detectives can unravel crimes decades in the past by studying the genetic composition of victims and perpetrators is a fascinating one. It not only indicates the ways the population of Iceland relates to one another, but the ways the climate and isolation shape the individuals that comprise its communities. To capture this organic link, the visual and narrative aspects of Jar City focus on the soil and particularities of the landscape to provide an impression of a tactile surface. Playing as much a character in the film as its protagonists, the landscape and natural factors, such as snow and steam emerging from the soil, provide an emphatically sensory experience, encouraging spectators into an immersive relationship with the ecosystem. Crucially, much of the film focuses on bodies unearthed from the soil. The constant emphasis on decomposition through close-­ups of decaying flesh or largely decomposed skeletal matter highlights this immersivity as the corporeal materiality of the body becomes part of natural recycling, while other parts of the narrative highlight the perversions (the murders) that accelerate the cycle of human decomposition. The focus on decomposing flesh and putrid smell provides a distinctly bleak alternative to the touristic hapticity of Cold Fever. These are complemented by the turbulent landscape which belches out lava and steam and provides the film with its unique sense of isolation. The use of the landscape as a hapticized factor extends to biopolitical considerations when we consider the film’s depictions of this small and isolated nation. The Jar City of the title is part of the genetics database hosting information of the island’s inhabitants. Due to the limited size and lack of external pollination of the population the database is a vital research tool to test out genetic factors in a variety of diseases and identify disease-­related genes. Rather than celebrate this achievement, the film seems sceptical about the project’s implications for social cohesion and harmony. While it may be a worthwhile tool to investigate criminal activity, its application in the film indicates a sense of science gone wrong as Orn uses it to track down his illegitimate father. Orn’s actions certainly seem to be morally correct in undoing genetic flaws in the nation’s constitution, but they also imply that the activities to supply and maintain the database are potentially corrosive in their own right. A study by Merz et al. (2004) gestures to a remarkably similar understanding as they focus on the commercial ethics of the database, especially its intentions to generate products and revenue for a private and non-Icelandic pharmaceutical company. The appropriation of Icelandic genetic heritage for tackling diseases and serious physiological conditions is certainly admirable. But

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simultaneously, the literal use of indigenous resources for neoliberal operations of multinational corporations poses a striking example of profiteering from projects with clearly defined ethical goals, a topic of much discussion in writings on the environmental justice aspects of ecocinema (see Stein’s 2010 discussion of The Constant Gardner (Meireilles 2007), for one). Whereas The Constant Gardner critiques the ways Western patronage of Africa in the form of medical supplies malforms into exploitation, the domestic population of Iceland is not safe from this sort of appropriation either. This is a problem gestured at in Kormákur’s film, especially when it contrasts national traditions and the more ‘modernized’ parts of the country. Several indicators of traditional culture appear, such as the culinary use of sheep head, but in the postmodernist Iceland of Jar City, even this specialist consumable is fast food, a microwaveable dish and an item of mass production and consumption. It seems that much of Iceland’s cultural heritage is up for an easy sale, similar to its genetic heritage. If much of Jar City emphasizes a sort of natural corrosive perspective on Icelandic existence, the use of travel and the road provide another dimension to its ecological argumentation. As discussed in Chapter 3, the road can operate as a heterotopic transvergent space between cultures, which provides an inquisitive vantage point from which to see cultures in transition. The road also has this function in relation to cultural depictions of nature. Much of the visual grandiosity of the film emerges from Erlendur travelling along the barren Route 1, the Icelandic Ring Road. The expansive shots emphasize the barren landscape and the adjacent sea, both beautiful in their bleakness. As satellite towns and distant habitation emerge out of the landscape, the film constructs dialogue between barely controlled ‘nature’ existing alongside ‘civilization’, or barely controlled civilization encroaching upon nature. Claire Thomson’s discussion of Cold Fever highlights the hybridizing role of the road as a space of dislocation, where the ‘super-­modern infrastructure of touristic Iceland’ meets the more ‘authentic’ space of the wilderness (Thomson 2006: 159). Erlendur’s journeys in Jar City provide another way of rethinking the barriers between humanity and nature. Reykjavik as the capital city and global hub of international finance stands as the epitome of the anthropocentric realm of contemporary Iceland. But even in the civilized space of the city, erosion gnaws away at its infrastructures much like the bacteria deconstructing the buried bodies. Through this, the film takes part in the ongoing negotiation over Reykjavik’s role in relation to the adjacent countryside and the national imaginary. According to film historian Birgir Møller (2005), films like Land og synir/ Land and Sons (Guðmundsson 1980) present Reykjavik as a dream and a utopian

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goal, although, as with the other Nordic countries, Icelandic films often focus on the corruption that urbanity represents. Jar City is intriguing in that it makes this relationship not only cultural but also corporeal as the film provides a comprehensive cartography of the Icelandic ecosystem and finds humans engaged in similar forms of corrosive activity everywhere – the city and the countryside, with little space for the romanticism of previous eras. By uncovering this pervasive corruption, ecocritical analysis contributes an alternative perspective on the state of national narration in contemporary Iceland. While nature is also used here as an appropriated symbol, much as it does with heritage cinema, its use is very different from the convergent logic operating in those films. By emphasizing not only the corporeal nature of the human body, but also the roots of societal organization in corporeal factors, the film is able to generate a transvergent take on contemporary Iceland’s ‘roots’. Instead of mere human appropriation of nature, human corporeality is the material that faces the most disturbing form of appropriation, with organic human matter being appraised for its capital value. Through this, Jar City critiques the contemporary directions of the neoliberalist nation.

The Pusher trilogy as urban ecocinema Jar City’s transvergent focus on genomics and human corporeality diversifies the scope of Nordic ecocritical film study beyond the nature appropriations of many heritage and genre narratives. Yet, this does not by any means imply that all urban evocations are ultimately concerned with transgressing the boundaries between nature and humanity. Instead, many of them use these very same boundaries as their foci, even as they construct pervasive critiques of the state of the nation. To take an example, Nicholas Winding Refn’s Pusher trilogy (1996–2004) forms a quintessential part of contemporary Danish urban cinema with its complex exploration of the lives of multiethnic drug dealers in Copenhagen. Focusing on small-­time drug peddlers Frank and Tonny and the Serbian organized crime boss Milo and his right-­hand man Radovan, the series constructs a bleak study of the human ecology of contemporary Copenhagen. The trilogy’s dystopian connotations rely on their pervasive sense of claustrophobia and a feeling of inescapable doom. While the world of the Pusher trilogy is highly stylized in its emphasized grittiness and references to the pop cinema of the likes of Quentin Tarantino and Guy Richie, the construction of the milieu

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is not only a stylistic gimmick. Portraying the city not unlike the dark cities of film noir, the films consistently confront us with the moral void of this human-­made urban ecosystem. The use value of the Pusher trilogy comes clear when compared with rural narratives such as Wolf and the Hunters 1 and 2, which share thematic concerns with Refn’s films. For example, all of them focus on the fluctuating relationship between individualism and collectivism in the constantly transforming welfare state context. Capitalism emerges as a central consideration, both as an essential facet in a society reliant on the logic of private property, as well as a destructive force that perverts one’s communal and individual relationships. When compared to these two Swedish examples, the Pusher trilogy may seem to have little to do with anything ecological. But in fact, it is the absence of anything conventionally ‘natural’ which provides the Pusher trilogy with its ecocritical potential, evoking a sense of a dystopian, dehumanized existence. In a particularly representative scene from Pusher 2, two of the Danish protagonists venture to a secluded location in the countryside to fake an attack on one of the henchmen from the Serbian mafia. Tonny shoots the henchman in the arm while in the background stand Denmark’s proud symbols of sustainable production, wind turbines. Wind energy is a key facet in the contemporary competitive profitability of the Danish economy, with turbine production companies such as Vestas among the global leaders in sustainable energy technology. Simultaneously, the production of sustainable energy is a business practice and Vestas, in particular, has been at the receiving end of negative publicity over the ways it relates to its human resources on a global scale. While this particular company is not identified in the film, the ethical contrast between the wind turbines and the faked injuries should not be dismissed. First, this is one of the only times we see anything resembling nature in the trilogy. If we consider sustainable development a form of business-­minded ecological thinking, or even a form of profit generating activity exploiting the current incentives to ‘green’ the energy production field, the pointed contrast between the gangsters’ manipulation of their competition and the symbols of wind energy asks whether there is much difference between the micro capitalist manoeuvring of the pushers and the wider activities of the green industries. While the two forms of business are inherently different in both method and practical impact on society, and should not be conflated unthinkingly, these sorts of outrageous connotations are not beyond the scope of Refn’s subversive films.

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Secondly, the instance draws attention to the wider metaphoric connotations of the pusher lifestyle in Danish society. Martin Jes Iversen and Steen Andersen have discussed the contemporary formations of Danish capitalism as a form of ‘co-­operative liberalism’, where liberal characteristics including ‘market economic principles, rights of individuals, and high reliance on intense knowledge sharing with other societies’ exists along with ‘co-­operative aspects [such as] “help to self-­help”, solidarity, traditions from many civil organizations and an intense negotiation between private and public interests’ (Iversen and Andersen 2008: 325). This emphasis between welfare state ideology and competition, egalitarianism and privatization indicates some of the interrelations and contradictions in which green politics and sustainable incentives operate as part of co-­operative liberal ideology. If Pusher 2 can be seen as a critique of the business philosophies of contemporary Denmark, how do its arguments fit in with nation-­building rhetoric? National narration in these films would, initially, seem entirely different from the heritage films as they use, for example, different iconography and character types to represent society. But insisting that these films form some radical break with the past would be misleading. After all, the Pusher trilogy has been interpreted, for very good reason, as some of the most visible indicators of Denmark’s globalization by Hjort (2006) and Nestingen (2008), notions explicit in their multicultural arguments as well as their stylistic debt to the gangster genre. Nature in the heritage genre often forms a somewhat unquestioned part of the ways they approach national narration. If the urban variations update these national narratives by challenging their exclusivity and restricted imaginaries, then the relationship they adopt with nature also needs further elaboration. Combining Buell and Tong’s work on urban ecocinema with the more sociocritical perspectives of Hjort and Nestingen enables me to provide a new take on ideological mutations in Nordic welfare ideology. Instead of playing up the multicultural angle, what if we are witness to a metaphoric dissolution of the notion of the welfare state, conducted through a globalized tale of intra-­species violence? The dystopian and nihilistic despair makes its most obvious point in the climax of the trilogy as we see a literal dismantling of the human body by the co-­operative liberal system and its by-­products. Milo and Radovic star in the third instalment as they have to cope with new, even more violent competitors. They accidentally kill a Polish and an Albanian gangster in a crime exchange gone wrong and have to erase all clues to the crimes before the crime organization

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catches up with them. If the rest of the series shows the psychological deconstruction of the human psyche in the liminal spaces of the urban world, here the body becomes the ground for rethinking the detritus of the city. In blurring the boundaries between the human and the organic material that the city exploits, the Pole is first hung up and bled dry, then disemboweled and finally cut to pieces. Not much more than an animal and an unwanted carcass, we are confronted with shots extreme in duration as the physical leftovers of the human are washed down the drain back to the ecosystem from where they came. By deconstructing the human body and showing it in all its corporeal organicity, the film both suggests a more ecological understanding of the human in the ecosystem and a critique of its master complex. In the most violent way possible, the film asks us to confront our own mortality and the fragility of our supposed mastery of the environment. Such shocking instances foster a sense of existential panic as the fragile identities humans have constructed are dismantled, leaving not much more than blood and gristle. Considered as a metaphoric critique of an overtly permissive liberal state, these exploits connote the sense of a society that is tearing itself apart, premised as it is on unsustainable principles. If the only indication of anything organic in this world is the brief glimpse of nature scenery and the blood and gristle that spills from the body, what use can such a society be? As a chronicle of the globalization of Danish society, the trilogy provides an incisive exploration of its transformations. But as an ecocinematic contri­ bution, they interrogate and ultimately deconstruct some of the founding principles on which the contemporary capitalist welfare state is premised. Ecocritical perspectives on the human ecology of global Denmark thus view its domestic politics and societal organization in an extremely critical light, showing us some of its fundamental contradictions. By deconstructing the principles of the contemporary state, the Pusher trilogy continues the project of national narration seen in the heritage films, albeit in a drastically different way. It seems the further these films move away from nature, the clearer it becomes that human organic matter has now become the resource to be appropriated instead of aspects of the ‘natural environment’. By shifting the focus firmly from the greenfields of nature appropriation to the human body gasping for survival in its brownfields, what may initially seem like divergent takes on ecological representation take on transvergent qualities as they question the rationale and consequences for distancing humanity from nature.

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The absence of nature as a nihilistic disconnection: R If the world created by Refn pays homage to the urban dystopias of Michael Mann or Danny Boyle, and in the process deconstructs human dominance over their environment, Tobias Lindholm and Michael Noer show us a world entirely divorced from any semblance of humanity in their Danish crime saga, R (2010). Focusing on the incarceration of young offender Rune (Pilou Asbek), the film shows us a dehumanized world where many of the ideological underpinnings of the Pusher films culminate. Rune is sent into one of the worst incarceration facilities in the country, a sort of human brownfield consisting of the most toxic individual elements in society. The prison is a wasteland, all concrete corridors and barren yards, inhabited by the worst of the worst, exploiting one another at every turn. While taking a grittier approach than the Pusher films, the microsociety of the prison is premised on a similar set of rules concerning individualistic and capitalist exploitation, all in a distinctly multicultural (though segregated) setting. The internal drug trade sustains loyalties and power relations and Rune is able to exploit an oversight in the dissemination of the substances. Through his obsession with cleaning he discovers a way to smuggle drugs by placing them in empty chocolate egg containers and subsuming them into his body. In this environment, the human body is no longer only organic matter, but also a vessel for smuggling and consuming substances harmful to it. By criticizing humanity’s self-­destructive ways, the denaturalized landscape and dehumanizing body politics show us the types of dystopian worlds normally reserved for science fiction. But this is not intended as some prophetic warning about the course of unsustainable contemporary actions. Instead the world of R is a reality within the welfare structures of the co-­operative liberal ideology of contemporary Denmark. Considered as a form of Foucaultian heterotopia, the prison is an inversion of the moral codes of the society and also an essential facet in maintaining the constitution of this society. It critiques societal organization by showing us an inverted impression of its contemporary structures, but it also supports the society by locking up those who exceed its normative limitations, thus validating these same limitations. Considered in terms of human ecology, the dehumanization of the body and its increased disconnection from any sense of sustainable existence suggests a perversion of humanity’s being in the ecosystem. The degradation (or disassemblage) of the human in this brownfield reaches a bleak conclusion. Rune and his accomplice Rashid are severely punished for

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their attempts to play the system. Assaulted by his so-­called friends, Rune dies as a consequence of Rashid’s betrayal. Yet, Rashid’s conscience gets the better of him and he confesses all to the warden. Unfortunately for him, the socio-­ economic structures of the prison are in many ways a miniature, extreme encapsulation of the co-­operative liberal system, extending to its negotiations between ‘market economic principles and help to self-­help’, to quote two of the principles emphasized by Iversen and Andersen. Co-­operative corruption extends throughout the system and Rashid is scolded with burning oil on the face. The final shot of the film is of the concrete wall of the correctional institute, a dystopian indication of human disconnection from one another and from the wider ecosphere, a dysfunction in part premised on its ideo-­economic constitution. While R and the Pusher films are hardly ecocinema in the traditional meaning of the term, they need to be understood in this framework as they show essential features of human existence in the wider ecosystem and contribute to socio-­ political debates over the implications of human disconnectivity. In this, they call to mind Chris Tong’s argument that: ecocinema does not seek to reaffirm the old and the familiar binarism of the urban versus the natural by offering counterpart to urban cinema. Rather, an ecocinema is [concerned with] the porous and permeable interrelations between the urban and the natural [which] are thought of as being interrelated, mutually generative. Tong 2009: 180

From such a perspective, the urban and the natural are part of the same ecosystem, an approach that necessitates considering urban forms of ecocinema as equally active participants in generating ecological meanings as any normatively understood natural representation. Interestingly, these films use their depictions of human ecology to challenge the positive self-­conceptualization of the Nordic region as the ‘People’s Home’ by expressing concern with the ways the state structures its society and how the human body is subjected to the demands of modernization (and its associated capitalist ideologies). If the only thing organic in this world is a set of wind turbines (which can be seen as both attempts at sustainability and more cynically as business manoeuvres) or the blood spilled from violated or utterly destroyed (and deconstructed) human bodies, the state of the contemporary society can be understood as little more than an apocalyptic and dystopian landscape. Taken ecologically, they indicate the extent to which we can detect a sense

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of panic and oppression in society where ‘cash rules’ (as the gang leader in R has tattooed on his back) and any individual with a moral compass or a sense of communal affinity is isolated and ultimately perishes.

From coal to culture power: Nordkraft The concrete apartment blocks and heterotopias of incarceration that comprise Denmark’s suburban underbelly are a prime space for exploring some of the ecological implications impacting those inhabiting the brownfields that emerge in parts of the Nordic welfare structure. An even more elaborate perspective on the human ecology of Denmark emerges when comparing the dark existential comedy Adams Æbler/Adam’s Apples (Jensen 2005) and the sociorealist exploration of the malfunctions of the welfare state in Nordkraft (Madsen 2003). In contrast to the transvergent dismantling of welfare ideology in the Pusher trilogy and R, Ole Christian Madsen’s tale of drug pushers and users in Denmark, Nordkraft, is determined to sever any lingering traces of cohesion. Following the struggles of three addicts in the city of Aalborg, the film provides an unflinching portrayal of the bleakness of addiction. The ecological implications of a cultured, ‘greened’ country become questioned from the perspectives of its inhabitants for whom life comprises of squalor and claustrophobia. The protagonists live constantly on the border between recollection and forgetting, many of them with pasts and current identities they would rather not discuss. Allan suffered an accident at sea in the Philippines, which not only left him with mental but also physical scars across his body. Muhammad used to work as a debt collector in Iraq, but now loiters around the various addict habitations. In reality, he is the main dealer of drugs for the city, a fact he hides to secure his business. The city seen through the eyes of these outcasts differs from the glamorous pictures of Aalborg in tourist pamphlets, where claims of rebuilding the city for a new future may make some sense. In reality, the past refuses to disappear, lingering on as fragments of scar tissue or as substances in the bloodstream. The title Nordkraft plays a key role in unravelling the significance of the film and can be interpreted in multiple ways. It may, for one, imply some mysterious sense of Nordicness (the power of the North, literally), hinting at the often discussed notion of the environment as a factor in the creation of the identity of the region. But Nordkraft is also the name of the power plant that is situated in the centre of Aalborg, decommissioned in 1998 and rehabilitated for cultural use

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in 2009. This retrospective knowledge allows us to read the use of Nordkraft as the title as a way to posit the city as a space in transition, on its way to becoming a better place by grasping on to a renewable sense of the human self. The promotional material for the centre suggests very similar ideas to this promised rehabilitation: Once upon a time, Nordkraft supplied the people of Aalborg with electricity. But now, the old, coal-­fired power station in the centre of Aalborg generates a completely different kind of power – Culture Power. Nordkraft has been converted into one of Europe’s biggest and most impressive culture and activity centres. Visit Aalborg 2013

While the project was only in gestation at the time of the film’s production, the irony of the title certainly gestures to the contradictions in the human ecology of Aalborg’s cityscape where the transformations from an industrial hub into a self-­proclaimed city of culture are concretely felt. In an appropriately optimistic conclusion, the film complicates the conventional pessimism of depictions of urban Danishness as Allan dumps the drugs he is smuggling into the river that runs through the city instead of carrying on with the expected bad choices that would lead to self-­destruction. As junkies pick up the bags floating in the water, the lives of the distraught protagonists correlate themselves on a more optimistic parallel as the beach and the river seem to project a way out of the dysfunctional parameters of co-­operative liberalism. Thus, the greening of the old coal plant mirrors the film’s narrative as the navigations of the protagonists out of the destructive parameters of the city work to generate a sense of ecological convalescence, of welfare ideology finding its way through the self-­ imposed corruption and dilapidation of co-­operative liberal ideology.

The welfare state ecology and remains of the agricultural infrastructure Whereas R, the Pusher trilogy and Nordkraft foreground their dystopian takes on the welfare state and co-­operative liberalist malaise, with only the latter building towards any sense of rehabilitation, Adam’s Apples shows us a more metaphoric approximation of societal rebuilding. The Adam in question is the incarcerated leader of a fascist gang who has been released to the care of a minister, Ivan, through whom the film discusses the problems of rehabilitation

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in a society that relies blindly, at least in theory, on the goodwill of its citizens. Ivan has absolute faith in the goodness of man and houses criminals in his secluded but idyllic parish, without question. Adam’s cynicism confronts Ivan’s perspective, enabling the film to construct a metaphor, an impression, of Danish society as a complex and contradictory public space in which its welfare politics, premised on egalitarian ideals, face the selfishness of human beings. The positioning of its protagonists as binary opposites situates the film as a good example of ‘thematizing Denmark’ (Hjort 2007) as it projects a dysfunctional portrayal of its co-­operative liberal idealism. Inhabitants of the parish consist of a smorgasbord of Danish identity types who conform to its (stereotyped) contemporary constitution. Co-­operative liberalism is embodied by Ivan whereas the more cynical and often dangerously right-­wing side of the nation is represented by Adam. We also have Khalid, an immigrant who has been convicted of senseless robberies, and acts as a metaphor of sorts for the meagre opportunities and cultural confusion of the ‘new Danes’. Underlying this sense of dysfunction is the overweight Gunnar who is a kleptomaniac alcoholic, and Sarah, unmarried and pregnant with a child she is not sure she wants. In addition to the film’s thematization of Denmark through its representative protagonists, further nuances are established by its central ecotheme, embodied by the apple tree of the title. The tree is for Ivan an instrumental way for reconnecting Adam with society. It is certainly a spiritual and religious metaphor as Christensen suggests (Christensen 2010), a notion that connects to impressions of healing through nature, typical of certain new age philosophies. But for our purposes, the tree is predominantly a metaphor for the welfare society project where socially beneficial work is designed to engender a better society. Yet, this is based on utopian ideological goals which are out of touch with societal realities. The mirage of healing is shown to be a fragile one as crows eat most of the apples and later Gunnar and Sarah consume the rest of them. Rather than suggesting that the welfare state is some sort of shared natural project, evoking processes that echo the naturalization of the nation, the film constantly undercuts the welfare-­state-as-­tree metaphor. Indeed, it is a constantly challenged project that needs ‘holy fools’ like Ivan to guide it through the many perils it faces in an individualist society. But even this guidance must be taken with a grain of salt as we find out that Ivan’s blind faith is directly connected to a brain tumour he has developed. Suddenly, the guardian of the welfare state project is revealed to be the one off-­kilter, a notion compounded by another revelation that Ivan’s

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earlier loss of his wife created a trauma that led him to forcefully seek some measure of good in an unjust world. His sunny disposition hides all these internal conflicts and problems, not unlike the welfare state, which sutures the wounds of a dysfunctional society. As Adam’s neo-Nazi gang come to reclaim their leader, Ivan is shot in the eye in the ensuing conflict. Adam uses the last apple of the tree to bake Ivan a pie, thus indicating the culmination of the welfare state project. But rather than seeing the tree as a means to reconcile the fallen leader with society, Adam discovers that Ivan survived the assault and has also had his tumour destroyed by the bullet. It seems that the dysfunctions of society keep it together even if they sometimes contradict or reject its founding principles. In a conclusion brimming with optimism and irony, Ivan and the now rehabilitated Adam welcome two recently freed criminals to their parish. We find out that Khalid has now returned to the Middle East, while Gunnar has married Sarah and the two have a child with Down’s syndrome. While they both have moved to Indonesia, the impression created by this wholesome turn of events is that the welfare state looks after its own. But simultaneously, underlying this sense of optimism is the lingering feeling that Adam has bought into Ivan’s hallucination as they both now dress alike and showcase the same sort of fanatical gleam that so repelled Adam initially. Instead of a simple metaphor of ‘the tree and its fruits of social cohesion’ standing in for the welfare society, the film questions rather than lectures – are we to take this culmination as a sceptical exploration of the false illusions of the egalitarian welfare state or does the climax, in fact, connote a healing through nature narrative, something which would be complemented by the visual scenery of the Jutland heartlands, reminding us of Denmark’s agricultural history? Through this complexity, Adam’s Apples emphasizes the fractures in the constitutive façade of the co-­operative liberalist ideology. Situated somewhere between rural heritage idealism and the dystopias of urban Danish cinema, it confronts us with the complexity of capturing societal transformation on screen. But by highlighting the central role of the apple tree as a symbol, instead of a material facet of the nation, the film foregrounds the importance of such iconography for social cohesion. While idealism and the simplicity of a harmonious Denmark may be an illusion, it is a powerful illusion capable of addressing some of the glaring wounds in the urban façade, with the metaphoric tree acting as a powerful reminder of a nation’s will to collectivity, premised on a sense of shared suspension of disbelief.

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Brownfields of the welfare state Shifting from Iceland’s genetic capitalization and Denmark’s co-­operative liberalism to Sweden’s Folkhemmet ideology, I will now discuss two genre films, vampire horror Låt den rätte komma in/Let the Right One In (Alfredsson 2008) and the dystopian science fiction tale Metropia (Saleh 2008) to expand my discussion of urban disconnection. Both films can also be productively discussed in terms of their influences from global genre cinema, but in this chapter, their use value arises from their close relationship with urban realities and welfare ideology. To start, Let the Right One In is a vampire tale that contextualizes well-­known genre forms with locally specific welfare politics. Focusing on the childlike immortal vampire Eli and bullied and lonely Oskar, the film combines vampirism and marginalization to explore the constitution of the Swedish welfare state. Film scholar Rochelle Wright (2010) draws attention to this particular facet, citing the combination of horror elements, realist dramatic conventions and coming-­of-age story as the roots of the film’s particular success. The sense of exclusion from the People’s Home, a term used to describe the ideals of Swedish society, is a concern that permeates the film as Oskar bonds with the outsider Eli. They are bound together by their inability to fit in with society and its norms, an approach that is key to conveying the film’s combination of societal criticism and popular genre conventions. The use of the suburban landscape illustrates the ways Let the Right One In, first and foremost, expands the scope of social realist cinema. The plain functionalist architecture of the suburbs, all concrete uniform housing, was conceived as the ideal structural basis for the welfare state, which was to ‘shape, educate, and edify subjects to become good citizens living rational lives’ but soon came to signify the ‘inhospitable uniformity, inconvenient locations and substandard maintenance’ of these suburban housing projects (Nestingen 2008: 130). The suburban bleak milieu grounds the vampire narrative in the context of broken families, bleak urbanism, bullying and alcoholism and sees vampirism as a similar condition of outsiderness as those left isolated by the dysfunctions of the welfare state mechanisms. Wright’s emphasis on flaws in welfare ideology and Nestingen’s take on the material manifestations of this malfare suggest that the contradictions between welfare ideology and its human habitatations have certain physiological implications that avail to ecocritical readings. A good illustration of the existence of a particularly Nordic human ecology emerges when comparing Alfredson’s film with the largely faithful American

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remake by Matt Reeves – Let Me In (2010). While both showcase a snowy urban landscape in bleak housing estates of their respective nations, the differences are telling. Gone are most of the explicit signifiers of the social context that noticeably place the film in Sweden. For example, a group of local alcoholics are an integral part of the Swedish version’s critique of the types of communal relations the welfare state seems to engender. The characters are much more marginal in the American remake as the local specificity they connote in Let the Right One In – all local pubs in plain housing tenements and the peculiarly affective communities they create – contrasts with the more simplistic depiction of addicts and abusers in the American remake. The emphasis on communal relations is one of the key tenets of Nordic welfare state ideology and it is thus not surprising that the affective relations of the Swedish group receive much more attention. Similarly, the combination of genre imagery and the banality of the topographic landscape in Let the Right One In situates this particular vampire tale in the context of the Nordic welfare state. The communal playground used by Oskar and Eli is meant as a way to integrate the next generation to suburban life, but now its snow covered emptiness becomes the venue for the outcasts of society – it is now a brownfield that is only able to sustain unnatural life such as that of vampires. Practically all of the film takes place in public space (even the apartments of the film seem to be ‘public’ housing) with murders along a jogging path, in the corridors of the housing estate, hospitals and a local ice-skating rink. In addition, the final confrontation between the bullies and Oskar renders the water of the communal swimming pool murky from the blood of Eli’s victims. Through this re-­appropriation of welfare space as hunting grounds for the outcasts, the spaces of welfare state ecology emerge as distinct brownfields, spaces hostile to organic life where the lived-­in environment breeds social exclusion and, in this more metaphoric case, extreme mutations such as vampirism. Or to put it differently, vampirism is the fictional manifestation of a society consumed from the inside by its own norms. Let the Right One In expands on the connotations of films like R in envisioning an almost posthuman form of life in the midst of the welfare project.

Towards a dystopian future: Metropia This chapter has explored different conceptualizations of urban space in very specifically delineated national contexts, moving from the immersive genetics of

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Jar City to the alienation of R, from attempts to reconnect with rural space in Pusher 2 to welfare isolation in Let the Right One In. Alienation from and reclaiming of nature has acted as a means to provide alternative narratives of nationhood, often of an explicitly critical variety. But instead of emphasizing divergence from nature, these films have mostly attempted to rethink this relationship. Such modes can be considered in transvergent terms as they aim to instigate new ways of conceptualizing humanity’s enstrangement in urban space, a project that continues with the dystopian Metropia. Dystopias are some of the most common rhetorical devices in the science fiction genre and have been frequently analysed since the inception of academic studies of ecocinema. Ingram (2004), Cubitt (2005), Brereton (2005) and Murray and Heumann (2009) all make reference to the ways key films of the genre such as Soylent Green (Franklin 1974) and Blade Runner (Scott 1982) evoke the dystopian ideas of Rachel Carson or Paul Ehrlich, responding to the proliferation of such ideas in wider popular culture. Nordic contributions to the science fiction genre are very rare, though key film histories including Sundholm et al. (2012) and Toiviainen (2002) make mention of texts such as Ruusujen aika/The Time of Roses (Jarva 1968) or Aurinkotuuli/Solar Wind (Linnasalo 1980), both esoteric and experimental evocations of future dystopias in Finland. Metropia is a predominantly Swedish production, though with production co-­operation from Norway and Denmark as well as Eurimages, qualifying it as a contribution to the transnational ecodystopian genre and a specifically Nordic exploration of a post-­apocalyptic – yet still identifiably ‘European’ – world. The iconography of this world is familiar from the genre with dark and polluted cityscapes and dank, tiny apartments housing alienated individuals. The world has run out of oil and the economy has subsequently collapsed. Neoliberal interests are up to their old ways as they have integrated most of the European population with a high speed rail system ruled over by an oligarchic elite. The Trexx Corporation runs the northern part of the Metropia structure and markets their ideological beliefs with all-­pervasive advertisements. Their new product is a shampoo that acts as the next step in neoliberalist enslavement as it is imbued with neurogens enabling mind control of the masses. As a projection of an ecologically destroyed European future, harvested clean by capitalist exploitation, the film shows the world as a brownfield inhospitable to organic life. Expanding on the dystopian projections of films like R, the environment has been consumed, but the human body remains the final frontier for chemical exploration and energy production – it is the only resource still to be

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exploited. The protagonist of the film, Roger, is an ordinary call centre worker who is not content with his life, but has no energy to do something about his pervasive apathy. Having used the shampoo of the Traxx Corporation, he starts hearing a voice providing instructions and orders to structure his daily existence. Confused by the origins of the voice, his instinct is to rebel. Once he spots the model Julia, he follows her against his logic and the commands of the inner voice, and is soon drafted on a mission to take down Traxx. Yet, even this liberation is only another level of falsehood as Julia turns out to be the rebellious daughter of the head of Traxx. Using Roger as an assassin, she implicates him in the struggle for corporate control over the last remaining resources on Earth. The narrative of the film is a familiar combination of genre tropes, but by combining criticism of geographic power structures with exploitation of the human mind, the film provides a distinctly different take on similar ideas valorized by Heise’s eco-­cosmopolitanism. For Heise, networks are a distinctly positive idea with applications such as Google Earth illustrating the engendering of a more holistic sense of the planet premised on the interconnectedness of humanity. In Metropia, the holistic sense of the planet is also enabling, but only as part of the rhetoric of the corporation. According to the cultural logic of dystopian neoliberalism, good citizens are those who embrace directives from above and contribute to the common good, and in this world, the common good is the good of the neoliberal elite. This rhetoric is surprisingly similar in conception to the eco-­cosmopolitan ethos characterized by ‘decentralized heterogeneity and encompassing holism’, a notion made physical in Metropia with the panEuropean train network that mimics the mind control networks of the corporation. As part of this networked society, individuals are both separated into a decentralized and unorganized mass and incorporated as one into a singular whole, only useful as resource vessels. The network acquires its propensities by operating in two ways – first, it keeps the European population in check by relegating them to a mindless media-­ controlled mass. Secondly, it also functions to exclude unwanted immigrants outside the barriers of Fortress Europe. As part of the mind control mechanisms of the corporate interests, Europeans are inundated with information concerning the unique possibilities they have, a contrast made forceful as immigrants have to compete on a reality television show for access to this utopian falsehood. This European homogenization is intriguingly close to what Jürgen Habermas has defined as the postnational constellation (Habermas 2001) – a stateless bound entity where political decisions and the individuals’

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rights are shared equally. But Metropia once more twists the positive connotations of borderless existence into its dystopian horrors and expressively anti-­ globalization discourse as the cosmopolitan utopianism becomes parodied through this inversion. The depiction of European unification acts as an almost inverted version of the optimism permeating eco-­cosmopolitanism, an argument well illustrated by the inclusion of green consumption rhetoric. While residents of Metropia may have tangible commuting links across Europe, all regions are the same, all dilapidated lands and inhospitable apartment blocks. Nothing distinguishes one place from the other as all forms of culture are now homogeneous corporate culture. While public forms of travel have become the norm, ironically, most of the reasons for travel have been extinguished and, to make the matter worse, there is no more environment to save with the prioritizing of mass transport. Eco-­cosmopolitan transcendence in this scenario is a pointless endeavour, and only a means through which the top one per cent benefit from the ability of levelling differences within Europe. In terms of human ecology, mind control and interchangeability of the labour force convey a forceful consolidation of eco-­cosmopolitanism into mechanics of surveillance and exploitation, not unlike the more nefarious potential of applications such as Google Earth. By focusing on the absolute absence of nature in the world of Metropia, the film chronicles a fundamental sense of human disconnection from the natural world. The critique of Europe-­wide developments in political acceptance of neoliberal rhetoric positions the film, at least in part, as a transvergent take on the eco-­cosmopolitan ethos often conceptualized in more optimistic arguments over humanity’s capabilities in transcending its constitutive ideologies. As many of the films in this chapter, and Metropia in particular, have shown, even egalitarian and potentially beneficial forms of social organization can be twisted to adhere to social and ecosystemic exploitation. These films act as important evocations of concern over what may become of society if divergence of human activity and nature, especially through the exploitative principles of neoliberal profiteering, is adopted as an unquestioned norm.

Conclusion: Urbanity as a transvergent phenomenon Conventional logic would dictate that urban representations follow the divergent logic of distancing the human from nature. But as I have repeatedly pointed

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out in this chapter, urban cinema is often an ideal vessel for raising transvergent concerns over human distance from and exploitation of nature. Taken as compendium pieces, the Danish urban films construct a complex ecological argument that is best understood in transvergent terms due to the ways they bring forth the absence of nature as its very presence. R and the Pusher trilogy correlate key aspects of the contemporary nation’s socio-­economic order with their bleak narratives of human desperation. With this, they certainly comply with Hjort’s assertion of Danish cinema as a globalized form of cultural production (Hjort 2006). Evoking both the diversity and contestations of the human ecology of multicultural Denmark, their ideological complexity both supports and questions the ideological imperatives of co-­operative liberalism as the constitutive ideology of the nation. Nordkraft and Adam’s Apples focus on criminal lives on the outskirts of Denmark, away from its frequently depicted capital city. Through this portrayal of the nation’s peripheries, two aspects central to the resource production and economics sustaining the nation are captured. Nordkraft is set against the context of Denmark’s transformation from a predominantly fossil fuel based economy to one that embraces green technology, whereas a dramatic break with the agrarian past is evoked by Adam’s Apples. In both these cases, resource economics stay in the background as the narratives focus on the ways the economic and political shifts of a society coordinated by co-­operative liberal ideology impact individuals and communal relations. The depiction of human life in the brownfields of contemporary Nordic urbanity constructs an impression of a world where anything organic is receding. Taken together, the films suggest different avenues in which this dystopian degradation may go. In some, when natural or organic elements impede on the concrete sterility of the city, they act as symbolic signifiers of human consumption of nature as is the case with the wind turbines in Pusher 2, or they are significant only as delusions essential for human self-­realization as in Adam’s Apples. In others, the lack of nature paints a picture of such dystopian extent as to call out for nature (R), or results in a film like Nordkraft presenting a metaphoric parable of ecological rehabilitation. Taken together with Jar City’s critique of the use of human genetics as capital resources, Let the Right One In’s critique of the imperfections of the welfare state, and Metropia’s insustainability of neoliberal practices, the films provide a transvergent critique of different brownfields of the Nordic countries, hostile to sustainable life, either human or ‘natural’.

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Intercultural Approaches to Ecocinema This book has so far outlined some of the scope of Nordic ecocinema, which ranges from questions of human ecology to heritage dynamics, from environmental justice to neoliberal systems of resource exploitation. The majority of these cases explore appropriations of nature for national narratives, but I have paid scarce attention to the diversity of cultural groupings within these nations. While distinctions in class and gender demographics have emerged as topics of discussion, the role of ethnic diversity as an indicator of ecological complexity has largely been ignored. Earlier, we discussed the ways landscape operates as part of a conservative nation-­building agenda and the ways the political project of heritage cinema uses social imaginaries which exclude minority groups from participation. As the dynamics of power and cultural hegemony are absolutely central concerns in the Nordic film cultures with Jews, gypsies, ‘tattare’ (travellers) and southern European immigrants receiving stereotyped, often defamatory depictions (Wright 1998), it is imperative that I now address these in depth. Cinema plays a key role in this history of stereotyping with Finnish films like Valkoinen peura/The White Reindeer (Blomberg 1954) and Maa on syntinen laulu/The Earth Is a Sinful Song (Mollberg 1973), which represents the northern Sámi as exotic and mystical others. In contrast to these films produced by the hegemonic populations of the nation, films produced by minorities, such as the Norwegian Ofalas/Pathfinder (Gaup 1987), focus on the politics of difference between ethnic minorities and hegemonic groups. Crucially, the director of Pathfinder, Nils Gaup, is Sámi and his film was an important contribution to instigating debate over Sámi identity in its context of production, Norway. Appropriately, Nestingen suggests that Pathfinder ‘can be understood as a space of display that conveys a performance of cultural vitality and a demand for recognition’ (Nestingen 2008: 58), thus making it a vital contribution to Nordic cultural politics. The complexities of a multicultural society are central topics in contemporary studies of Nordic cinema, with chapters in most prominent collections exploring

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the topic from different contextual perspectives (Wright 2005; Hjort 2006; Nestingen 2008; Kääpä 2010b). These studies address the cultural diversity of the Nordic countries and range from immigrant experiences to minority cinema. I draw from these discussions in my exploration of cultural differences between the populations of the Nordic countries as well as the experiences of first and second generation immigrants in the egalitarian Norden. This discussion will lead to Chapter 8 where the focus is on ethnographic works, both by film-­makers from the dominant ‘host’ populations depicting ‘others’, as well as those produced by minority or indigenous directors, which challenge many of the positions that the more mainstream multicultural films evoke. By investigating these topics through an ecocritical lens, I contribute to this questioning of dominant norms by interrogating the ways environmental justice interconnects with calls for social equality. Through this, the discussion provides not only an alternative approach to the study of Nordic multicultural cinema, but also unravels some of its taken-­for-granted anthropocentric premises. The focus of this chapter is on establishing an intercultural approach to representing and studying ecological understandings in and between the Nordic countries. In discussing the concept of the intercultural, I draw on Martha Nussbaum’s use of the term as connoting ‘the recognition of common human needs across cultures and of dissonance and critical dialogue within cultures. Understanding is achieved in many different ways, and being born a member of a certain group is neither sufficient nor necessary’ (Nussbaum 1997: 82). Intercultural understandings are particularly relevant here as they are especially illustrative of the diverse practices through which individuals from different Nordic countries find understanding among each other. I focus on a number of case studies to illustrate the different ways in which intercultural understandings are generated (and in some case challenged) by utilizing appropriations of nature. I am particularly interested in exploring the changes the convergent anthropocentric logic of national narration undergoes when explored from the perspective of intercultural critique, and whether in fact such perspectives only contribute to the convergent implications of national narratives.

Interculturalism in the Norden: As If I Wasn’t There To initiate this discussion, I focus on perhaps the most obvious level of cultural difference in our context of study, involving differences between the Nordic

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nations and the ways these differences are framed with nature. In collaborations between Finland and Sweden, Klaus Härö’s evocative Elina – som jag inte fans/ Elina – As If I Wasn’t There (2001) is one of the most suggestive examples. The nature of the Tornio area, located at the top of the Ostrobothnian Sea between the two countries, plays a key role in the narrative of the film. Both the geo­ cultural location, as well as other aspects of nature imagery are used to maximum effect to convey transnational affinity and cultural convalescence. Following the death of her father, Elina must go to a Swedish-­speaking school on the Swedish side of the border. Despite the best efforts of her mother to keep the rest of the family together, the social and economic circumstances of Finns is distinctly less well-­off than those of the Swedes. Elina is confronted with the Swedish-­speaking norms of the school and her distinctly individualistic spirit clashes with Holm, the head of school recently moved from Stockholm, whose strict perspectives on education cause fear among the students. A cornerstone of Holm’s educational plan is to ensure that Swedish is spoken by all students, and Elina and Holm’s battle of wills comes to reflect cultural struggles for autonomy and identity that characterize many areas of the region’s identity politics. Nature provides an additional level of meaning to the film’s cultural politics, both justifying and questioning the imposition of cultural authority and Elina’s challenges to it. The only space for Elina to express herself is a near­by swamp, a place she used to frequent with her father. This space, unappropriated by the human, is a sort of utopian tabula rasa, metaphoric in its connotations for Elina’s developing identity as well as for the cross-­cultural relationships that exist between the two nations. The swamp is the place where she can envisage a different life, divested of the impositions that structure other places in society. Cultural colonialism is a key theme in these impositions as well as in the conflicts that flare between Holm and Elina from her refusal to speak Swedish. A sense of elitism permeates the teacher’s attitudes as she frequently chastises the northern regions of Sweden and Finland as uncivilized parts of the world. Refusing the imposition of such labels, the film emphasizes the increasing support Elina’s cause raises, which contrasts with the moral questionability of Holm’s directives. The cultural significance of the swamp is key to understanding the ecological implications of the film. The final confrontation of the film takes place there as Elina wades in deep, resulting in her mother rescuing her by putting her own life on the line. Repairing the rift between the two, the culmination also discredits Holm and leads to her voluntary leave from the school. While the swamp is

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mostly an empty space divested of most of its natural qualities, used effectively to reflect and enforce anthropocentric ideas, it also encourages the types of cultural negotiations central to Elina’s politics of equality. First, it is a way for Elina to establish her independence by challenging societal norms and their roots in taken-­for-granted assumptions about the characteristics of peoples. Secondly, it is about levelling cultural differences and resetting parameters by creating a sense of traumatic shock through bodily encounter. But this encounter is also one where cultures meet and are able to assess one another. Thus, the swamp facilitates a moment of intercultural awareness, enabling understanding between the protagonists of the film. Indeed, films such as Elina are best understood in an intercultural light as they foreground communication between cultures. Accordingly, the narrative dismantles notions of cultural superiority and inspects them in the tabula rasa of the swamp. Here, nature is a way for Finland and Sweden to overcome any past cultural differences and literally find mutual ground, even forcing Holm to question her authoritarian stance. Of course, this does not eliminate the problems of anthropocentric treatment of nature as all of the ecological dimensions of Elina are used predominantly for cultural politics. In many ways, the role of nature in Elina is not much different from the ways heritage films use its symbolic value for strengthening constitutive forms of ideology. This is not entirely surprising as Elina is ultimately a tale of narrating nationhood, even if this is done in a more transnational scale. Its use of the liminal space of the swamp works predominantly as an intercultural facilitator, a process that sees different cultures come into contact and change as a result of this contact. But such encounters will remain forms of anthropocentric appropriation, utilized for ideologically motivated tales of social collectivity.

Cultural encounters in natural spaces To explore if such forms of cultural convalescence can somehow feed into a better understanding of one’s ecosystemic connectivity, I turn to another tale of a teenage girl growing up in a liminal space, Iris (Bengts 2011). A co-­production between Finland and Sweden, Iris’ protagonist, as Elina’s, faces daunting challenges that force her to take responsibility for her family at an early age. Iris moves to Åland Island as her painter mother takes off to Paris and leaves her with her uncle and aunt. Her new home becomes the place to discover her own

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identity, which takes physical form as a natural barrier, an ‘island of the dead’, a place where her father would often sail and which often features in her nightmares. Crossing the sea that took her father years ago is Iris’ test, a natural obstacle and a symbolic signifier of her journey to adulthood, and the conquest of which would allow her to consolidate her identity, much as the swamp did in the case of Elina. While Iris also continues the anthropocentric efforts of heritage cinema, the positioning of natural space at the centre of the battles for cultural identity evokes what Thomson (2006) identifies as affective ecological rhetoric. Of course, such rhetoric is a key trope in narratives of nation-­building as natural elements provide the obstacle against which individuals must prove themselves, a symbolic act designed to consolidate authentic national identity as a natural given (or taken, in fact). By creating a space in the no-­man’s-­land between nations, the swamp in Elina and the island in Iris, as well as their arguments against cultural colonialism and segregation of peoples urges reconsideration of the anthropocentric impetus of nature appropriation. To reflect this sense of questioning, neither Iris nor Elina overcome nature nor succumb to it, but instead learn to respect it and coexist alongside it. The subjective and fantastical memories of place for Elina and Iris suggest, initially, that nature is a sort of tabula rasa, awaiting colonization by the human. But as both protagonists learn, this is only a fantasy, with reality evoking a more complex form of coexistence between the two. Nature’s refusal to submit to the fantastical logic of the human mind is a key aspect for facilitating the formation of intercultural knowledge, especially of the kind that challenges national narration (Thomson 2006). A complex perspective on the role of nature gestures to more hybrid and thus more ecological forms of being and thinking in a fluctuating world. The point in this hybrid sense of existence is relationality, of hybrid forms of existence in and as part of nature. Through bodily immersion into the swamp and the sea, the protagonists are able to develop a more haptic sense of understanding of the independence of the natural world from human cultural practices. They generate the sort of hybrid awakening of which Whatmore (2003) writes, which ‘opens up a space in which to undertake the first sketchy mappings of a more holistic understanding of the nexus of culture, material world and affective belonging’ (Thomson 2006: 152). By evoking both geocultural liminality and ecosystemic immersion, both Elina and Iris suggest a transnational evocation of the inadequacies and the limitations of national narration, and the need to rethink its hegemonic paradigms

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anew. This is especially relevant for the need to consolidate both films’ multi­ cultural ideology – in fact, it could be argued that nationhood is not a critical target as such within these films. According to this logic, they critique the simplistic appropriation of nature for the sort of limiting social imaginaries of which constitutive national narratives often consist, and which leave little room for real cultural openness. As such, both films evoke the need for complex treatment of natural space via affective emotional schemata, which, in these two cases, emphasize affirmative intercultural understanding designed to facilitate the construction of egalitarian social politics. Through this, they contribute another facet to the ways nature operates in Nordic film culture.

Liminal natural space and the road: Bye Bye Bluebird Instead of only supporting the cultural connotations of restrictive national narratives, Elina and Iris use natural space to generate a sense of intercultural affectivity. Similar tactics take somewhat different forms in established genre frameworks, such as the road movie narrative of Bye Bye Bluebird (Ottarsdóttir 2000). This particular road movie takes place in the Faröe Islands as its two female protagonists, Rannvá and Barba, both originally from the islands, journey back to find their roots. Pat Brereton suggests that the journey of the road movie is often a process of self-­definition and improvement, with landscape specifically taking on a proactive role in the generation of meaning as a ‘performative sensorium and a source of cultural meaning and symbolism’ (Brereton 2012: 215). This is also the case with Barba and Rannvá, as while they project an aura of cosmopolitan arrogance, preferring to show off their skills in English and French, there is also a clear undercurrent of crisis at play here. Appropriately for the cultural displacement felt by the girls, their first act is one of gaining a tactile feel for the land as they take off their shoes and subsequently their underwear to immerse their feet in the land and slide on the wet grass. This sort of encounter evokes Thomson’s discussion of Cold Fever and the ways in which its Japanese protagonist gradually comes to ‘feel’ Iceland by immersing himself in its natural elements. The identity negotiations of Bye Bye Bluebird are similarly complex as they evoke both inter- and intracultural considerations. The Faröe Islands are historically and politically part of Denmark, but they are also party to long former historical contestations over political and cultural sovereignty. The girls are in a

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complex liminal position as they can understand most of the customs and the language, but they are also clearly outsiders in this context, a notion that they forcefully play out. Both Barba and Rannvá still have some members of their family on the islands, but, for them, the community is too small and ingrained in its own reclusive ways. The girls show their distaste for what they perceive to be the backward ways of the locals, but the film soon undermines these stereotypes. It turns out that the hotel keepers are fluent in French and it is in fact the snobbish behaviour of the girls that comprises the outlandish strangeness that they expected to find in the community. Their liminality is reflected back on themselves through their own stereotypes of the ‘other’ – in fact, a reflection of their own insider outsiderness as malformed through their own emphasized cosmopolitan masquerade. Perhaps the most potent ecological signifier of the film is to be found in its depiction of the barren landscape – evoking the performative role Brereton assigns to it. The behaviour of these two strange individuals is at odds with a world that is reliant on austerity and adapting to nature. By setting off on a road trip through the small island, the film plays up the exotic impressions of the tourist gaze, but frequently undermines its exoticizing implications as the girls’ liminal intra-­interculturalism turns the gaze onto the travellers instead of the land. Instead of the type of convergent logic evident in Lapland Odyssey’s male odyssey (explored in Chapter 2) – a journey that emphatically used both nature and masculine caricatures as the grounding material for national narratives – Bye Bye Bluebird questions the appropriation of the natural environment for such narratives. Natural space for Iris and Elina was a space of transition, an obstacle they had to overcome to discover themselves. Yet, these tales of self-­discovery refuse the potential conservative implications of such narratives, aiming instead to build a picture of tolerant multicultural understanding. Bye Bye Bluebird evokes a similar approach, albeit in very different ways. Utterances by both Barba and Rannvá play on to the relationship between their cosmopolitan performance and the environmental context, including statements such as ‘small islands were not done for humans but for birds that can fly away’. As they state that ‘this has to be the only land where one is made a traitor if they want to move to another country’, the levities of a cosmopolitan life are made even more appealing. While the majority of the actions of the girls operate between the competing pulls of the local and the global, and they forcefully evoke their preference for cosmopolitanism, it becomes increasingly evident that any cosmopolitanism they

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evoke is mostly a performance. At first, the unusual qualities of the land reinforce Rannvá and Barba’s complaints about the smallness of the island. But simultaneously, the cosmopolitanism of the girls is revealed to be a façade that slowly strips away. As more is revealed about their past – including Barba’s trouble with her family and the daughter that Rannvá left behind – their sense of superiority starts to crumble, a notion that their ridiculously colourful clothing, framed against the much more earthly nature, accentuates. In contrast, an authentic sense of self emerges through their tactile connection with the land and enables a reconnection of sorts with the past. The film culminates with Rannvá leaving for abroad with her daughter while Barba goes back to her real mother. The ending is a conservative turn if we consider it from the perspective of the road movie. As Römpötti has argued (Römpötti 2012), the end of the road often conserves dominant norms and strengthens even the ideas against which the protagonists rebel. In Bye Bye Bluebird, the act of rebellion is against traditions, but what we, for the most part, end up with is a reassertion of family dynamics and the importance of stability. Intercultural uses of natural space thus enable both transvergent and convergent perspectives as human appropriations of nature are brought into question by the tactility of Barba and Rannvá’s hybridized encounters with nature. But simultaneously, the road trip acts as a rite of passage to realign or even cure the unnaturally emphasized cosmopolitanism of the girls, with nature as a key facilitator in this sobering tactile experience designed to evoke connection with one’s ‘homeland’.

Intercultural harmony and food consumption If Bye Bye Bluebird converted its intercultural trauma into intracultural harmony through a predominantly tactile experience evoking belonging in one’s ‘own’ socio-cultural constellation, other films, such as the Japanese Kamome Shoduko/ Kamome Diner (Ogigami 2006), construct similar means of belonging from an external perspective. Focusing on a group of Japanese women in Helsinki, the film constructs an optimistic impression of the ways transnational cultural encounters work. The protagonists find themselves in Finland on a journey of self-­discovery, resulting from dissatisfaction with the gender mores of contemporary Japan. Fuse (2011) suggests that the protagonists of the film can be considered as Make-­inu – that is, a specific type of Japanese middle aged

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unmarried woman – who are at odds with the largely traditionalist mores of the Japanese society. Their journeys in Finland provide them with a new start, and the film has appropriately generated considerable debate over gender bias in Japan. But for an ecocritical reading, much of the film’s richness resides in its imagined cultural topography of Finland’s capital. This touristic approximation of what Finland is supposedly like is created via flattering depictions of Helsinki marketplaces and the cozy neighbourhood of the restaurant run by the protagonists, in reality, a much more grittier locale. The world of the film mostly resembles the Helsinki of latter day Aki Kaurismäki films with their highly composited, minimalist, but attractive shots. The similarity is emphasized by the presence of actor Markku Peltola, familiar as M, the lead character of The Man Without a Past. In one of the most noted scenes in Kaurismäki’s film he consumes a plate of sushi on a train from the north of Finland back to its capital, having discovered his real identity and sorted out past mistakes. This culinary connection has been interpreted as Kaurismäki’s play on the changing cultural habits of a globalizing nation (Nestingen 2008; Kääpä 2010a). Indeed, the act of consumption is a distinctly idiosyncratic way of depicting the dislocating changes in Finnish society and also the multicultural openness that can heal this disjuncture. M’s reinvigorated perspectives and the cultural practices embedded in the prepared food combine to provide the film with new ways of depicting the interrelations of consumptive and cultural practices. Food consumption – as much as alcohol consumption, which plays another pronounced part in many a national narrative – is a way to not only vindicate national thematic (Hjort 2007), but to also envision cultural and ecosystemic interconnections. Discussing the case of Cold Fever, Thomson explores the ways in which Hirata’s consumption practices encapsulate a form of intercultural performativity that allows the human body to become part of an integrated, culturally-­defined ecosystem. As much as M’s (lack of) shock of the new can be considered as an intercultural encounter, the protagonists of Kamome Diner see food as a vital aspect of their optimistic intercultural negotiations. First, the consumption of food acts as a form of cultural exchange with sushi and the Finnish culinary korvapuusti (a cinnamon roll of sorts) emerging as ingredients in negotiation and communication. While we never find out anything about the conditions under which the materials are sourced, the food as a culturally inflected organic commodity is key to the ideological

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underpinnings of the film. To emphasize the significance of such impressions of authenticity, Shiori, the owner of the diner, bakes and cooks her own culinary delicacies in an open kitchen in order to create an attractive space for her target clientele, the Finns. The impression is of a wholesome and healthy space of cultural encounters and interpersonal affinity, consolidated when a potential romantic interest teaches her the art of making korvapuusti. The kitchen provides a utopian space for intercultural encounters, a meeting place to learn and to exchange. While this is all clearly a part of a romanticized fantasy, Kamome Diner provides suggestive material for thinking about the ways corporeal elements operate in reflecting and negotiating cultural differences. By exploring the ways the human body performs ‘geographies of intimacy’ (Whatmore 2003: 119) via resources harvested for consumption, and processed through the cultural machine of food preparation, food attains a more profound role as a facilitator of diasporic identity negotiation. While this is still premised on a certain degree of anthropocentric appropriation, food provides the connecting tissue for establishing a more solid relationship with the new context, a notion that extends to the film’s depiction of the Finnish capital and its cultural topography. Through this, the film provides a utopian space for the Make-­inu to feel at home, and divest the negative labels that are often associated with them in their home context. In discussing the globalization of Danish cinema, Britta Timm Knudsen suggests an apt description of the dynamic interrelations between the local and the global, especially as they extend to affective considerations: The relation between the familiar and the unknown does not have a fixed topography: it is a structural relation in which the familiar and the unknown have multiple combinations. The local can relate directly to the global and the feeling of being at home can be linked to both, just as the linguistically and culturally close can appear infinitely strange. Knudsen 2006: 92

Kamome Diner certainly vindicates such conceptualizations, but consumption and the chemical processes it generates connote an even more ‘felt’ level of connectivity, indicating a corporeal, if utopian, form of transnational convalescence. Thus the consumption of culturally-­inflected goods may enable both Finns and the Japanese to construct a sense of mutual affinity. Yet, such representations of humanity’s consumptive prowess does not move much beyond national caricatures, which is a problem that also emerges in the

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film’s lack of environmental consideration for the resources the characters consume.

Conclusion: Anthropocentric undercurrents of intercultural encounters While it would be unreasonable to expect all films to make a professed ecological statement, the absence of consideration of the ecological levels of these cultural negotiations seems entirely typical of a more pervasive sense of anthropocentric logic operating even in films that refuse the simplicities of national narratives. Ultimately, Bye Bye Bluebird and Kamome Diner use different resources – the land and food, respectively – for their narratives of socio-cultural affinity. In this way, both films focus on negotiations of transnational connectivity and convalescence by relying on a penetrating organicist negotiation of community, though one that is premised on impressions rather than studied knowledge. While they do not develop into deeper studies of the wider sets of relations that go into the production of this cultural hybridity, they remain illustrative case studies of the relationship between the intercultural and the more than human world, one that may not be that different from the convergent logic of heritage cinema, despite their seemingly liberal approaches. The ways these examples of multicultural and transnational diversity use ecosystemic evocations becomes even more apparent when contrasted with the malleable forms of natural space in Elina and Iris. While natural space generates intercultural transformations, it is also a material signifier connoting a sense of nostalgia and national identity in ways that characterize the utopian longing of a diasporic imagination, as Arjun Appadurai (1996) has suggested. The films do rely on largely utopian tendencies in their argumentations, utilizing the discourses of nostalgia and exoticism as they lay claim to affinity and inter­ cultural understanding. This is especially evident in Bye Bye Bluebird’s complex forms of inter- ­and intraculturalism and the glorified harmonious interculturalism of Kamome Diner, providing an impression of the more conservative patterns in which film cultures use nature and other organic material to provide a sense of community and affectivity beyond borders. When combined, the complex transnational relational politics of these four films highlight some of the predominant practices of using environmental imagery and relational politics to negotiate transnational communality. In Bye Bye Bluebird and Kamome

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Diner natural space and consumption practices create a tangible sense of communal belonging to undermine the shock of coming into contact with new intercultural frameworks, but whether such moments of transnational communication propose any new avenues for ecocriticism is a question that needs to be explored further from both immigrant and minority cultures perspectives.

8

Ecopolitics of Multicultural and Minority Cinemas Intercultural uses of natural space can be considered a progressive step from the anthropocentricity of more traditionalist national narratives. So far, we have focused on those narratives that use nature to create evocations of social and, often precisely, national cohesion. Intercultural encounters are more complex than these, but even the notion of the intercultural does not get us much beyond the anthropocentric logic of national heritage cinema. This is ultimately a wider problem of the uses of nature for social narratives, a problem integrally connected to the convergent logic of tying the natural environment to national authenticity. But as we have seen, such narratives leave room for more hybrid relations between the human and nature, especially as they often position national narratives as question marks rather than self-­evident answers. But what role do ecological considerations play in the politics of ethnic diversity on an intranational level among first and second generation immigrants who come into contact with the social and cultural mores of the host society? Ethnic diversity is an increasingly central consideration in Nordic cinema, a notion that touches on many of the problems identified in the previous chapter. As I have suggested, intercultural encounters emphasize the potential in understanding one another through cultural communication, yet this is not to be conflated with multiculturalism. Whereas many of the meeting points between different national identities in the previous chapter work from an intercultural premise and emphasize affective communication between cultures, multiculturalism is more heavily contested territory. Taking my lead from Zižek (1997) and Taylor’s (2001) critique of the repressive tolerance that underlies many areas of multiculturalist ideology, I focus on exploring how the taken-­for-granted egalitarianism and permissiveness that characterizes the Nordic societies can utilize both homogenizing and marginalizing dynamics. Multicultural ‘permissiveness’,

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that is, the notion of tolerating others only if they elect to abide with the governing structures of society, characterizes the ideological foundations of many Nordic films, ranging from problems of stereotyping (consider the criminality of the Serbians in the Pusher trilogy, for one) to questions over who gets to represent whom. The Helsinki of Kamome Diner could be considered a multiculturalist space, imposing a certain harmonious/homogeneous logic on its cultural topography. But as it is mainly produced from a touristic perspective, its potentially problematic logic is more utopian wish-­fulfillment than explicit homogenizing rhetoric. While arguments for and against multiculturalism are ongoing and complex, the problems of inequality in the Nordic societies are an acute concern. Mehmet Necef suggests that the lack of adequate creative roles for immigrants is a key flaw in contemporary Danish cinema (Necef 2013), leading to such depictions that maintain a repository of stereotypes of ethnic others. This is a concern that extends across the film industries of the region and involves not only concerns over unequal access to the industry, but also the labelling of these films as immigrant cinema. Imposing such a label on the films does as much to discourage multiculturalist rhetoric as it does in advancing equality. Others see these developments in a more positive light. Wright’s (2005) discussion of contemporary Swedish immigrant directors suggests that a more nuanced and complex approach to depicting cultural differences is emerging. She argues convincingly that films by directors such as Josef Fares and Reza Bargher ‘present immigrants as self-­evident parts of the Swedish society’ (Wright 2005: 70), while films such as Säg att du älskar mig/Say That You Love Me (Fridell 2006) focus on the diversity of Sweden’s suburbs without making diversity the problem. The fact that all the teenage protagonists of the film hail from different cultural contexts is not an issue for them, whereas the older generations castigate and even categorize individuals on the basis of their presumed heritage. Yet, films produced by both immigrants and the host population are often based on a sense of affirmative multicultural rhetoric that emphasizes the need to build a more equal society – even if this is achieved by addressing the racism that exists in these societies. As suggested by Necef, the focus on conflicts has the negative side-effect of othering minority groups in ways that maintain distinctions between them and the host population. This sort of weak multiculturalist rhetoric inevitably foregrounds differences even as it emphasizes the need to overcome them.

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A hybrid approach to multicultural cinema The Norwegian production Import Export (Hussain 2007) is a good example to illustrate these dynamics, especially as it provides a pointed comedic take on contemporary Norway’s ethnic differences. The film even culminates in a typical strategy of multicultural cinema, a celebration of an arranged marriage that constrains the protagonists of films like Reza Bargher’s Vingar av glas/Wings of Glass (2000), incisively discussed by Nestingen (2008). Here, marriage provides the obstacle for the protagonist couple Jan, an ethnic Norwegian, and Jasmin, whose roots are in Pakistan. Faced with condemnation from Jasmin’s father Allahidda, Jan hatches a plan to win his favour by pretending to be a sociology student researching immigrant experiences. The narrative has certain similarities with other immigrant comedies such as the Finnish Vieraalla Maalla/Land of Love (Vanne 2003). Both feature a ‘native’ taking on alternative fabricated identities (the Finnish sociologist pretends to be an immigrant by putting on an ignorant ‘brownface’ disguise) with narratives that use the guise of sociology as a way to depict other cultures and facilitate multiculturalist rhetoric. Whereas Land of Love only reinforces the sense that the ‘others’ are, indeed, different from the ethnic Finns (see Kääpä 2012b), Import Export plays with both stereotypes of immigrant and ethnic Norwegian behaviour to create an ‘optimistic, hybrid story about how great everything can be by combining the best aspects of the two cultures’ (Bakoy 2010: 157). While one must be sceptical of such optimism, especially when it comes to matters as contested as immigrant lives, social scientist Eva Kaboy’s emphasis on hybridity allows us to unpack the ways ecologically potent ideas combine with the film’s multicultural rhetoric. Furthermore, incorporating an ecocritical perspective to this analysis will enable us to interrogate the politics of a multicultural society and its ethnic contestations in a more relational ecosystemic way than has been the case in previous studies and ‘add to our understanding of [. . .] doing politics through popular culture’ (Nestingen 2008: 133). The first area of ecocritical interest involves evoking the ways culture is inscribed on the human body. A running gag throughout the film focuses on Jan’s circumcision, which he considers as the ultimate way to win over Allahidda. After his many attempts at excessive hard work and camaraderie fail, he accompanies the youngest of the family, Ali, to the boy’s circumcision ceremony and gains the trust of the father. While the act has a tangible connection with issues of personal health management and cleanliness, as one of Jan’s friends puts it, it also emphasizes a

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perception of physical difference between the cultures. To be a Norwegian one has to be white, to be a real Muslim one has to get a circumcision, seems to be the extent of the film’s cultural finesse. Jan crosses these boundaries as he negotiates the biological in a way that not only separates different cultures, but also ties them together. By literally transforming his flesh to meet the demands of Muslim culture, Jan becomes more acceptable. The corporeal is thus the field in which contemporary forms of multicultural negotiation play out, a notion made explicit as Jasmin’s body is also branded with her second generation status by the identical tattoo she shares with Jan. Bodily signifiers are signs of a wider cultural political transformation that enables the protagonists to unravel the complexities of multicultural Norwegian society. Ultimately, it is up to Allahidda to make the film’s clearest connection between multicultural understanding and ecological rhetoric. Allahidda is shown as the one in need of reform as his fears that his supposedly traditionalist mother will condemn the union of Jan and Jasmin are unfounded. To accentuate this change of perception, he reads a poem composed by Jasmin at the wedding: I am the seed of the most beautiful plant in the world. You bring me to the other side of the world, you plant me there, water me, fertilize me. You are very shocked because your beautiful plant is not the way it would have been where it came from. The leaves are a different colour, the stems grow differently. You do everything in your power to help the plant blossom. But what can you do about the wind that moves me? What can you do about the water that flows there? What can you do about the earth in which my roots grow? Is it my fault that you decided to plant me here?

The poem is built on a simple but powerful ecological metaphor that encapsulates the approach of the film to multicultural politics. In this line of thinking, hybridity is conducted through biological factors as already seen in the transformations undergone by the bodies of Jasmin and Jan. The poem suggests that while individuals must inevitably change as a result of intercultural meetings, there is also something even deeper that affects them. Much as the cultural contexts vary and shape individuals, the climate and soil of the new country play key roles beyond the cultural realm. Equating cultural negotiations with the responses of individuals to the physical constitutions of different societies, the film conceptualizes the formation of multicultural hybridity as a natural process, where multiculturalism is not only a mental state, but also one with a distinct physical dimension.

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While much of the ecological rhetoric of this optimistic multicultural text is both utopian and metaphoric, its appropriation of a range of natural, including corporeal, signifiers stands as an indicator of the extent to which the utilization of ecological rhetoric makes cultural politics feel stronger. Whether this is able to overcome the problems of anthropocentric appropriation of nature is another matter, especially as one could argue that the film both advances the convergent logic of ideologically limited forms of multicultural cinema, even as it consolidates some of the more intriguing hybrid positions of intercultural films. While it is clear that Allahidda’s speech and other areas of the film appropriate ideas of nature for narrative purposes, its positioning of the human body as part of nature makes its strongest case for a truly ecological understanding of multicultural politics. The ways these two ideas – multiculturalism and a sense of the ecosystem – coalesce in the film exemplifies progressive tendencies in the ways national narratives and ecocritical understandings operate.

Deconstructing naturalization: The case of ‘minority’ cinema I have now discussed some of the ways in which the affirmative multiculturalist rhetoric of Nordic cinemas ties in with both ecocultural diversity and ecological hybridity. By focusing on explorations of ethnic minorities in the pan-Nordic Lapland, my approach moves even further away from the convergent logic of national narratives into explicit challenges to the ideological underpinnings that constitute them. I initially focus on the Sámi, an indigenous minority who inhabit the Sápmi, a region that spans Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. These concerns are inspected alongside ethnographic documentaries by Anastasia Lapsui and Markku Lehmuskallio focusing on the Nenetsi tribe. The fictional and documentary films urge rethinking the notion of the environment as a resource for social, and especially national, ideologies, providing in the process important challenges to any homogeneous projections of the ‘Nordic project’. Academic analysis of indigenous cinema – that is, film productions by minority populations designed to critique histories of domination and colonization – remains an underdeveloped field within Nordic film studies. For the most part, studies that focus on indigenous cinematic representations or, even better, production practices, remain scarce. Representations of certain ethnic minorities such as the Sámi are discussed in collections including Nordic

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National Cinemas and Transnational Cinema in a Global North, and certain high profile Sámi productions such as the historical epics Pathfinder and Kautokeino utrörning/The Kautokeino Rebellion (Gaup 2008) are discussed at length by Iversen (2005) and Christensen (2010), respectively. My discussion draws from these existing studies to inspect the politics of these epics via an ecocritical prism. Before exploring these films, I start out with documentaries that consciously challenge the repressive tolerance of multicultural ideology, exploring the ways the naturalization of minority cultures conceptualizes these peoples as more closely attached to nature than the hegemonic populations, and thus, as inherently different from the ‘norm’, an other. Through this, the films tie into our discussion of the convergent logic of national narration as they combine ecocritical approaches with what Charles Taylor (2001) has conceptualized as the ‘politics of recognition’. This involves evoking indigenous sovereignty and rights with an acknowledgement of the realities and relations of power governing the national contexts of production of these films.

Ecocritical rhetoric in Sámi documentaries To start this exploration of the ecological connotations of politics of marginality in the ‘egalitarian’ Norden, I briefly focus on two documentaries about the Sámi in Finland. A conventional environmentalist perspective emerges in Hannu Hyvönen’s Viimeinen joika Saamenmaassa/The Last Yoik in Sámiland? (2009), which provides both a powerful argument in favour of the preservation of the Sámi lifestyle, and against the resource exploitation of the partially private, partially state owned foresting corporation Stora Enso. Embodying the practices of the ‘competitive state’, this is one of the most influential foresting companies in Finland, merging both state interests and foreign private investment. Stora Enso’s activities and their impact on the environment are shown in distinctly negative terms in Hyvönen’s ecocritical film, despite the company’s use of extensive green rhetoric to amass state support and positive publicity. The issues here concern exploitative resource management and depravation, a contrast made potent by contrasting the mercantilist activities of Stora Enso with the Sámi. To achieve this contrast, the film shows us a somewhat typical view of Sámi culture, depicted as a people living in harmony with the environment and using only the amount of resources needed for daily survival. In contrast, the industrial modes of resource economics practised by Stora Enso are distinctly

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exploitative of the environment, emphasized by a range of powerful and memorable visual cues, such as the polluting Enso factory amidst the pristine landscape, the barren land left over from their logging operations, the extensive networks of dirt roads which penetrate the unspoiled forests, and the pervasive and noisy traffic which shatters the calm. In contrast, the Sámi are engaged in deer herding activities, which take place in idyllic natural settings. While the imagery repeats many familiar and even stereotypical conventions of depicting the exotic Sámi, the contrast is clear – the modern Finnish nation lives in unbalance with the environment, changing the landscape into a resource base, which contrasts unfavourably with the more harmonious state of equilibrium craved for by the Sámi. The Last Yoik in Sámiland is very explicit in pointing the blame for the destabilization of the forest ecosystem on Metsäliitto (The Forest Group, an entity focused on managing privately owned forests) and VAPO OY (a partially state owned operation focused on creating biofuel). When contextualized alongside the marginalization of the Sámi, whose treatment by the Finnish state has met with criticism even on the level of the United Nations, a dual form of criticism emerges, targeting the combination of geopolitical interests and economic priorities of the state. If we consider the ecosystem as something which works above and beyond national borders, The Last Yoik in Sámiland’s arguments for a more ecological approach to foresting provides a powerful opposition to both Enso’s activities and its ties with the Finnish state. As a supporter of capitalist practices, and as a perpetrator of cultural marginalization, the state is depicted as an exploitative machine, an impression far from the more beneficial ideas evoked in the convergent logic of heritage cinema. What makes this particular example of ecocritical cinema intriguing is that it recycles many of the conventional images of the Sámi as well as visual impressions that could be considered as part of the rhetoric of deep ecology – that is, absolute harmony with an idyllic nature. Whereas in traditionalist heritage cinema, nature acts as a supporting element for nation-­building, here it is used to construct a potent argument against the role of the state in exploiting natural resources. In contrast to the explicitly environmentalist rhetoric of The Last Yoik in Sámiland other films use similar material to generate discussion over Sámi politics of recognition. As suggested, the Sámi have often been depicted in exotic terms as an internal other of the north, a mystical and even dangerous tribe that stands apart from the civilizing influence of the hegemonic Finns. Katja Gauriloff, one of the first Sámi film-­makers in Finland, debuted with the documentary

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Huuto tuuleen/Cry in the Wind (2007), which shows us an entirely different image of the Sámi from even The Last Yoik in Sámiland. The film does not actively seek to deconstruct the exoticized image in the mainstream representations by attacking historical injustices. Instead, the argument is conveyed in a tempered manner through multiple narratives focused on the Koltta Sámi in contemporary Finland. Some of the individuals express dissatisfaction with the reclusive geographical location in and around the northern city of Inari and wish to immigrate to the southern cities. Others work in bureaucratic jobs trying to sort out the paperwork for municipal care centre projects. Mostly, the focus is on the everyday life of this community, regardless whether they are Sámi or not. While we do see glimpses of deer herding and touristic performance, Gauriloff ’s film takes a markedly different approach from the exoticized cinetourism of the mainstream films or even more mythical narratives featuring the Sámi, such as Pathfinder. As the Sámiland remains a contested political cultural space, spanning territory in Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia, it has often been conceptualized by the Sámi as a geocultural space that supersedes (or even precedes) nationhood. The Sámiland is premised on a sense of belonging beyond borders and draws on indigenous myths and shared cultural practices of the Sámi. This is a vital tactic not only for Taylorian politics of recognition, but also for the right to maintain legislative control over the use of resources and the representative rights of individuals. But simultaneously, the emphasis on exoticism and myth plays into the politics of othering, enabling the construction of the Sámi as different from the hegemonic norm. Diverting the focus away from exoticism and nature appropriation enables Cry in the Wind to project a transvergent perspective that instigates not only a need to rethink national narration, but also the ways the symbolic value of nature are appropriated in such narratives. The latter consideration is especially significant as minorities and indigenous peoples have been frequently caricatured as nature children, who exist in close connection with nature. By refusing the mythic and the exotic gaze, Cry in the Wind deconstructs the use of the ‘natural other’ to construct hegemonic national narratives and provides a vital step for cultural representations that operates in more complex terms than mere reliance on simplistic forms of stereotyping. Instead, it moves the focus back to a more realist level where constructing communality is as much about bureaucratic politics as it is about generating impressions of tangible felt belonging. From the perspective of the Sámi, it is more important to highlight the day-­to-day activities of municipal legislature and other such unglamorous procedures than

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to continue to emphasize the ‘inherent’ natural mysticism. After all, this would be another case of narrating, if not a sense of the nation, at least a shared, and potentially imposed, form of communality. Thus, the convergence of naturalized national narration – the construction of national togetherness by imagining an other – is revealed to be limited in its politics of othering.

Fictional encounters with a dominant culture: The case of Non Profit Considering the challenges these two documentaries pose for the conventional parameters in which indigenous others are treated in Nordic cinema, the lack of discussion of their merits in academic scholarship is puzzling. For sure, both films have been produced with very meagre budgets and received limited distribution, mostly in specialist festivals and on television. This lack of visibility is indicative of the wider systems of domination under which these films must operate. I explore these practices of exclusion elsewhere (Kääpä 2014) as, for now, the focus must remain on representational politics of recognition. This is the case as certain productions directly address the systems of exclusivist thinking that sustain national narratives as well as the othering of minority groups. One such case is Pauliina Feodoroff ’s Non Profit (2007), a film that works in an elusive, yet explicitly deconstructive manner in challenging the parameters of Nordic cinema. Feodoroff, herself an activist politician in Finland, worked on the film in an independent fashion, shooting the film for five years and spending four more in post-­production. Much of the film is self-funded by Feodoroff with some financial assistance from the Sámi Council, and it only received support from the Finnish Film Foundation in 2008 for post-­production costs. The problems in securing funding indicate the marginal position these films face in Finland and elsewhere, receiving minimal support from official governmental cultural fund organizations. While the situation, at least in Finland, has improved with a specialist Finnish Film Foundation one-­off grant devoted to Sámi film production, during the production of Non Profit, in the early 2000s, the situation was much different. Accordingly, the project was a response to the merging of Sámi culture into dominant cultures, premised on the necessity that ‘one has to keep talking about their own culture’ to prevent it from erasure, according to its director (Feodoroff 2007). The focus of the film is on a group of Finnish researchers who receive a substantial government grant to study the

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depletion of water and other natural resources in Finland’s ecosystem. The grant has been offered for a project that intends to learn sustainable production and consumption practices from the Sámi. To achieve a comprehensive enough space for their research, the group constructs a village in the midst of Sámiland and set up camp to study their own consumption practices. Non Profit sets up an interesting parallel between the group’s research mandate and the film’s approach to representing the lives of the Sámi. One of the researchers explicitly evokes the idea that the Sámi are often considered as an equalitarian goal by parliamentarians, conceptualized primarily as a means to indicate one’s multiculturalist credentials instead of demonstrating any real concern for the Sámi project. To complement this critical stance, the research team is seldom portrayed in a positive light. They quibble among themselves, getting too preoccupied with individual success and merit as well as confusing their research imperatives. They are the outsiders in this world, where their ethnographic preoccupations and scientific methodologies can only get them so far. Intellectuals professing to study an area of which they have little hands-­on knowledge become targets for some of the most penetrating criticism of the film as it seems that the whole construction of the research rationale is reliant on presuming that the practices of the Sámi can somehow allow them access to the incomprehensible totality of nature. By focusing on the activities of a ‘natural people’, the scientists continue the construction of anthropocentric categorizations of the environment that see the Sámi as a variation of the ‘ecological Indian’. Shepard Kreck suggests that this is a frequent character type in cinema, a way of ‘othering’ which constructs ‘the Indian in nature who understands the systemic consequences of his actions, feels deep sympathy with all living forms, and takes steps to conserve so that earth’s harmonies are never imbalanced and resources never in doubt’ (Kreck 2000: 21). The film plays along with this depiction as it emphasizes the harmonious ways of the Sámi, showing them at first as mystical shamans or traditional deer herders. But these impressions are revealed to be part of the gaze of the outsiders, continuing the prevalent tendency in Western writings to glorify its ‘indigenous’ or exotic others. While all of the researchers repeatedly make claims about the cost-­cutting involved in state organized foresting and their destructive impact on communities and the ecosystem, they never consider their own role as researchers who impose a set of barriers between them and the areas they profess to study. Ultimately, the film ridicules the inability of the researchers to make the necessary connections with their research topics as they are repeatedly shown

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losing their senses and running uncontrollably through the forests. One of them quarrels with the others over the rights of the research, providing a commentary on the ways that even ecologically and ethically conscious researchers make use of the natural environment for their own purposes. Furthermore, disciplinary disagreements also threaten to undo the group as they do not understand the rhetorical and methodological premises of the type of anthropology the main researcher conducts. For them, the primary investigator’s actions amount to an inversion of the ‘fox girl’ phenomenon, comprised of an activist movement which started out as ecologically inspirational activity to free minks and foxes from captivity, but which ended up devastating the environment as these predators upset the food chain balance. Non Profit seems to indicate that the sort of educated environmentalism practised by the research group and supported by sizable funding from the state can only have negative effects on what they try to protect. By forcefully underlining the ways the researchers are approaching their topics of study from a flawed perspective – both a resource-­led approach to nature, and a nature-­led approach to the Sámi – it creates an impression of the short-­sighted view these outsiders hold. Finally, the group is visited by an emeritus professor, who evaluates the research but discovers very little evidence or rationality to back their extensive funding. It seems these intellectuals rely on human rationality and the objective prerogatives of the scientific mandate that blinds them to the limitations of their research. This sort of anti-­intellectualism permeates the symbolic levels of the film, which are used to illustrate a literal re-­enactment of some of the key philosophical principles of deep ecology. This concerns an ecophilosophical strand originally developed by Norwegian scientist Arne Naess that argues for the conceptual need of humans to totally immerse themselves in nature, doing away with most, if not all, of the categorizations and parameters that separate the two. In capturing this sense of immersion, one of the researchers buries the research findings in the ground, symbolically suggesting that if one aims to learn about the ecosystem one needs to immerse oneself in it thoroughly and not use tools that only distance the analyst from what they study. But as another researcher goes to retrieve the data, she sinks into the soil while the other researcher that buried the data comes to try to help her. The culmination of the film, with the two researchers clasping onto life as they continue to sink, suggests that human activity remains insignificant in relation to nature, and a more comprehensive understanding of this totality is possible only in immersion. By ending the film in motion, a pointed argument emerges regarding the fact that humanity faces a choice to

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comprehensively rethink its anthropocentric analytical approaches. According to this logic, it is only an immersive experience, of seeing the human as part of the ecosystem, that can break this isolation. While the conclusion brings up many key points in ecocritical thought, namely hybridity and relationality, it also opens the film to critiques levelled at deep ecology from different analytical perspectives (see Plumwood 2003 for an ecofeminist critique; Adamson, Evans and Stein 2002 for an environmental justice perspective). To elaborate, when Whatmore discusses relational politics between humanity and nature, the emphasis is not so much on immersion, but on an act of solidarity and creating a more nuanced perspective than deep ecology offers. In rejecting the potential of science to study natural systems and of outsiders to understand the practices of the Sámi, the film projects a similar myopic perspective of which it accuses its protagonists. By suggesting that only the divestment of human value systems can facilitate a comprehensive approach to the ecosystem, the film not only critiques the mentality of dominant cultures, but also repeats certain fallacies of the very system it seeks to critique. These fallacies are to do with the adoption of the somewhat abstract notions of intrinsic relationality and immersivity in deep ecology, which the film combines with its anti-­intellectualist stance and its lack of engagement with more complex assertions of Sámi existence. In many ways, these are problems that repeat assertions central to the convergent heritage narratives discussed above, that is, locating authenticity in nature and seeing disconnection as integral to the urban mentality. As the film ultimately attempts to combine deep ecology with a form of social ecocriticism it, perhaps unintentionally, projects binaries and divergencies that govern the constitutive ideology it seeks to critique.

The cinema of the Sámi in an ecological framework Non Profit and Cry in the Wind both challenge some of the norms with which the Sámi have been depicted in fictional cinema. Despite their limitations, both films are important contributions to Nordic indigenous film production as productions initiated by the Sámi remain relatively rare within the Nordic context. While small-­scale productions such as these provide the seeds of alternative critique, the prevalent depiction of the Sámi has not changed much from the twentieth century when exotic impressions of the Sámi as a mystic tribe prevailed in cinema. One of the key texts in this regard is Niels Gaup’s Pathfinder, which

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focuses on an orphaned boy who guides his enemies to their death. Iversen (2005) suggests that the film uses exotic depictions of the Sámi that show their close communality and connectedness with nature, but also emphasizes Sámi identity politics in a more proactive way. While many of these notions have their roots in reality, Iversen’s description (and the film itself) plays up the sorts of exoticized depictions Non Profit seeks to deconstruct (and which it also inadvertently strengthens).1 Both exoticism and marginalization are ongoing problems in Sámi representations in mainstream film culture, but even the Sámi authorities take part in this rhetoric as can be seen from the following description of the Sámi Film Festival: The life and culture of the Sámis is colourful and special. Sámi Film Festival wants to show this by films. Reindeer husbandry is one of the most important ways of making a living in Sápmi and a lot of films have been made about the subject. It is the Sámis themselves and other people that capture this part of the Sámi culture on film. This year the festival is screening seven films about reindeer husbandry and the opening film Varg/Wolf is also about that.2

While the qualities outlined in the quotation are certainly important aspects of Sámi culture, the repetition of such norms, especially when equating a film such as Wolf (discussed in Chapter  4) with the culture of the Sámi, continues to recycle the conventional roles available for the Sámi. Ecological elements, far from helping to expand or complicate these representations, come to play a reductive role in these cultural politics, especially if they are conceptualized as part of the discourse of authenticity closely connected with deep ecology. By continuing to evoke an impression of the Sámi as exotic or authentic natural ‘types’, the Sámi are conceptualized as an alternative to urban, presumably somewhat more advanced, culture. Through this, it is not difficult to suggest that the films continue to perpetuate the ideological assumptions that they set out to unravel.

The Kautokeino Rebellion and deprioritizing the ecological While mysticism and nature connectedness are key parts of Sámi culture, depicting the Sámi in a more secular manner is increasingly vital for fostering an effective politics of recognition, as can be seen from Gauriloff ’s Cry in the Wind. Similar ideas prevail in fictional form in Niels Gaup’s Kautokeino-­opprøret/ The Kautokeino Rebellion (2008), a depiction of the late nineteenth-century

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colonization of a village of Sámi in the Kautokeino region of northern Norway. While Gaup’s film uses much of the same imagery as the other Sámi films, it is also substantially different in its politics and its depictions go well beyond the reductivity of the ‘ecological Indian’. The key idea here is environmental justice and the need to address a history of exploitation, especially the mistreatment of marginal groups such as the Sámi. The events are put in motion by Norwegian merchants who provide the Sámi with alcohol to entice them to go into debt and subsequently repossess their reindeer and land. The Swedish and Norwegian colonizers use mercantilism and religion as their ways of making the Sámi ‘behave’ and exploit the natural resources, the reindeer. Alcohol is just one means of establishing control as religion, in its dogmatic form, acts an imposition of ideological oppression on the Sámi. A group of Sámi herders comes into direct conflict with the tradesmen and representatives of the Church. As the law takes the side of the mercantilist class and supports them with both goods and weapons, the conflict heats up. Following a clash between the Sámi and the merchants, the tradesman and the corrupt sheriff are left for dead. From the perspectives of the colonizers, the Sámi are to blame and the participants in the conflict are condemned to death. Refusing to bow down to orders, the Sámi do not admit their guilt even in the face of execution, a heroic act that instils a sense of resistance in the Sámi people. The anticolonial argumentation of The Kautokeino Rebellion intends to redress an imbalance of historical narration as film scholar Christensen (2012) suggests, as history is typically written by the dominant power. The film unravels the relations of domination by depicting spiritual and cultural resistance as the most efficient way to achieve equality and recognition of the Sámi cause. This attempt to address the injustices of the past can be seen ecocritically, especially as much of its politics of recognition are reliant on a range of environmental considerations, including both land ethics and resource appropriation. These critiques share much with ecocritics such as Soenke Zehle (2002), who combine critiques of colonialism with ecocritical tendencies when questioning the ways human rationality and organized civilization are conceived as superior forms in the binary division between nature and culture. By ‘naturalizing’ the Sámi, the merchants in Kautokeino position the Sámi as culturally lesser forms in need of civilization, a process that enables the application of severe measures to control them. Furthermore, from the perspective of the Sámi, interaction with the environment is premised on sustainable herding and consumption, and as such ideas are antithetical to the dogma of economic rationality, the Sámi ways are reconceptualized as irrational. By challenging the ‘natural’ principles on which

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colonialist actions were carried out, The Kautokeino Rebellion provides an important contribution to environmental justice rhetoric with its complex depiction of the discourse of ecocolonialism, or imposing Western or other imperial modes of ecological policy and thinking to other environments. But taken as a genre piece, The Kautokeino Rebellion plays out in the mould of epic heritage cinema, with narrative trajectories and iconography not unlike large-­scale Hollywood features such as Braveheart (Gibson 1995). While much of the film’s narrative is dictated by historical factors, it remains a reinterpretation of history, leading Nestingen to identify it as part of the medium concept production mode common in the Nordic film cultures. According to him, it evokes ‘a complex balancing of narrative, multiple address, cultural politics and marketing appeal’ (Nestingen 2008: 57), which combines both Sámi politics and critiques of ecocolonialism. Such politics are then conveyed in the more accessible framework of the epic, enabling the film to operate both as a film with a distinct political message and one that aims to reach mainstream audiences. Such combinations make sense as they have a chance to evoke more general awareness of the Sámi cause and further their calls for equality, a notion made explicit when considering its relatively large budget and wide appeal. Gaup’s political aspirations may be sound, but it is also not difficult to see the problems such conventional frameworks of representation bring. Following this, one has to wonder whether The Kautokeino Rebellion is inebriated in the same kind of ‘cunning of recognition’ that film scholar Monika Siebert (2006) has identified in relation to the Inuit-Canadian epic Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (Kunuk 2000). In this historical epic, we are made privy to a precolonial Inuit history, complemented by glimpses of the lives of the Inuit actors in the present day. While the film exhibits an anticolonialist stance in Siebert’s perspective, it is also part of the problem it seeks to criticize (part of the constitutive ideology of the dominant society, to use the terms I have employed). According to this logic, historical epics made by indigenous directors, but with substantial support from official funding bodies, become complicit in the multicultural state’s nation-­ building efforts and their ‘global self-­promotion’, whereby the ‘indigenous in turn get access . . . to administrative structures, which allow them to participate (now out of political maturity) in the ongoing work of the state’s political and economic self ’ (Siebert 2006: 544). The adoption of distinctly anticolonialist politics is not enough in Siebert’s view as it only conforms to hegemonic ideals by conserving indigenous independence in the past, and validates the liberal aspects of the Canadian national narrative.

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Similarly, The Kautokeino Rebellion’s methods of relegating independence to some mythic past and not confronting the contemporary structures of Sámi marginalization comes to predominantly support the multiculturalist exceptionalism of the contemporary Norwegian society, with the outrage and public debate about past mistakes fulfilling the dominant population’s quest for self-­validation as a permissive and tolerant society. The cunning of recognition involves recognizing the historical injustices against the Sámi, but conducted in this way, it disavows sufficient address of contemporary injustices. While The Kautokeino Rebellion certainly makes a passionate argument for equality and self-­determination, its conventional use of a range of exotic markers and genre formula position the Sámi once again as an exotic natural other, even if they are now the main active parties in the film and its production. These complications are typical problems faced by marginalized social groups who operate at the intersections of popular culture and political demand. This is a pervasive problem that confronts most narratives attempting to work with the conventional structures of mainstream entertainment while presenting arguments that criticize the fundamental principles of the structures that generate such entertainment. The cunning of recognition is one of the reasons Gauriloff and Feodoroff ’s films take the form they do, refusing to work with the conventions that such a limited conception of recognition entails. While Cry in the Wind remains somewhat tempered in its challenges to dominant norms, Non Profit explicitly confronts such conventions by undermining the authority of its protagonists and the conventions of narrative cinema. Meanwhile, The Kautokeino Rebellion may be able to contribute substantially to Sámi politics, but it also remains bound by the ways it tries to operate both as historical spectacle and activist cinema. By abiding with the parameters defined by principles of the cunning of recognition, it would not be too difficult to envision the film as a case of populist environmentalism as critiqued by Sean Cubitt (2012: 284) in that it positions the Sámi still as an object of neocolonialist marginalization that seems permanently unable to envision other forms beyond this framework of othering.

Ethnographic ecodocumentaries If we were to assess Sámi film production from the perspective of ecocriticism, perhaps the most evocative contribution emerges in documentary productions such as Cry in the Wind. Its politics of non-­exotic ordinary life gestures to what

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I have in this work called a transvergent position. It neither seeks to evoke mastery of the environment (divergence) nor argues for the type of assimilative practices for which both deep ecology and heritage cinema simplistically call (convergence). The protagonists of the film strive to find new ways of conceptualizing their place in relation to an environment of changing realities. This provides the film with a sense of constant transformation both in terms of societal politics and ecological understanding. Transvergence, here, could be considered a sort of third way with the ‘trans’ in transvergent emphasizing the ongoing negotiations that are part of the ecocritical dimensions of Sámi politics of recognition. Transvergent perspectives are also key to understanding the ecological scope of a range of other documentaries, such as those of Markku Lehmuskallio and Anastasia Lapsui. Co-­operating on a range of documentary and fictional films since 1990 focusing on the lives of the Nenetsi and the Sámi among other minority groups, Lehmuskallio and Lapsui have emerged as some of the most important film-­makers working with minority cultures. Finnish film historian Sakari Toiviainen’s seminal work on Lehmuskallio is based on the premise that his films are integrally tied to nature (Toiviainen 2009). Certainly, this is one of the main areas with which the films work, as all of them exhibit a distinctly environmentalist ethos in their profound respect for nature. Such approaches are complemented by the ways they take part in wilderness politics as well as express concern with environmental justice, especially when it comes to marginal cultures. While they do contain aspects that attain some of the utopian tendencies of deep ecology rhetoric in situating humanity as an integral part of the ecosystem, their complexities and multiple modes of address negate any potential reduction of the films to deep ecology cinema. I will not discuss many of the earlier films Lehmuskallio has produced in Finland as Toiviainen’s exemplary work chronicles many of the environmental impulses of the films and as many of them predate the scope of this work. Rather, I focus on a case study of one of his later films, Jumalan morsian/A Bride of the Seventh Heaven (2004), produced in collaboration with directorial partner and wife Lapsui. The film is a key text as it provides a comprehensive longue durée examination of the ways humanity and the natural world intertwine (Toiviainen 2009: 8). Whereas other of Lehmuskallio and Lapsui’s productions explore colonialist power relations and marginalization, including the powerful documentary Sukunsa viimeinen/Pudana – The Last of the Line (2010), the ways A Bride of the Seventh Heaven combines aspects of mysticism with a profound sense of ecopolitical realism makes it an ideal case study.

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A Bride of the Seventh Heaven provides an intriguing counterpoint to the tempered ecological argumentation of Gauriloff ’s Cry in the Wind and the more politicized views of Gaup’s The Kautokeino Rebellion. Lapsui and Lehmuskallio’s film is a fictional examination of the lifestyle of the Nenetsi people and the restricted options available for women in this society. It follows the life story of Numd Sjarda, who was named as a bride to god before her birth as females of the Nenetsi society may have to occupy this role for periods lasting several years. After this time has passed, they can take on an earthly husband. Their imposed and predetermined calling puts them in a highly disadvantageous position as they have no means of establishing a real family and have to settle for roles as concubines in this highly patriarchal society. According to Lehmuskallio, the film has a dual purpose, which concerns both the provision of the ‘arctic peoples a chance to tell about their own culture, but also to communicate to audiences a picture of the multiple value systems and universal humanism of the surrounding world’ (Lehmuskallio 2003). The film is appropriately based on Lapsui’s childhood memories of a neighbour who occupied this gendered outcast role, a connection that allows the film to avoid the usual ethnographic problems of inspecting other cultures from the outside. As a form of ecocinema, the film is invigoratingly frank about Nenetsi culture and its environmental relations. The Nenetsi society is still largely predicated on hunting for minimum means of sustenance and thus its connection with the environment is very strong. Nature is a fact of life that conditions the life of the protagonist, but the directors’ approach is never fetishized or glamourizing. Negotiating the ways spiritual and corporeal forms of existence shape culture and people’s lives, the film never resorts to an easy sense of nature glamourization. The environment is a breathing living participant in the proceedings, yet its role is never hoisted to the foreground as a self-­evident ‘theme’ that constrains all meanings of the film. While Lapsui and Lehmuskallio’s films are visually stunning, there is a grittiness to their images that distinguishes them from other forms of ecocinema. The visual style of the film uses an intriguing approach to depicting the ecosystem whereby all of the external scenes have mosquitoes circling our human subjects, and on many occasions they stay on the camera lens. This breaches the cinematic world in a way that forces us to immerse ourselves in the diegetic world. Instead of providing the comfortable distance that a conventional spectator position may engender, we are confronted with a haptic image that shows us aspects of the reality of life in the Nenetsi habitat. But simultaneously, it also works to remind us that what we are seeing is ultimately a

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constructed, mediated reality. And as A Bride of the Seventh Heaven includes several fantastical or hallucinated scenes, its adherence to realist aesthetics become more complex in connotation. On the one hand, the technique forcefully points out that we do not have direct access to this world, but have to experience it through cinematic means. But simultaneously, by merging several different stylistic elements, the overall mode of the film results in a text that refuses easy categorization, much as its ecological qualities refuse simplification. Gender politics provides another element through which the film confronts caricatured depictions of human embeddedness in the ecosystem. The narrative focus on the protagonist’s meagre opportunities and resulting suffering emphasizes the ways she is left outside of the community and denied the opportunity to benefit from conventional familiar relations. A common tendency in environmental writing is to equate women with spiritual or sacrosanct aspects of the natural world, resulting in depictions where lives of holy women are seen in positive terms. The critical realist depiction of the film deconstructs this myth and shows its impact in a more secular, tangible sense. Through this, the film constructs a cinematic equivalent of an ecofeminist perspective: One of the most significant insights for literary studies afforded by approaching the general problem of ecological denial through the lens of gender is its exposure of the double paradox of nature having been androcentrically constructed as a domain for males, in contradistinction to female-­coded domestic space, yet at the same time symbolically coded as female – an arena of potential domination analogous to the female body. Buell 2005: 109

Not only does A Bride of the Seventh Heaven provide a critical realist approach to envisioning nature – not as the space of the other, but as a felt and potentially dangerous entity – it also challenges the processes through which nature and non-­hegemonic cultures are often othered. The critical realist take on feminized nature moves it away from the anthropocentric fallacies of most forms of eco­­ cinema as its combination of style and theme unravels the naturalization of patriarchal ideology. Simultaneously, the film makes it clear that the solution is simply not about emancipation or undoing past forms of oppression as the society does not have the support mechanisms in place to allow the women to exist independently of men. Its refusal to see the Nenetsi women as embodiments of some utopian conception of a feminized Mother Gaia is emphasized by

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the frequent deployment of jump cut editing, cutting on the bodies of three generations of women in similar positions, an act that links their suffering across the decades. The emphasis on bodies in stasis consolidates the idea that little has changed in the social position of these holy women. Through this deglamourized view of the ‘natural’ and gendered other, we are made to confront the ways in which many areas of ecocinema contribute to the marginalization of individuals and cultures, even as they propose considerable advances in environmental understanding. In many ways, the film calls to mind Berilla’s (2010) critique of the gender and ecopolitics of Robert Redford’s films, especially their andro- and anthropocentric limitations. Simultaneously, A Bride of the Seventh Heaven’s refusal to use nature as another symbolic signifier of domination stands in firm contrast to the power politics of mainstream entertainment tactics adopted by The Kautokeino Rebellion. Films such as this are content to work with the means of hegemonic representation to get their constructive arguments to wider audiences. Others refuse to do so and use a wide range of means to resist or even deconstruct the parameters through which constitutive ideological perspectives normalize (that is naturalize) their existence. Films such as Cry in the Wind and A Bride of the Seventh Heaven provide a form of ethnography from within as they use personal and collective memories to criticize many of the normative modes in which constitutive ideology plays out and constrains the generation of new meanings. They remain some of the most powerful indicators of the complexity of eco­­ cinema, even when these films stay well within the borders of anthropocentric logic.

Conclusion Our discussion of the diversity of Nordic multicultural cinema in the past three chapters emphasizes, first, that the focus on the constraints of heritage politics or on urban dystopias, both notions that remain the most widely circulated impressions of the region, are limited in their ability to capture the complexities of the cultural variety evident in the region. Secondly, interrogating these texts from an ecocritical perspective necessitates being mindful of the ways the cultural practices integral to the multiculturalist promises of Nordic societies use naturalization as a political tactic that excludes as much as it includes. To account for these challenges, we have only offered ecocritical readings of some of the predominant

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patterns in multicultural cinema from the region. Much remains to be done in exploring the works of immigrant directors such as Tonislav Hristov or even productions from Greenland such as Nuummioq (Rosing and Bech 2009), which would form a considerable topic of study in its own right. Similarly, indigenous film productions also remain a neglected field in studies of Nordic cinema with a range of documentaries and short films by directors such as the Swedish Sámi Åsa Simma-Charles and the Norwegian Johs. Kalvemo requiring comprehensive exploration. While the scope of the present chapter is limited, the introduction of an ecocritical approach to interrogating both multicultural and minority cinema is intended to encourage prioritizing focus on the fissures and contradictions that appear under the egalitarian surfaces of Nordic cinema. Continuing this line of interrogation, I now move to questioning how these ideas operate when Nordic producers expand their egalitarian philosophy to a more global scale, especially when these expansions are conducted with an ecological agenda in mind.

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Responsibility and the Nordic Model The scope of this book has gradually expanded from studies of heritage culture to explorations of multicultural ideology in an egalitarian Norden. Moving from the level of domestic concerns to a more global scale is entirely relevant for understanding the relationship between cinema and ecology in the Nordic countries as globalization plays a key role in both contemporary national narratives as well as ecocritical explorations. Key works, including Hjort’s Small Nation Global Cinema: The New Danish Cinema (2006b) and Nestingen and Elkington’s Transnational Cinema in a Global North (2005) focus on the diverse ways globalization and Nordic cinema interact. The arguments in these works largely focus on the ways transnational cultural flow influences producers working in the Nordic nations or the transformations the societies they depict undergo in times of economic and political integration. Accordingly, the history of globalization in Nordic cinema has traditionally been written from an intranational perspective. But even here, globalization is best conceived as ‘reciprocal’, as Hjort puts it, in that the Nordic producers react to imported stimuli and combine them with ‘indigenous’ forms of culture in new forms of synergy. Globalization has also been seen as a more outreaching operation with both Lunde (2011) and Kääpä (2010) exploring Nordic producers operating in other cultural contexts, namely those of Hollywood and Brazil. In all these examples, Nordic globalization takes place at the meeting point of cultures and creates a plethora of new cultural permutations that necessitate rethinking what is meant by Nordic culture on a regional level as well as within the individual nations that comprise the region. But globalization is also a process with a distinct ecological dimension, especially when it comes to the proliferation of economic policy and ideology. These areas have often been neglected in studies of Nordic cinema, necessitating that I now address Nordic globalization from an ecocritical perspective. To start off, I explore three key ways in which Nordic globalization is often depicted: I move from evocations of a homely backward Nord to representations of an affluent society swimming in

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complacency to, ultimately, ‘exceptionalist’ evocations of a global role model. I develop the idea of ‘Nordic exceptionalism’ throughout this chapter as I move from unbalanced cultural encounters in Populärmusik från Vittula/Popular Music (Bargher 2004) to consumerism and cosmopolitan fantasy plays in Nina Frisk (Blom 2008) to a sense of global inequality in Mammoth (Moodysson 2009).

Nordics abroad Popular Music (2004), Reza Bargher’s adaptation of Mikael Niemi’s novel, is a good example of a reciprocal response to the complexities of globalization. Unexpectedly, the film, about childhood friends Matti and Niila, living in the Norrbotten region between Finland and Sweden, begins in the Himalayan mountains. The now adult Matti has climbed the summit to spread his friend’s ashes to fulfil his final wish. Having reached the summit, he bends over to kiss the ground in a gesture meant for celebration and respect. As he does so, his lips instantly freeze to the icy ground. It seems that individuals from the Nordic region travel the world, but they are not entirely ready to counter the complexities of different cultural and ecological systems. Flashing back to their youth we see the boys growing up in their small community, identifying with rock music imported from the US and the UK and dreaming of escaping their reclusive confines, which is not entirely surprising as the local community is characterized by the extremes of alcohol and religion. Environmental factors of their home region, all dreary and bleak winters and expectations of following in the footsteps of their parents to the traditional herding and fishery industries, play a key role in their need to elope. But when the boys do escape, this comes at a personal cost. Far from the cosmopolitan traveller, they are not ready to meet the challenges of an ecocultural environment much different from their own home turf. As Matti’s warm lips freeze to the soil, Nordic forms of appreciating otherness and using it to vindicate one’s own identity politics become, if not ridiculed, at least fundamentally questioned. As this is achieved through a symbolic (dis)connection with ‘foreign nature’, the sense of home is strengthened, despite the bleak depiction of it throughout the film. While Bargher’s film remains ironic about the abilities of Nordic individuals to conquer the world, other films are not as critical and, instead, mobilize popular entertainment conventions to represent Nordic cosmopolitanism and affluent

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lifestyles. One such case is Nina Frisk, a film that finds optimism instead of estrangement at the collision point of the global and the local. A Swedish variation on Bridget Jonesian ‘chick-­lit’, the film is a romantic fantasy following the life of Nina, a flight attendant, who thrives in the transient lifestyle of a jet-­ setter. Complementing this insecurity is a history of problems with her mother and her alcoholic partner and she compensates for these fragile relationships with constant travel. When she meets Markus, a devoted and obsessive parent, her life philosophy is thrown into turmoil. The promise of something solid with Markus and his adorable son is enough to help Nina breach her ephemeral attitude. In contrast to the constant fluctuation and movement of a global traveller, Nina settles into an earthbound lifestyle and starts to see the benefits of local connections. But soon it turns out that Markus is as confused as she is as he tells her of his intention to move to India for half a year with his son. Nina bounces back from Markus and returns to her life as a steward – only now she has learnt the need to balance the local and the global in more sustainable and efficient ways. While the film is clearly a romantic fantasy in the mould of Bridget Jones’ Diary (Maguire 2001), its depiction of Nina’s lifestyle choices not only concep­ tualizes the contemporary Nordic society in relation to cosmopolitan attitudes but also facilitates its interrogation in an ecocritical light. At first, it seems as if the film is condemning Nina’s jet-­setting lifestyle in favour of local attachment as the film uses a conventional romantic narrative to argue for the need to establish roots. This is typical localization rhetoric reliant on a simplistic binary that positions the local as the antidote to the abstractions and the ephemeral qualities of the global. Having had her local aspirations squashed, Nina continues to fly as before, allowing the film to provide an impression of both assertive femininity and cosmopolitan independence. But while the gender politics of the film may be somewhat progressive, its ecological dimensions are severely limited. Nina Frisk never brings into question any aspects of her ecological footprint and echoes this ignorance of anything other than romantic relationships by suggesting that the only way to achieve female emancipation is through consumerist lifestyle politics. It is a text thoroughly self-­satisfied in its approximation of the enabling and affluent Norden and fails to provide any eco-­cosmopolitan understanding of the complex ways in which the local and the global, the immediate and the planetary relate to one another as environmental concerns. By glamourizing the enabling affluence of cosmopolitanism, it provides a contrast to Popular Music’s gentle parodies on Nordic reclusivity and ability to engage with the wider world.

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Popular Music and Nina Frisk show two perspectives on eco-­cosmopolitan approaches with Nordic ecocinema. As stated in the above, eco-­cosmopolitanism concerns rethinking the notions of the local and the global in social or cultural environmentalist rhetoric beyond highlighting the role of nature as a source of local ‘authenticity’ or emphasizing the often abstract evocations of a global ecosphere. The unthinking cosmopolitanism of films like Nina Frisk relates to more negative assertions of cosmopolitan affluence, especially when it comes to taking for granted the abilities of affluent Westerners to jet-­set the world. Popular Music, in comparison, reverts back to home, with these two polar opposites showcasing some of the basic principles of Heise’s eco-­cosmopolitanism. While these two cases are extremely simplistic, they emphasize the need to understand local and planetary ecological considerations as both intertwined and reciprocal in nature. As such, they provide a basis for an eco-­cosmopolitan approach to globalization that complicates the simplistic binary of the global and the local and gives rise to the following assertion: Environmentalist advocacies of place assume that individuals’ existential encounters with nature and engagements with intimately known local places can be recuperated intact from the distortions of modernization. Most networks of information open the local out into a network of ecological links that span a region, a continent, or the world. Heise 2007: 11

The logic of eco-­cosmopolitanism emphasizes the need to think beyond the boundaries of cultures, ethnicities or nations in a range of socio-cultural and ecosystemic frameworks that see all places as tied to other places. Eco-­ cosmopolitanism allows us to conceptualize individuals and groups as part of planetary ‘imagined communities’ of human and non-­human kinds who exist in a reciprocal framework instead of the simplicities of national imaginaries or other similar communal categorizations. Yet, such optimistic envisionings of planetary connectivity work in complex ways in the cinema and neither of our case studies has been able to encapsulate such complexity. Indeed, any sense of cosmopolitanism here is strictly for enabling the Western protagonists to envision global connections which they see as opportunities for their own benefit rather than the types of complex ecological networks Heise envisions for eco-­cosmopolitanism. To explain how such connections can be both ecocritical and fundamentally self-­serving, I turn to another case study, Lukas Moodysson’s Mammoth.

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Relating to the world: Mammoth In contrast to the comic depictions of uneven meeting points between Nordic subjects and ‘the world’ in Popular Music and Nina Frisk, several films concretely interrogate the ways the Nordic countries relate to the rest of the world, the ‘global society’. A particularly illustrative case study is provided by Moodysson’s English language Mammoth, which negotiates between cosmopolitan affluence and its emotional and material consequences. If the convergent logic of Popular Music sees globalization in relation to narratives of nationhood and the divergent take of Nina Frisk conceptualizes globalization as a means to strengthen cosmopolitan identities and consumerist uses of the environment, Mammoth provides a more critical take on the intersections of the local and the global. Once more, we have a stand-­in for Western affluence in computer designer Leo whose firm is expanding its business operations to Singapore in an attempt to profit from its cheap human resources. If Leo represents the exploitative side of globalization, his Filipino nanny shows us the other side as she has had to leave her children to come to work in America to earn money for the family. When her son gets injured, she cannot hide from her guilt any more and leaves Leo’s family to cope without their taken-­for-granted hired help. Meanwhile, Leo has an affair with a local prostitute and even considers giving up his privileged lifestyle for her. But ultimately, he realizes that this is only a fantasy and sneaks out at first light. As a depiction of global inequality, Mammoth operates at the schisms of global cultural and political economy, at times powerfully critiquing the unfair balance of economic power, at others, working with a range of stereotypes about ‘others’, including women in servitude roles, to make its point about global inequality. Environmental politics are central to this as the air-­conditioned limousines with hyperconsumptive engines and hotel rooms inhabited by the Westerners contrast with Gloria’s unfinished and roofless house. Leo is never able to connect his confusion upon seeing local people wearing breathing masks with his own complacency in environmental degradation. Instead, he is shown gazing at the city’s skyline from a five-star hotel window while breathing from an oxygen canister and holding a pen constructed of mammoth tusk. Given to him as a present by his trading partners from Singapore, the mammoth is a luxury item derived from a now extinct species, but it is also, more potently, a sign of Western consumerist extravagance and over-­consumption. If we take the mammoth as an overarching theme of the film, the pen is a powerful symbol for

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the ways Western self-­satisfaction and consumptive lifestyles are leading to a state where humanity is becoming an extinct species, a mammoth that is grafting its own conditions of extinction. To make this assertion more provocatively connected to Nordic forms of constitutive ideology, including the role that egalitarianism and welfare play in Nordic self-­conceptualizations, Leo and his family are shown as individuals with a social conscience. They do charity work and donate money, but also demonstrate distinct traits of self-­satisfaction in having ‘contributed’ to charity. Scavenging for food at garbage dumps and trafficking of children are actions reserved for the other side of global relations as Gloria’s son is urged to accept his position as part of the exploited service class. The conclusion of the film treats this duality with a heavy dose of sarcasm as the upper-class Americans remain preoccupied with the inconvenience of having to find a new nanny, while the main preoccupation in other parts of the world is basic survival. It is clear that such binary contrasts strive for a clear critical approach to Western lifestyle politics, yet a sense of Western self-­worth nevertheless permeates the film’s ideological structures. Moodysson comments on the film’s message: ‘It’s about how all of us on this planet are connected with each other, whether we like it or not. And how we need each other’ (Moodysson 2009) The message in itself is not unsurprising for the director whose previous works, including Lilja-4-Ever (2005), present similarly committed perspectives on exploitation and social inequality. The film does exhibit substantial power in its metaphoric characterization of the West as a soon to be extinct mammoth – an increasingly clear aspect of contemporary European economics and politics – but it also encapsulates a pervasive problem with these sorts of well-­meaning films in their inability to work outside of their comfort zones. We never move beyond the paradigms of exploiter and exploited, a notion especially problematic as the prostitute character is shown, dejected and all alone, struggling to come to terms with Leo’s departure. Despite indications of critical complexity, we must ask whether the film’s condemnation of the West as an inherently wasteful society challenges the normative operations of consumerist lifestyles. While the film focuses on the inequality generated by normative ways of life, Leo’s affluent and comfortable lifestyle is never in any serious question – instead, it seems the largest crime committed by Leo’s family is their inability to understand that access to wealth is precisely what the other wants as well. As such, the film’s reliance on consumerism as a norm operates as a contradictory self-­critical salve to suture over

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global fissures, providing few new perspectives on global relations of power. Through this, the film does not propose anything fundamentally different about current levels of consumption or relations of global exploitation, and resolves all its suggestive directions in the self-­sufficient embrace of the American family. In providing such symbolic life support for the Western ‘lifestyle mammoth’, the film is curiously indicative of the wider sense of self-­delusion that permeates both EU and US policy.

Nordic exceptionalism Taken together as a reflection on Nordic cinema and reciprocal globalization, Popular Music, Nina Frisk, and Mammoth (despite its somewhat tangential connection to the Nordic countries) can be considered to construct different perspectives on Nordic ‘exceptionalism’. According to Christopher Browning, exceptionalism indicates conceptualizing one’s own country (or region) as more advanced than others, with its history of success providing a formula that could be successfully imposed/developed in other less well-­off contexts. The sense of a ‘Nordic brand’ (Browning 2007) relies on well established concepts like egalitarianism and the welfare state, and relies on (at least, the impression of) low power distance between government and the people and adherence to democratic principles. The brand does not only focus on social politics, but also has a distinct ecological dimension. This concerns the ways models of global responsibility, especially as pertaining to welfare capitalism, human rights, sustainable development and environmental justice, can be applied to other socio-­economic and political contexts around the world – at least in theory.

The problems of exceptionalism: After the Wedding To illustrate how this exceptionalist ethos works in cinema beyond the immature cosmopolitanism of Popular Music, the self-­satisfaction of Nina Frisk and the confused politics of Mammoth, I turn to ideologically complex depictions of global Nordicness in the films of Susanne Bier, one of the leading directors in Danish cinema. Whereas the above discussed films could be interpreted to take Western exceptionalism for granted, Bier’s films focus on Nordic exceptionalism as a topic of interrogation. Appropriately, Bondebjerg and Renvall see Bier’s Efter

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brylluppet/After the Wedding (2007) as a significant global turn in Nordic cinema, one that has commercial and artistic viability, all while it wrestles with Denmark’s moral sense of self: As a drama, After the Wedding is characterized by a new trend in Scandinavian and European drama in which global problems are mirrored and reflected in a national, classical family drama. It is a form of new social, global drama, which raises a number of the perhaps often abstract problems of globalization in a concrete, dramatic and narrative way. The film’s popularity in Scandinavia and in Europe might have to do with this ability to combine everyday life with a global agenda. Bondebjerg and Renvall 2010: 75

The film’s combination of everyday situations with a pervasive sense of global responsibility is embodied by the protagonist of the film, Jacob, who works at an orphanage in India facing the threat of closure. He receives a substantial offer from millionaire Jørgen to establish a rehabilitation facility in India that could help over 65,000 children. Jacob is judgemental about life in the affluent West, though his rants at global capitalism and the Western mentality are seen as naïve by people close to him. It turns out that Jørgen has a terminal disease and has sought out the former lover of his wife Helene – Jacob. Jørgen wants Jacob to stay on as a surrogate father for their daughter Anna, but to make the affair more complicated, Anna turns out to be Jacob and Helene’s child from an affair. Jacob is torn between his promise to Pramoud, a child he aims to adopt in India, and his bloodline heritage in Denmark. He decides to take Jørgen’s money as this seems like it has the potential to positively affect most lives and visits the centre in India to adopt Pramoud. Yet, Pramoud does not want to take up Jacob’s offer, which he had considered as a given. Instead, Pramoud sees the contradictions in Jacob’s position – the Nordic sense of exceptionalism is premised in this case on the wielding of capital as the means to help others. But also more importantly, exceptionalist attitudes seem to prioritize money as the answer to all of the world’s problems. Even Jacob, who has been vehemently opposed to big capital, becomes part of the equation once he is shown where he ‘really’ belongs. To capture the contradictions evident in Jacob’s position, Bier’s film uses its formative elements to construct affinity networks on a transnational scale. Through this, it connects the people of India and Denmark haptically, which in this case means the deconstruction of the human into corporeal material through close-­ups and editing. The emphasis on extreme close-­ups of skin pores

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and eyes allows us to see Jacob and Pramoud as organic material bound together by their mutual sense of affect. Rather than breaking the human body into different unconnected segments, these haptic impressions rely on match cuts to show the construction of interconnectivity even when individuals are physically far away from one another. Such editing practices are especially impressive during the transcontinental phone calls between Jacob and Pramoud as the film captures their mutual affection and longing. This becomes even more persuasive as such techniques fade away when Jacob’s priorities change. In contrast, the cold world of business transactions is captured in long shots and muted colours, providing a clear contrast to this level of the sensual and the affective, a notion ultimately signified by Pramoud’s rejection of Jacob. While a film like After the Wedding is not self-­evidently ecological, its emphasis on the differences in living habitats and consumption practices between India and Denmark connote an environmental justice angle, a notion made explicit by the affective and emotional connections the ‘global agendas’ of exceptionalist rhetoric facilitate. The combination of ecocritical and transnational concerns indicates a crucial area in which ecocritical analysis can make the academic study of Nordic cinema more refined in corresponding to globalization’s challenges. To take one such example, by suggesting that the act of saving a large group of children is not necessarily an act of generosity, but a form of business transaction, After the Wedding paints a very cynical impression of the dynamics between Western idealism and global realities. Such contributions to the global human ecology are also an act of identity politics, conducted to strengthen Jørgen (and Jacob’s) sense of exceptionalism – they are an act of cultural management, one with uncomfortable parallels with efforts to bolster a brand image of global beneficialism.

Nordic exceptionalism as a global model Bier’s exploration of moral responsibility in After the Wedding critiques the convergent narratives that rely on the exceptionalist ethos and impressions of harmony in prosperous Denmark. These questions have ecological applicability as they not only provide a way to develop Browning’s critique of exceptionalism in relation to cinema but also indicate many of the root concerns underlining Nordic forms of global environmentalism. Namely, this is a concern related to models of sustainable development and ecological policy that may be hampered by their lack of consideration for realities outside of the Nordic context.

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To illustrate these frictions further, I turn to Janus Metz’s documentary Armadillo (2008), recounting a tour of duty of Danish soldiers in Helmand, Afghanistan. Much of the film works as an observational documentary following the lives of these soldiers, with little explicit ideological participation. A key scene in the film captures the ideological underpinnings of the Afghan mission in an explicitly ecological frame, allowing us to inspect the repercussions of Nordic operations on a global scale, conducted not out of explicit exploitation, but as a crusade with moral connotations. In this particular scene, the troops must use the local fields to avoid the roads, which are most likely planted with mines. The soldiers are frequently berated by local youths calling for them to acknowledge the ways their trespassing destroys the fields, which are used for agriculture, and if destroyed, will have a major impact on the livelihood of local communities. While the soldiers are shown fighting the Taliban and protecting local farmers, the key question of the field persists and calls into question the moral righteousness of the Danish mission in Afghanistan. In a particularly aggravating scene, the owner of the field visits the Danish base, Armadillo, to plead with the soldiers to stop their trespassing. He is met with a largely condescending response as the commander tries to explain to him that the owner must understand why they had to cross through the field and destroy the wheat in it, that is, for self-­protectionist military purposes aimed at protecting the Afghans. The confusion and outraged laughter that this sort of arrogant demand evokes in the Afghan farmers confronts the viewer with the complacent attitudes underlying the mission’s moral certainties. Whatever one may think of the military activities in Afghanistan, the film takes us beyond global geopolitics and power games and focuses on the different value systems that operate in specific cultures. While the sustainability of the field may not appear to be a significant issue for the Western war machine, it holds all the value for the local people. Armadillo showcases the ways cultural and political ignorance intrudes on ecological issues – and how different approaches to environmental resources are often a key aggravator in cultural conflicts. The evocation of land ethics confronts us with probing moral questions relevant to Nordic cinema, especially when producers wish to extend their scope into global modes of responsibility: when is it the correct thing to intervene physically, if ever, and how can one justify the presence of Western outsiders as the saviour (and thus the superior) of others? What exactly can the role of the Nordic countries be on a global scale, and is the model proposed by

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these countries ultimately so foolproof? These questions are of fundamental importance and show the ways in which constituted ideologies of exceptionalism can sow more damage than do good, especially when they rely on an outsider’s inability to comprehend the particularities of other ecosystems.

Conlusion: A global perspective on Nordic ecocinema From cultural misunderstandings to emancipatory jet-­setting, from metaphors concerning extinct species to self-­serving charity work, Nordic films capture some of the key global/local developments and frictions emerging at points of transnational contact. A sense of global responsibility is clearly evident in both the fictional and documentary films I have discussed in this chapter. Despite this explicit sense of commitment, global capitalism and its associated values of neoliberalism and consumerism act as the constitutive ideologies which complicate the argumentations the films put forth. While many of the films explored here are powerful eco­­ cinema, their approaches are not without flaws. The problems of subjective intervention and assumptions about conventional consumption patterns and income levels are especially prominent features of their constitutive ideology – that is, the affluent self-­satisfaction of ‘exceptionalist’ Nordic states. A key part of the exceptionalist rhetoric is based on the assumption that these models are transferable to other contexts, often located in and as part of the ‘developing’ world. For sure, many of these cases can be classified as part of Nestingen’s ‘the melodrama of demand’, a key trope in Nordic cinema that continues the mandate of social democracy and participation, widely conceptualized as fundamental principles of the egalitarian Nordic states. In the case of films such as After the Wedding and, in a less obvious sense, Armadillo, they make wide-­ranging demands about global inequality and forcefully propose a set of sustainable approaches. But others continue to perpetuate a set of assumptions about appropriate living standards and consumption levels, as is the case with Nina Frisk and Mammoth. The former in particular communicates a range of contradictory impressions to audiences, while it also mobilizes divergent anthropocentric rhetoric and the conventions of popular entertainment to normalize a range of assumptions about consumptive practices and distinctions between the developed and developing world. Indeed, many of these takes on the global dimensions of Nordic film culture exemplify an expansion of the anthropocentric representational approaches

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seen in heritage, urban and multicultural cinema. The convergent argumentation of heritage cinema, for example, is taken up by films such as Popular Music and Mammoth, as they amplify the appropriation of nature to the level of global cultural exchange, often in the service of culturally located or national narratives. In contrast, a film such as Nina Frisk combine different ideological strands – especially consumerism and cosmopolitanism – to provide a divergent take on the human as the master of the ecosystem. Yet, globalization also works as a means through which the anthropocentricity of these narratives can be, at the very least, questioned. After the Wedding and Armadillo construct complex critical arguments, where nature provides the focus for questioning the role of Western exceptionalist thinking and eventual application in geopolitical strategies and global politics.

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Eco-­cosmopolitan Urges and Documentary Film Sustainable development has become a mantra for eco-­economic optimists, a source of concern for those in the developing world who fear an ethic of sustainability may be evoked to keep their economies down, and a target of attack by environmentalists who hold that the term is oxymoronic and in practice gives permission for economic interests (development) to override sustainability. Buell 2005: 148 Lawrence Buell’s description of the complexities of sustainable development finds echo in After the Wedding’s depiction of Nordic global responsibility and Armadillo’s depiction of different priorities in cultural encounters. Capital or geopolitical incentives override any affective transcontinental connectivity in Bier and Metz’s work as their emphasis is on the protagonists’ hypocritical attitudes and conflicted responses to environmental justice and access to resources, which reverberate into themes such as green politics and sustainability rhetoric. This sort of critical perspective is by no means relegated to fictional films with a guilt complex. Documentary production is particularly adept at evoking the critical perspectives necessary to investigate Nordic exceptionalist rhetoric and its correlations with the problems of sustainable development. This exceptionalist ethos connecting Nordic particularity with global applicability allows us to contribute a new angle to the burgeoning field of ecodocumentary studies (McDonald 2004; Hughes 2013). Whereas many of these studies discuss the important contributions films from diverse cultural contexts provide to advancing documentary art and cinematic ecopolitics, they remain somewhat abstract in engaging the particularities of the cultural context from where the documentaries originate. By addressing this concern, our study of a particular geocultural context expanding outwards – the Nordic countries going global – is

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especially relevant as it responds, first, to the need to include place in ecocritical analysis and, secondly, challenges some of the limitations the inclusion of specific cultural contexts may bring to environmental concerns flowing over borders. The focus of this chapter is on the Nordic ecodocumentary, specifically those productions which make a claim to global or planetary applicability. Focusing on these films enables me to interrogate the ways exceptionalist rhetoric, both on the level of ideological projections as well as developmental and resource politics, applies to the conduct of cinematic ecopolitics, especially as many of these films make precisely such claims to global relevance. To start off, I identify some of the key issues and problems pertaining to the Nordic documentary. The first of these can be considered part of what Bill Nichols (1991) has called the participant mode of documentary production. This involves the director getting involved in the actions on screen, often becoming a topic of the film themselves. Nordic examples of such participant documentaries can be found in cases such as The Dark Side of Chocolate (Mistrati 2010) and The Ambassador (Brügger 2012), films which focus on political and environmental issues on a wide transnational scale. Nichols’ description of films that prioritize the maker as part of the narrative is entirely appropriate for these films as they are arguably as much about the personalities behind the production as they are about the topics they nominally depict. While such practices are diverse in application and political orientation, the valorization of the auteur becomes a problem when considered as part of the exceptionalist self-­satisfaction of Nordic cultural production. The Ambassador is a clear case of such a conflicted participatory documentary, providing a dark but comic exploration of Western complacency in exploiting the resources of post- and neocolonialist parts of the African continent. The director of the film, Mads Brügger, poses as a businessman to set up a ministerial connection in the Central African Republic to export blood diamonds. Working from an ironic first person perspective not unlike some of the exploits of Sacha Baron Cohen, the film confronts the spectator not only with footage of corrupt government officials and businessmen, but the very real danger in which Brügger puts himself. Many aspects of the still pervasive Western colonialist mentality are exposed through Brügger’s alter ego who intends to build a match factory in the Central African Republic, a project with little basis in reality. The matchboxes would be branded with images of pygmies to provide them with a supposed stamp of authenticity, a move that sufficiently emphasizes the ways in which capitalist greed and consumer choices often rely on exploitative practices and gimmicks rather than any real substance.

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As a subversive exploration of Western exploitation, Brügger’s work is certainly not the first (nor likely the last) Nordic documentary on Western colonialism in different parts of Africa. Miki Mistrati’s The Dark Side of Chocolate presents a similar look at Nestlé ’s exploitative practices in chocolate harvesting, including the slave-­like conditions of their workers and their economic blackmail practices. Both of these documentaries on Western interactions with Africa (a problematic and homogenizing concept in its own right) have plenty to say about the darker side of multinational business operations, but they are also thoroughly steeped in the cult of the director. As Tommy Gustafsson and Pietari Kääpä (2013) suggest, The Dark Side of Chocolate is problematic due to its first person narrative and its persistent emphasis on the problematic conditions in African manufacturing. Instead of focusing thoroughly on the exploitative practices of companies like Nestlé, it uses caricatured negative stereotypes of African underdevelopment and the suffering of individuals to showcase the liberal Western perspective of its director. Similar problems also linger in Brügger’s work as the film ultimately tells us more about his supposedly daring persona and witty abilities in evading the authorities than it ever reveals of the exploitation of the local workers – especially the ones that had their hopes raised by Brügger’s fictional character promising them well-­paid work and improved living conditions. If we combine the participant documentary mode with some of the more dubious ideological prerogatives of Nordic exceptionalism – namely the emphasis on moral superiority in relating to other cultures – it would not be too outlandish to call these films ‘egodocumentaries’.

Critical perspectives on the egodocumentary The use of self-­publicizing, exceptionalist rhetoric that seems par the course for many of these investigative egodocumentaries is not, of course, something that has gone unnoticed by Nordic producers. An example that concretely notes and challenges such modes emerges in Jörgen Leth and Lars von Trier’s experimental work De fem benspænd/The Five Obstructions (2005). Leth achieved fame with his modernist experimental film Den nya man/The New Man (1967) and subsequently produced a long list of documentaries and short films in Denmark and abroad. In their co-­produced film, provocateur par excellence Lars von Trier takes aim at the institutionalization of this revered cultural figure. If Trier’s early work in, for example, the Dogme 95 production Idioterna/The Idiots (1996) challenged the formative and thematic conventions of mainstream cinematic

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narration, The Five Obstructions concretely lays out the production methods used for achieving the cinematic critiques to which his films aspire. Trier sets the stage for this intergenerational dialogue on the artistic and political role of cinema by challenging Leth to reproduce a key scene from his earlier film in five different settings, putting The New Man, a sort of science fiction prototype of our future self, outside of his clinical comfort zone. The purpose is to see how familiar thematic material takes on alternative connotations when it is repackaged via alternative cinematic means. The most relevant of the five obstructions for my purposes is concerned with challenging the comfort zone of white Western masculinity as Trier sends Leth to India to reproduce a key scene of The New Man enjoying a steak dinner. Instead of the sterile confines of the earlier film, Trier challenges Leth to eat his steak in a busy street in the red light district of Mumbai. Consumption becomes a performative act with diverse cultural connotations, involving both class politics and criticism of elitism, but now contextualized with inequality on a global scale. By placing Leth in a position where his privileged sense of self-­content – and ability to produce modernist works critiquing Western ways of life from the safe confines of that way of life – is forced into the spotlight, Trier captures a fundamental flaw in Western leftist intellectualism – that is, the necessity to put words into action. Leth responds by placing a translucent sheet between him and the street, an act which could be interpreted as a way to not only protect him and his crew, but to symbolically convey the distance between the two communities. For Trier, this is a failure on Leth’s part to do as one preaches. Simultaneously, the instance touches on a fundamental philosophical problem with ecocinema, which is to do with the safe distance the film-­maker maintains from the targets of their criticism. While it is all well and good to produce films on the disparate conditions in the Third World – as Leth is known to do – Trier’s suggestion seems to be that they maintain the safe distance of an impartial observer. This suggestion is underlined by Leth’s refusal to go back to Mumbai to complete his film, choosing instead to use split screen techniques to capture the necessary sense of contrast. While the arguments conveyed by The Five Obstructions remain, certainly, somewhat caricatured, they provide a clear and vital alternative to the self-­aggrandizement of the ‘journalistic’ Nordic documentaries discussed above. What could be seen as a lack of commitment on Leth’s part certainly contrasts with the gung-­ho mentality of Brügger, but the placement of this scene in Leth and Trier’s film serves as a powerful reminder of the exceptionalist ethos that structures even the most critical of Nordic films.

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Self-­promoting documentaries with exceptionalist tendencies are, in one way or another, part of a global movement with deep historical roots in ethnography and other forms of ‘responsible’ activist production. From Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) to Mika Kaurismäki’s work on Brazilian music cultures (see Kääpä 2010 for more on these limitations in Kaurismäki’s work), Western-­produced documentaries on the lives of others take it as their responsibility to show how other cultures live and the problems they face. While they are certainly inspirational in trying to address issues of environmental injustice and exploitation, they are simultaneously emblematic of cultural production that seldom questions Western conceptions of hegemony and global imbalances of power that form the constitutive ideology from where these films emanate. This is a line of interrogation I now continue as I focus on Nordic films that show clear interest in addressing social justice, but often end up operating within the normative framework which they seek to critique.1

Environmental politics on a global scale: Bananas! While many of these egodocumentaries use environmental material to boost their narratives, other documentarists merge the investigative with a more objective take on Nordic responsibility. Accordingly, exceptionalist arguments are not only concerned with constructing an image or using resources to produce ‘universal’ films. They can also make more pronounced uses of Nordic cultural and economic capital to address seemingly unrelated forms of injustice. Fredrik Gertten’s observational documentary Bananas! (2009) is a case in point. It follows a group of Nicaraguan farmers exposed to the pesticide DBCP in Dole plantations in Nicaragua. With the help of lawyer Juan Jose Dominguez and his crusading legal activist Duane Miller, they take the company to court in the US as they are now suffering from diseases and sterility caused by the pesticide. Having taken on Dole’s corporate power and legal bureaucracy, the farmers eventually receive a positive outcome and set a precedent legal decision implicating multinational corporations with responsibility for their local workers. The story does not end there as the final postscriptum of the film tells us that Dominguez is under investigation for fraud and a judge has overturned the initial victorious verdict. In March 2011, the California State Bar cleared Dominguez of all wrongdoings, but with this question mark on Dominguez’s

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ethical conduct, damage to his reputation had already been done. Not least of all, the discussion had been diverted away from Dole’s unethical practices. Dominguez was not the only one who met the wrath of Dole’s legal army, as before the premiere screening of the completed film at the Los Angeles Film Festival, problems emerged. Gertten was taken to court for libel and the film was pulled from the Festival competition. Instead, it was shown in the ‘test-­case’ lineup, where any sense of veracity and political participation the producers hoped to gain from the platform resulted instead in questions and scepticism over the integrity of the film. The decision effectively towed the corporate line and supported the perspectives espoused by Dole. While the circumstances seemed overwhelmingly negative for both freedom of speech and the fortunes of the Swedish director, the case went on to attract a lot of attention. In 2010, two members of the Swedish parliament demanded that the film be screened for them and, later in 2010, the libel suit was dismissed. But the real issue of public perception persists as Dole’s abilities to skew and consolidate impressions of guilt through their discourse management has had a clear impact on the legacy of the case. Following Bananas! and its observational stance, Gertten’s follow-­up Big Boys Gone Bananas (2011) chronicles the problems Gertten experienced with the early screenings and getting the film out to audiences. Through this, the documentary takes on the structure of the egodocumentary. As Dole sued Gertten for defamation, with not only the film, but also his livelihood at stake, it is not entirely surprising that he chose to document his travails and produce this sequel. The film makes the point that Dole seems to have been mostly interested in making a large-­scale PR statement against small film producers, warning them not to go after capital-­heavy multinational corporations. As this was a battle waged in the public sphere for control over the opinion of the people and the press, the film combines discussion of journalistic ethics and the ways big capital influences and controls public opinion with what could be seen as individual myth-­making around Gertten’s persona. Once the politicians in Sweden start to support the film and Gertten’s right to freedom of speech, the film provides an intriguing reversal of the dynamics of the global and the local. Instead of vindicating acceptance of globalization as economic neoliberalism, the response is to urge dialogue between global and local players, emphasizing the understanding that freedom of speech is a universal act and must cross borders. Through enforcing this sense of global responsibility, the tables are turned on Dole, who campaigned to force restrictions on Gertten’s means to work

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from Sweden, a decision that reverberates from the Nordic context in a global scale. Furthermore, grass roots campaigning eventually results in the banning of Dole products from certain Swedish food chains, an act that takes on a second life in new media communication networks. Thus, in a wave of optimism, the film shows that local public discussion can make an impact on global issues. Gertten’s films combine observational and participant modes of film-­making in illustrating how individuals in specific contexts can have an impact on a global scale. In this, they can be considered as examples of Nordic documentaries evoking indexical realism, a mode that works to encourage dynamic relations between the producer, viewer, text and the context. Britta Timm Knudsen (2006) has identified indexicality as a key feature of Danish documentaries from the 1990s onwards. This implies a self-­conscious acknowledgement of the subjective influence of the producer in the frame and manipulation of the ways the text engages with audiences. Nowhere is this sort of indexical realism more evident than in Big Boys Gone Bananas, which prioritizes the dynamic sense of inter­ action with the public through its theme. These are documentaries that aim in no uncertain terms to change the world and thus the personal narrative must be included as a case study and model. Such modes are of course problematic in their assertions of realism – indexicality as access to an unmediated reality – but the fact that the film makes media realism and participation one of its themes enables it to foster a more complex connection with audiences than egodocumentaries that go for a seemingly more impartial, irreverent style. In both documentaries we are confronted with the notion of an individual willing to challenge injustice by producing films that partake in social and ecopolitical reform. This form of socio-­political commitment reflects wider patterns in Nordic documentary production, which encourage participation and change in viewer perspective. Thus, when texts like Gertten’s duology involve the parliament and the audiences, it exploits the participant potential of ecocinema to its fullest. While Big Boys Gone Bananas certainly operates as an egodocumentary narrative and is thus open to critical interrogation of its exceptionalist rhetoric, this is a necessary step to take in providing a connection with the viewer. Furthermore, the transnational scale of the films’ ecocritical work suggests that ecological movements and environmentalist productions can take advantage of certain areas of the national infrastructure without restricting their politicized scope. Importantly for its transnational scope, Bananas was seen as a Swedish film, at least in Sweden, where it met with political support and outrage

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over its banning as well as the legal difficulties of its director. This positioning takes centre stage in Big Boys Gone Bananas and amounts to something of a validation of Nordic exceptionalism as Gertten’s local means and concerns are allowed to reverberate on a global scale. By operating on a reciprocal global scale, the films evoke a concrete instance of Heise’s eco-­cosmopolitanism as they show how the local and the global can intertwine and interact in mutually beneficial activity. The events in the Swedish parliament kick-­started a process that resulted in the positive decision concerning the wide release of the film in the US, and which will potentially have impact on the worldwide reputation of Dole and also on Dominguez’s exoneration. Appropriate for a specifically eco-­cosmopolitan understanding, impact is felt at several locations, including Nicaragua, Sweden and the US, with local and more specifically transnational actors engaged in complex forms of reciprocal interaction with potentially wide reaching, even universal consequences.

Even the word Finland scares us: Transnational documentary and critical perspectives on Nordic responsibility First person participant documentaries are a key strand in Nordic ecocinema. These films can be premised on the cult of personality (The Ambassador and The Dark Side of Chocolate) or they use personal involvement and their own Nordicness as a way to negotiate multinational political issues. For some, their origins and production background – their Nordicness – is the topic to be interrogated, as happens to Leth upon Trier’s urging, and which also colours Gertten’s media politics. Others take the relationship between the affluent North and the developing East as the main topic of interrogation, as happens in Mika Koskinen’s Punaisen metsän hotelli/The Red Forest Hotel (2012). Koskinen was producing a journalistic piece on China’s green policy developments for YLE, the National Broadcasting Company of Finland, when he came across the dubious operations of the Finnish-Swedish foresting company Stora Enso in China. Stora Enso’s strategy is a typical example of unsustainable outsourcing as it is based on planting eucalyptus trees in Southern China as they grow quickly and yield a swift profit. Koskinen discovers that eucalyptus is harmful to the local soil as it overshadows other plant life and literally starves the soil, killing the biodiversity of the region. This has a negative effect on local communities who have either been paid off or violently removed from their territory by agencies of the Chinese

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government. With the help of crusading lawyer Yang Zaixin, Koskinen manages to peek behind the veil of secrecy characterizing the collusive relationship between Enso and local government corruption. But once his sources are attacked and incarcerated, Koskinen has to consider what effect his film production activities may have. While Chinese state (or at least local government) corruption is shown in a distinctly negative, Kafkaesque light, Koskinen’s film is overall largely positive about China’s green policy initiatives and actions. China has traditionally been depicted as the guilty party in global pollution and deprivation of environmental resources, but as the film shows, the current level of greening in China is way more advanced than in Finland, for example. Whereas nuclear power has been the priority for the Finnish government, wind power and other renewable energy forms proliferate in China. This has not always been so as Stora Enso (formerly known as Enso Gutzeit) was initially a paper manufacturing company and relied on Finland’s indigenous resources to gain a lead in the market. But as the costs of importing wood or growing it in ‘developing countries’ has proven much cheaper, a clear exploitation of these markets along neoliberalist principles has emerged as the new direction for the company. The connections the film draws between the local and the global arguably follows eco-­cosmopolitan logic, albeit to very different ends from the exceptionalist ideas of Gertten, for example. To capture the interrelated effects of the local and the global, The Red Forest Hotel takes a clear ecocritical stance on environmental justice, neoliberal globalization, regional instability in China and outsourcing of resource harvesting. As Stora Enso is partially owned by the Finnish state, global exploitation is not only a corporate matter, but also a moral question of responsibility for Finnish citizens. In contrast to the other participant ecodocumentaries, The Red Forest Hotel places responsibility for globalization’s exploitative side on individuals at home. This is especially important as the film attempts to deconstruct the positive public image of the foresting industry that Stora Enso goes to great lengths to maintain. Public images are also at stake in governmental operations as the film targets the collaboration between the Chinese and Finnish governments, which enables Enso to take advantage of China’s support for green policies, while Finnish politicians publicly shun China for its human rights violations. On the level of state operations, Finland talks about equality and rights, while one of its business interests indirectly condones such activities. The same goes for Stora Enso whose publicity is awash with green promises and claims to advancing sustainability. For example, one of its

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promotional spots creates a distinctly eco-­cosmopolitan ethos, combining idyllic location shots from around the world with footage of affable Enso technicians helping the local environment. The tagline for the spot reads: ‘rethink – we need to think what we can do for the planet’. Not only does Stora Enso take care of local concerns, but these ultimately feed into planetary ones, seems to be the argument here. Of course, what we have in reality is precisely an instance of Buell’s (unsustainable) development, which acts as a form of greenwashing and profit generation. Enso’s company propaganda is ideal for demonstrating the ways impressions of eco-­cosmopolitan practices can be used to detrimental effect, especially if its idealism is subjugated to the profiteering machinations of global capitalism. In such propaganda, local roots are used as a signifier of authenticity and responsibility designed to make decisions made on a global scale seem sensible for local communities. It emphasizes the benefits of local and global activities, but uses this rhetoric as a way to funnel capital in a one directional flow. Reflecting the more problematic connotations of surface skimming cosmopolitanism, Stora Enso’s operations do most things correctly in theory – more jobs for the locals, the use of green resources – but they fail in practice as thousands of small-­scale farmers are displaced from their land and only a handful of them receive further employment in the sterile efficiency of the plantations. The exploitative relationship even extends to the level of the Guangxi ecosystem. The imposed mono­ culture of the eucalyptus plantations, for one, shows a lack of understanding of the nuances of the local environmental balance, and the treatment of local individuals as nothing more than a minor inconvenience points to a failing understanding of the human ecosystem. The ways The Red Forest Hotel negotiates the complexities of the local and the global also extend to its impressions of China’s green politics. While it chronicles many positive aspects of the greening of China, the film is clearly aimed at foreign audiences. Koskinen’s initial idea was a documentary on China’s greening, but its focus shifted to the Kafkaesque bureaucracy and secrecy inside the titular hotel as the local officials tried to prevent him from approaching the villagers. By shifting the focus to China’s corrupt officials, the documentary moves away from its target – Stora Enso and Finland’s complicity. In this, it perpetuates certain critical impressions of Chinese corruption and bureaucracy that could be considered concessions to (foreign) audience expectations. Simultaneously, the repetition of pervasive negative impressions of the Chinese government – no matter how realistic – throws into question the veracity of China’s sustainability

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efforts. For example, one could ask: who is to say that the greening process is anything more than a sustainability façade, intended to cover up an increase in other aspects of anti-­environmental activity such as coal mining? While these are all problems originating from the choice of the film’s topic, the focus once more shifts to systemic flaws in other parts of the world and the exceptionalist sense of moral superiority embodied by the film-­maker. Yet, when we compare the tactics taken by Koskinen to other egodocumentaries, some of the nuances of his approach complicate understanding the films as an exceptionalist text. Many other ecodocumentaries covered here target injustice elsewhere and use their home as the basis for such critiques. Despite limitations in its focus, The Red Forest Hotel arguably targets the exceptionalist rhetoric of Finns involved in these operations. Even if the Stora Enso propaganda aims to complicate responsibility in a mesh of eco-­cosmopolitan entanglements, Koskinen’s film reorganizes this in a clear funnel of responsibility that reverberates back to Finland. To enforce this perspective, Koskinen meets a group of local farmers who have been displaced by Stora Enso’s operations. In what must come as a shock to Finnish viewers, they state ‘Even the word Finland scares us’. In a clear indication of how transnational business operations resonate on a national level of responsibility, Koskinen states: ‘The land has been hijacked and Finland’s reputation is at stake’. Transnational corporations rely on an impression of responsibility (as Stora Enso does on Finland’s reputation), but when the activities they undertake reverberate in numerous contexts (local, national, transnational, planetary), they challenge the positive awareness on which these country brands rely. As with the two Bananas films, The Red Forest Hotel had demonstrable impact. Lawyer Yang was incarcerated for a lengthy period following Koskinen’s filming activities, which may have had an impact on his treatment. But simultaneously, it would be simplistic to blame Koskinen for these difficulties as Yang had persistently campaigned against Stora Enso’s actions even before Koskinen caught on to the issue. Koskinen has campaigned for Yang’s release, and in late 2012 this finally took place. While Koskinen’s stake in the release is up to debate, the publicity that the film has generated may have had some impact as it encouraged the Finnish Development Minister Heidi Hautala and other activists to campaign for Yang’s release. Ultimately, what all this comes down to is the flexibility of the eco-­cosmopolitan ethos, which can be used for both exploitative and critical purposes. Using the rhetoric of globalization, Stora Enso can promote its operations as working for the planetary good or with the best interests of the local

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people in mind, depending on where the promotion is held. Simultaneously, Koskinen can produce documentaries on cases involving local and global injustices and enjoy immunity in precarious production contexts such as that of China, as he is effectively both inside and outside the prevalent cultural and political norms of the context, not bound by its legal or cultural conventions. Through this, the film shows the ways the foreign and the domestic, the global and the local, exist in a dynamic relationship, shifting in relation to the whims of global capitalism as well as in direct opposition to some of its patterns.

Taking care of the globe at home: Ecodocumentaries and everyday responsibility As Koskinen and Gertten’s films testify, Nordic ecodocumentaries often aspire to represent other parts of the world in a nationally or locally specific framework. In this, they evoke both eco-­cosmopolitan practices and moral universalism as well as criticize specific problems arising in their local contexts of production. They showcase two perspectives on Nordic exceptionalism with Gertten demonstrating a positive take on exceptionalist rhetoric, and Koskinen providing a more critical view on the combination of democratic and capitalist principles. The latter, at least, poses a transvergent challenge to the constitutive logic of the Finnish state – that is, the principles of welfare capitalism. In contrast, Bananas mostly validates an impression of the socio-democratic principles of the People’s Home by positioning such ideological frameworks on a global scale. In contrast to these two explicitly global explorations of Nordic exceptionalism, John Webster’s Katastrofin aineksia/Recipes for Disaster (2008) reminds us that if such exceptionalism is to have any moral or ecological grounding, one must, at least in the first instance, take care of the globe at home. Webster’s documentary is also an egodocumentary and a first person narrative as it chronicles his Finnish-British family’s experiment to live without plastic for a year. Underlying this individual narrative is a wider universal concern: climate change, as adopting a more ethical approach to consumption is for the film-­maker the main way to combat it. Much of the narrative of the film focuses on the difficulties involved in maintaining a conventional lifestyle without plastic products. Initially, difficulties manifest in finding products that do not come wrapped in plastic, such as toothpaste and other necessities. Soon, the material used by the children at school, as well as the petrol used for the family car are outruled. Every

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aspect of the Webster family life is complicated by the decision and drives them to frequent confrontations. A substantial part of the film is devoted to exploring the difficulties of living with sustainable consumption choices. In this area the film is reminiscent of the conclusion of An Inconvenient Truth (Guggenheim, 2006), which famously suggested a range of strategies to limit individual consumption, arguing that the adoption of a sustainable way of life can be difficult but not impossible. Recipes for Disaster certainly refuses to glorify the adoption of a sustainable lifestyle. The focus on the children of the family is illuminating in this regard as the idealism of a parent is not necessarily something that can be easily adopted by other generations in the contemporary society. John’s wife frequently argues that the experiment should not impact the children, especially when it comes to their experiences at school. The overwhelming societal pressure to be ‘normal’ is one of the considerations the film addresses, even as it suggests that sustainable lifestyles often fall outside society’s conventional parameters of normality. While Recipes for Disaster is inspirational in its arguments for maintaining sustainable consumption levels, it remains problematic in its emphasis on the complacency of middle-class lifestyles. Its obsession with the ‘ordinary’ citizen and ‘normality’ confines its arguments to operating within the parameters set by the constitutive ideology of welfare capitalism and its focus on consumer lifestyles. Indeed, its environmentalist rhetoric is limited by its narrative, which mainly emphasizes the threat green activity brings to the equilibrium of the nuclear family. While addressing ordinary consumers by working within their means is an entirely appropriate tactic in raising sustainability awareness, it would also be appropriate to consider other options outside of consumerist choice. While we do live in a consumerist society where such ideologies form the ‘constitution’, the lack of substantial consideration for other alternatives ignores the fundamental underlying societal problems that normalize contemporary consumption levels. For example, even as John develops new biofuel from turf matter to use in his diesel-­powered car, the film shows the choice to use a lower consumption engine as a highly impractical venture. Green consumption is often represented as a necessary, but difficult way of life. And while this may be the case, for a ‘green’ documentary such as this to focus only on the personal sacrifices and difficulties the choice necessitates seems problematic in tone. The way in which consumerist ideology takes over the film – the holiday in Italy by train instead of the plane is presented as one of the family’s biggest achievements – is another instance of its normalizing myopia. Indeed, John’s

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escalating obsession arguably typecasts environmental activism in an idealistic and over-­the-top light. We see shots of him unshaven and tired, a man who has been driven to the extremes. Similar images accompany his wife, who tries to talk sense into this eco-­warrior gone too far. Such depictions of the extremes of environmentalist activity are not only very easily dismissible, but also show how environmentalist awareness can work akin to a malfunctioning psychological state. While idealism is shown as an absolute necessity to reverse the negative effects of global warming, it is also a state that can tear apart lives and families. Moderation emerges as the only stable way to encourage a sustainable lifestyle in a society of convenience. While, certainly, the film wants to convince ordinary Finns to consider reducing waste in their everyday lives, its rhetoric also works as a justification of a middle-class-­based consumer society rather than a thoroughly dynamic or inspirational rethinking of its parameters. This Finnish contribution to an increasingly prolific strand of ecocinema is important, if conceptually muddled, environmentalist work. Again, Western modes of complacency emerge as key targets of criticism, but simultaneously, the focus on providing agreeable models of behaviour for other individuals reasserts consumerism as the contemporary norm. This is not unusual as we see many similar problems with constitutive ideology in Koskinen and Gertten’s films, not least of all their pervasive focus on Nordic exceptionalism – even if this means critique of it as in Koskinen’s film. By charting these fallacies, my intention is not to demean the work of these directors. Rather, I acknowledge that they approach the topics from a sensible moral need, but the focus on the state of things, especially in a film like Recipes for Disaster, can be seen to convey an acceptance of taken-­for-granted aspects of normative Western lifestyles. This reveals the pervasive hold of anthropocentric ideology even in those films that would work against its constitutive logic.

Temporality and the planetary implications of local resource management If representations of taking care of the globe at home are fraught with similar difficulties as the exceptionalism of global egodocumentaries, a viable alternative may be provided by films which displace the human from their central narrative role. One such case is Michael Madsen’s Into Eternity (2010), which continues the focus on the planetary implications of local actions but does this

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by addressing an imaginary spectator thousands of years in the future. It does not matter so much if the spectators are human or not, as their role is to assess the damage the current generation has caused. Into Eternity focuses on resource and energy production in the Nordic countries, and especially the legacy of dangerous waste that nuclear power emits. Finland remains the only Nordic country with a substantial commitment to nuclear energy, which it is increasing at such a pace as to soon reach the highest global concentration per capita. Waking up to the problems of waste management, engineers and plant managers have built a facility called Onkalo (The Cavern) for storing nuclear waste for at least 100,000 years. As many of the scientists and engineers interviewed for the film point out, this is a lot longer than any human-­made structure has existed. The engineers plan to complete the facility and seal it off for the period once it is stocked full of the lethal substance. To emphasize the seriousness of the potential danger, we learn about the ways radiation can lead to death or mutations as it breaks the DNA code. This situates the human body within the wider biosystem, where Promethean myths warn us of causing our own demise by reaching too far into the unknown realms of science. To complement this warning, space and the ocean have been deemed too problematic for disposal of the over 250,000 tons of nuclear waste in existence around the world, and it is only cavernous structures in the earth that may be able to hold it and provide sufficient security. In the case of Onkalo, the Finnish state is responsible for passing information on to the future, but this is an entirely uncertain future. Not only is there concern for its accidental discovery, but parties could seek for it intentionally for use in nuclear pollution attacks. Further­ more, prophetic forms of geology are never an exact science and geological movements and floods provide some potential challenges to arguments in favour of caverns as conducive environments for conserving waste material. The design of Onkalo is as different as possible from contemporary human habitations as the engineers are not only concerned with storing the waste, but also ensuring that future species understand the gravity of its contents. To facilitate a point of contact for audiences, Madsen films himself in the dark addressing an imaginary future species that may find the stash. This provides an alternative point of contact beyond calling for identification with the story of an ‘ordinary individual’ as seen in the egodocumentary. While Madsen is present throughout the film, the film is not about learning with him – and, eventually, learning about him. Instead, the narrative framing device puts into question the anthropo­ centric logic of the whole Onkalo project. By adopting a narrative form with

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posthuman connotations, the film asks questions that resonate well beyond the film’s origins as a local or even national problem. The legacy the contemporary generations leave not only for their offspring, but also for the planet, is the key ecological concern that must be able to have resonance universally. Using testimonies, the film suggests that the contemporary media focus on the viability of nuclear power diverts attention away from the more urgent (and also more long term) concern over the disposal of waste. What is done about its management and how will the future generations understand what is buried there? The film’s projections into the future are an appropriate means to capture this uncertainty and enable it to posit a transvergent quality largely missing from the other ecodocumentaries covered here. By projecting an existence beyond the human, the tactic blurs anthropocentric logic, which it uses to consolidate a clearly anti-­nuclear argument that contradicts those posed by activist journalists such as George Monbiot, who have taken a notable stance in favour of nuclear power because of its efficiency levels (Monbiot 2011). As we learn that Finland will need many more of these depositories to accommodate its current level of expansion, the global dimensions of the depository problem become evident. Finland is, after all, only one very small country and represents a minuscule proportion of global energy consumption. To underline the point, one of the scientists points out that three new nuclear plants a day need to be built to get China and India to the levels of Western consumption. Contradicting the pronuclear lobby’s assertions that nuclear is the only viable alternative in the current economic climate, Madsen refuses to budge to the constitutive ideology of neoliberalist rhetoric. Some of the most powerful arguments the film makes challenge the cultural preoccupations of constitutive ideology. The arguments supporting nuclear power are, in one way or another, premised on maintaining consumption levels and thus the taken-­for-granted primacy of neoliberal ideology. As culture is a malleable idea changing over time and varying according to perspective, cultural considerations are ultimately insignificant in relation to the sustainability of the planetary ecosystem. Displacing what is effectively the cultural logic of late capitalism (to borrow Jameson’s phrase), the posthuman perspective ends the film by telling the hypothetical spectator to ‘go back up and take care of our planet better than we did’. By positioning humanity in hybrid temporality, the film indicates both the fragility of human dominance of the planet and its potentially paradoxical major impact on its future. Whatever the case, the film moves us from local and national policy decisions to a planetary scope, from

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immediate considerations to long-­term impact. Through this, it suggests a truly eco-­cosmopolitan ethos where local decisions are decisions made on a planetary scale.

Beyond individualism In addition to Madsen’s alien(ated) narrator addressing posthuman spectators, transvergent perspectives can also be attained by evoking the hybrid perspectives discussed by Whatmore and Thomson. In Thomson’s work, hybridity and immersion in nature enables transnational forms of affect and cultural understanding among individuals from different backgrounds. But this can also work the other way as well with transnational affinities enabling more comprehensive ecological understanding. To elaborate on these directions, I focus on the creation of affective networks in Katja Gauriloff ’s documentary Säilöttyjä unelmia/Canned Dreams (2012), which explores the material origins of the ingredients for an ordinary can of ravioli. Tracing all the ingredients back to their origins provides an intriguing glimpse of an interconnected, yet ultimately disparate global network of individuals and interests. We start out in Brazil where workers are operating in a mine to source the metal for the can. The conditions are tough and the workers exploited and underpaid, with the film creating a picture of the human costs of the uneven development of one of the world’s emerging economies. Much of the focus of the film is on Europe as we journey from a Danish pig farm to the edge of the EU and ultimately to Finland. In Denmark, we hear about the affective connections workers sometimes build with their animals, but once they are shipped eastwards to Poland and Romania, they become mere product and are treated accordingly. While we are shown horrifying scenes of slaughter similar to other animal rights films such as Earthlings (Monson 2005), Gauriloff ’s film instead focuses on the stories and feelings of the individuals it follows. Through this, we not only learn about the demands food production makes on natural resources and livestock, but how it ties with human ecology. The conception of human ecology the film conveys is premised on an intriguingly confrontational technique where voiceover, comprised of the characters describing their dreams, is complemented by shots of them mutely staring at the camera, confronting us with their inherent humanity. The confronting gaze is clearly aimed at the Western spectator, especially as this is where our moral compass ends with the can’s culmination in a Finnish shop. This geographical

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coordination situates the global economic and cultural centre in the West, and while this certainly conforms to (contemporary) facts, it also moves the ideological core framework with which the film operates – its constituted ideology – close to the constitutive ideology of consumer capitalism. Gauriloff is very aware of this problem as the protagonists’ stories illustrate different ways of conceptualizing one’s societal and environmental priorities. Whereas Brazilians talk about social exploitation and inadequate support structures in the mining operation, individuals in the affluent West are more occupied with personal relationships and feelings of displacement or affection. For example, the staff at the pig-­rearing facility in Denmark talk of problems stemming from their childhood and their inability to find partners. Some of them evoke parental affection with the pigs, and are shown holding them like children. Once the pigs are shipped to Romania to sterile slaughter facilities and taken apart by mothers in abusive relationships and ex-­criminals, whose ‘dreams’ are about harbouring revenge, a European sense of inequality emerges. The countries on the periphery of the EU act as the depository for all the offal and dirty jobs that the West does not want to handle. The killing of the animals enforces this sense of inequality as the material and psychological cost of the ways our food is prepared becomes evident. While Nordic self-impressions evoke a wholesome green image of their resource production and consumption, this is based on socio-­economic inequality and continues to enforce binaries rather than undo them. The sterile and symmetrical corridors of the slaughterhouse are framed to capture this sense of an inhuman underground necessary for the maintenance of an affluent yet supposedly ethical consumer society. Only the blood and body parts of the spasming animals shatter this sterility. The film concludes with an arresting image shown in a lengthy static shot. The now-­ready can of saver price ravioli sits on a symmetrical shelf in a Finnish supermarket, costing less than one euro and ready to be consumed by inhabitants of one of the more well-­off societies in Europe. Contrasting the neat, even sterile surroundings of the can with the messiness of blood and soil seen in the earlier scenes makes a clear ecological point about the taken-­for-granted values of a consumerist society. This point is enforced by the film’s focus on the dreams, and indeed the humanity, of the individuals producing the elements of the can. By working on the level of the affective, the film makes the connection between consumerist society and the unequal and even exploitative framework that sustains it, felt. The dreams provide substance not only to the sections concerning the lives of tomato pickers in Portugal and olive oil makers in Italy, but they also

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forcefully show us the humanity behind the division of Europe into its zones of economic benefit and social comfort. The selection of such an emotional approach can also be inspected critically. For one, focusing on individual aspirations and emotions results in a film that exhibits a distinctly anthropocentric worldview. Furthermore, the film provides very little data or verifiable information on the social context of food production and focuses instead on its emotional connections, an approach that could be critiqued in terms of David Ingram’s (2004) ‘melodramatic ecologicalism’. For Ingram, in much of mainstream narrative ecocinema, melodramatic narrative structures and neat closures reduce complex issues to individualized narratives or simplified answers. This is ultimately a way to avoid culpability in green politics, as ‘the attribution of blame to a nameless and inaccessible “they” is a consistent element in the depoliticization of environmental issues in Hollywood films’ (Ingram 2004: 3). Canned Dreams could certainly be labelled melo­ dramatic, but its consistent use of the confronting gaze of the European other penetrates any blameless surface Nordic exceptionalism may generate. While the film may not be explicitly political, its ecological connotations certainly enable such interpretations. For example, the 30,000 mile journey the food undergoes before it gets positioned in the can is another indicator of the differences in consumer power and the geosocial and political divisions that remain not only in Europe, but also on a global scale. The exploitation that enables the product to be offered for a ‘competitive’ prize, and the fact that this is a cut price version of ravioli, goes beyond the borders of Europe and targets contemporary economic globalization. By constructing a powerful critique of Western consumerism, affect and complex modes of spectator identification shatter the easy illusion consumerist advertising creates around the goods we consume. They are not mere product offered at the cheapest price, but have a lineage that needs to be understood in relation to both human and non-­human ecology. If melodramatic texts elude responsibility with a nameless ‘they’, the they of Canned Dreams are not left any more unidentified than those of Gertten or Koskinen’s films. It is clear that they are us, the spectators.

Rax Rinnekangas and cosmopolitan nodality Into Eternity and Canned Dreams challenge not only Nordic exceptionalism, but also critique the evasion of planetary responsibilities by Western complacent

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thinking. By evoking transvergent existential and political musings, they showcase the ecocritical potential of creative documentaries that combine artistic lineage with political content. To wrap up this overview of patterns in Nordic ecodocumentary, I turn to the films of Finnish artist and film-­maker Rax Rinnekangas, whose work combines art history with ecophilosophy, aesthetic appreciation with ideological critique. This combination provides unique access to the diverse ways in which documentaries merge the subjective with the objective, the local with the global, all while they appropriate nature for their environmentally aware productions. Rinnekangas’ fascination with what he calls the utopias of the old continent, that is, the ideologies that filled the cultural and spiritual world of Europe, provides exceptional material for our exploration of Nordic exceptionalism. First, this fascination forms the basis for a critique of the exceptionalist ethos we have identified as the constitutive basis for many Nordic films. Secondly, contrasting aesthetics and ideological content allows Rinnekangas’ work to compare and contrast different parts of the world in ways that see them as interconnected parts of a larger whole. To illustrate how these ideas work, I turn to a set of five films Rinnekangas has produced on architecture, humanity’s way of distancing from, and potentially closing in, on nature. Rinnekangas’ approach has its roots in Finland, but is distinctly cosmopolitan in method and, appropriately, the houses he explores move from Konstantin Melnikov’s Utopia house in Moscow to Tadao Ando’s Koshino house in Tokyo, from Le Corbusier’s French Le Cabanon to Luis Barragán’s studio in Mexico, and finally to Finland for Villa Mairea designed by Alvar Aalto. The five architectural films provide nodal points for conceptualizing some of the ways eco-­cosmopolitan rhetoric and cultural politics combine. To understand the implications of this combination, we first must inspect how the houses work not only as forms of human habitation, but also as contributions to social and cultural history. For example, Melnikov’s Utopia house in Moscow can only be understood in the context of the turbulent history of the twentiethcentury Soviet Union. Melnikov’s cosmopolitan ways conflicted with Stalin’s ban on modernist art, and the architect fell out of favour. Imprisoned in his circular house, the Utopia was forged into a space best described as a heterotopias, due to his marginalization and erasure from public life. Constructed on Melnikov’s artistic and philosophical principles with little attention to dominant social mores, Utopia stands as an absence in Soviet society, generating a void in its façade and construction.

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As part of art history, the houses illuminate vital aspects of national history. But as ecologically significant material constructions, they work as impressions of interactions between organic material and cultural appropriation. The establishing shots of each film feature an exploration of the nature surrounding the house, suggesting that the fundamental basis for any type of cultural activity must emerge from organic roots in the environment. Setting these very culturally specific explorations in the context of the ecosystem indicates a hybrid mapping of the architectural layout. For example, Casa Estudio in Mexico emphasizes the organicity of the interiors following the philosophy of its architect Luis Barragán, according to whom the house must age with its proprietor. Thus, the house as constructed is not complete, but takes on its real qualities through ‘living’. It is not a cold inorganic space only reserved for human inter­ action, but a constant reminder of human organicity. Understanding the house and its surroundings as parts of the same whole dismantles the binary between the inhabitant and the habitation, a notion made explicit through the film’s depiction of the ways light and the interiors of the house coalesce. By emphasizing the interactions between constructed habitations and the environment, the films suggest a hybrid approach to depicting humanity’s understanding of nature. Using a meditative approach with carefully phrased, hypnotic voiceover and lingering shots of natural light, the films facilitate a dialogue of light and design, of constant reciprocity between the organic and the inorganic. This level of suggestion extends to Rinnekangas’ film of the Koshino, designed by the Japanese architect Tadao Ando, which focuses on the ways architecture incorporates the human body. This corporeal take is foregrounded by concretely addressing the constructed origins of human habitations, as houses are, ultimately, means and ways to distance humanity from nature. To reflect this disconnection, the heating and other sustainability systems are situated on the outside of the building in ways that clearly highlight their existence. Another perspective on the fusion of the organic and the inorganic emerges with Villa Mairea in Finland. The house combines Finnish agrarian traditions and design culture, emphasizing both the simplicity of form and a sense of close affinity with the natural environment. The clearest indication of the relationship between human and nature comes from the foregrounded presence of the smoke sauna as part of this otherwise modernist collage and the ways the building merges with the forest. The design blurs the boundaries between construction and nature and provides a hybrid site where art meets the environment.

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Implicit in these explorations of architecture and nature is the suggestion that architecture, in fact, can be considered as an anthropocentric morphing of nature into human habitation. The Le Corbusier segment opens with a quotation from Rousseau, the philosopher, concerning the ways nature is a resource for the betterment of mankind and an aid to societal malnourishment. Accordingly, Le Corbusier’s house Le Cabanon was constructed as a Rousseain place of happiness. It was to be a green dream, where pure geometry meets the natural environment, as its architect put it. The irony is that Le Corbusier is one of the most well known of urban architects and Le Cabanon is a quintessential haven from nature. This contradiction is explained by Le Corbusier’s differentiation between philosophy and physics as, according to him, time and space are controllable by the philosophical mind, whereas physicality is something very different. Philosophical conceptualizations are able to move beyond the restrictions of space and place whereas art works need to exist in the material reality and in culturally specific contexts. Nature acts as both a utopian ideal to which the architects aspire and a reality with which they have to contend. This oscillation between the natural and the human world culminates with Barragán’s house Casa, where silence acts as the ultimate way to negotiate humanity’s relationship with nature. The film draws on the beauty of silence, suggesting that this is an aspirational state. Yet, it also concludes that real silence is impossible in urban nature or even in ‘real’ nature. Absolute silence is tantamount to death and, appropriately, the film has to face this reality as the chirping of insects and vague traffic noise is constantly heard. The utopianism of art faces the realities of corporeal existence as the film illuminates the unbalanced coalescence of ecological aspirations and material reality. The ultimate indicator of the clash of artistic utopia and material reality emerges with the metaphoric connotations of Barragán’s preference for Cadillac cars. This icon of Western hyperconsumerism collides with the artist’s ecophilosophical principles, forcing us to approach his artistic principles with scepticism. By touching on the contradictory role of the artist who appreciates and appropriates nature, the spectator is drawn to note that the harmony of the house is a distinct luxury, a utopian transcendence to harmony, where its aesthetics of appreciation are designed to ignore key social realities. By evoking these contradictions, Rinnekangas’ films provocatively gesture to some of the fundamental limitations of using nature in art. While constructions may be designed with an ecological sense of harmony in mind, the potential of these habitations as ecocritical signifiers will remain inevitably limited, especially in their utopian ecological

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imagination, as they are unable to escape their primary role – shielding humanity from nature. Even as they note these contradictions as well as largely ignoring questions of social inequality and global divisions of cultural and economic power, Rinnekangas’s architectural explorations are relevant not only for their ecophilosophical musings on the relationship between human habitations and nature, but also for their suggestive power as ecocinema. They provide an intriguing summation of many of the key concerns of this chapter. As the types of experimental ecocinema identified by Scott McDonald (2004) – the most productive type of ecocritical visual representation, according to him – these films find unorthodox ways to depict hybridity as well as deconstruct the powerful role the constitutive ideology of anthropocentric thinking holds on film production.

Conclusion: The ecodocumentary and Nordic exceptionalism While the majority of films discussed in this chapter are more conventional in representing ecological concerns than these architectural films, they are often more explicit in their ecocritical content. Films such as The Dark Side of Chocolate, Bananas, The Red Forest Hotel and Into Eternity use diverse means to investigate Nordic complicity in social and environmental exploitation. Simultaneously, they often fall within the framework of the egodocumentary, a mode we have criticized here as using the principles of Nordic exceptionalism to construct one’s own sense of superiority. This is also a part of the more artistic films of Rinnekangas as the production of art films that generate aesthetic appreciation of human-­made structures is in many ways implicated in this constitutive anthropocentric use of the natural environment, especially as the films rarely contain any explicit ecocritical material. The ecodocumentary, then, is not much different from the constitutive anthropocentric approaches of fictional film production. While many of the films explored in this chapter emit a distinct global awareness, the ways they tie with conceptions of Nordic exceptionalism as part of their ideological structures see them, first, take part in a construction of a ‘reactive’ national narrative that sees individuals from these countries assume a leading role on the global stage. These assumptions are, secondly, based on the exceptionalist ethos identified by Browning, that is, the evocation of the capabilities of these Western democracies in offering advice and exerting influence on the conduct of resource politics and land ethics in other parts of the world. Even though many of the films explicitly

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criticize this self-­serving impetus, they are ultimately confronted with the limitations of the cinematic form, a concern that emerges as a central problem with Rinnekangas’ works. By addressing the inevitable anthropocentrism of the cinematic form, I both draw together the many disparate strands of this book and provide suggestions for further study.

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Representing the End Times By focusing on the diverse combinations of nature writing and national narration, this study continues interrogating the appropriation of nature for various cultural and socio-­political purposes. Previous studies on American (Brereton 2005; Carmichael 2005) and Chinese (Lu and Mi 2009; Kääpä and Gustafsson 2012) cinema have explored the relationship between narratives of nationhood and environmental politics, but in this work, I have consciously adopted a transnational approach to these questions. This has seen the discussion move from the convergent logic of national narratives to popular genre cinema with global aspirations, from the dynamics of multiculturalism to Nordic exceptionalism. The next step is to expand beyond the constraints of socializing narratives into ecophilosophical deconstructions of human significance in the wider ecosystem. One area of cinema’s relationship with nature that we have not yet directly addressed concerns the very rationale of the existence of ecocinema as a means to come to terms with humanity’s ecosystemic role. For sure, both convergent and divergent narratives have their rationales, constructed as they are to facilitate and strengthen socio-­political argumentation or to vindicate commercialist or exploitative perspectives. But surely, there must be more to the production and study of ecocinema. Ecocinema, in all its different variations, seems to be a way of stating that ‘we exist’ (even if this existence often results in a wholly unbalanced relationship with the environment). Therefore, the frequency with which films evoke impending apocalypse (i.e. Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow, 2004, Alex Proyas’ Knowing, 2009, and so on) or depict post-­ apocalyptic worlds (M. Night Syamalan’s After Earth 2013 or Joon-­ho Bong’s Snowpiercer, 2013, for some more recent ones) can be seen as somewhat surprising. Yet, the prevalence of apocalyptic scenarios suggests an increased awareness of the fragility of human life on Earth. According to film scholars Tim Matts and Aidan Tynan, such narratives evoke ‘ecological melancholia’ (Matts and Tynan 2012), an approach that demonstrates a ‘mournful attitude’ to human fragility in the face of the self-­regulatory harmony of uncontrolled nature. Such

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attitudes are particularly evident in apocalyptic tales where nature is characterized as a superhuman foe capable of extinguishing life: What if today such notions are obstacles to a genuine awareness of the ecological realities facing us all (humans and non-­humans)? What if this ideal of nature were just a product of our own desire for stability, order, and regularity – for some imaginary extra-­social non-­human point of reference by which to attain to a position of mastery in the telling of the story of ourselves? Matts and Tynan 2012: 6

I have come to a similar suggestion elsewhere (Kääpä 2013) concerning the possibility of ecological rhetoric, especially of the explicitly doom-­laden kind, appearing as a sort of comforting mechanism, where representations of the ecoapocalypse rely on spectacle and melodramatic narratives. By making the apocalypse enjoyable, such representations may have the effect of negating any serious issues the films may raise as well as preserving existing power relations and normative societal order instead of presenting a serious challenge to anthropocentric mastery. What makes Matts and Tynan’s questions especially intriguing is their suggestion that Earth’s destruction is an ‘ungrievable event’, as the whole of humanity, and the existence of human memory, would be eviscerated by such a catastrophe. Melancholia is the only appropriate response to such a fundamental challenge to human logic as it captures the unimaginable sense of loss resulting from an event that refuses the objectifications of human representation. Subsequently, ecological argumentation is unable to correspond adequately to the challenges posed by the unrepresentable, argue Matts and Tynan. In the concluding chapter of this book, I investigate some of the ways such problems emerge in Nordic ecocinema as well as the strategies used by producers encountering them. These range from attempts at retraining perception to ecocritical work that undoes some of the suturing devices which aim to placate existential panic over the apocalypse with simplistic ideological concessions.

Refusing the spectacle of ecocatastrophe: It’s All About Love and running out of objectifications Much of the existing critical work (Brereton 2005; Kääpä 2013) on ecoapocalyptic scenarios focuses on the films of Roland Emmerich, especially The Day After Tomorrow (2004) and 2012 (2009). These films are criticized as spectacular

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forms of ecotherapy, creating narrative promises of species survival precisely in the terms evoked by Matts and Tynan. Nordic producers have also utilized threats of the ecoapocalypse in their work, albeit in very different ways than Emmerich. As we will see, producers such as Thomas Vinterberg and Lars Von Trier challenge imported mainstream conventions with elusive, difficult material, providing explorations that question humanity’s place in the ecosystem. I start with Danish director and Dogme 95 co-­founder Thomas Vinterberg’s follow-­up to his groundbreaking debut film Festen/The Celebration (1996), the apocalyptic It’s All About Love (2003). The film, in English and starring Joaquin Phoenix and Sean Penn, was perceived as a colossal failure on its festival release. Many of the critics found the film pretentious or impenetrable, but since then, the film has undergone a degree of revaluation with Arne Lunde (2011), for one, drawing attention to its myriad of complex engagements with mainstream forms of representation. Lunde does not go into much depth on the film’s ecological dimensions, but as we will see, ecocritical perspectives allow us to uncover much of the film’s power, especially its contributions to fostering complex non-­ anthropocentric, posthuman perspectives. It’s All About Love follows John and his ex-­wife Elena, a Russian ice skater, who has been cloned by her sinister management team to ensure the survival of their trophy fighter. Following an assassination attempt on Elena, John embarks on a journey to the ends of the Earth, an Earth that is on the brink of extinction. The ecological dimensions of the narrative are explicit everywhere as people die suddenly, dropping dead on the street from ‘something to do with the heart’, a condition particularly pervasive with lonely individuals. In Gambia, the temperature has been decreasing on a daily basis and people have lost their sense of gravity. The World Bank is pumping money in to solve the phenomenon, but critics are sceptical about not only the power of capital, but also the intentions of the Bank. To make matters worse, advances in biogenetics and medicine have perfected cloning, resulting in the decreasing importance of the individual. Finally, John’s brother, Michael, has had an injection against his fear of flying, but overdosed so badly that he can only fly now. All of these factors contribute to a largely negative impression of a world that has entered a stage that can only be described in transvergent terms as an ecosystemic mutation. Much of the film presents unexplainable events that capture the refusal of the end of the world to bow to human expectations. One such case is an annual event where all the fresh water freezes at the same time globally. It would be tempting to try to provide a scientific framework to explain the logic, but none

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is found in the film. The film does not make an emphasized point about human engineered climate change or pollution as all we see is dystopian imagery that paints an impression of a world winding to an end. The end is not something which can be explained or even countered – it is an ungrievable event of the sort evoked by Matts and Tynan, incomprehensible to human logic. To capture a sense of ecological melancholia, the film persistently disavows any sense of closure or making sense of the ecocatastrophe. Elena and John freeze to death in the apocalyptic storm that engulfs the world, and the coda of the film shows Michael on an unidentified plane circling the mountains, unable to land. His final words seem to propose a conclusion to the film’s puzzling ambiguities as we learn that he has been writing a report about the state of the world and come to the conclusion that ‘it is all about love’. This is, of course, an anthropocentric conclusion to a film that seems to gesture to something far greater, but the conventional implications of these words are undercut as the film culminates with a shot of a village of floating Gambians tied with rope to the ground from which they are now disconnected. The suggestion is of a planetary ecosystem changing its ownership as humans float away from the surface, while a dog stays on the ground chewing a bone. Refusing any sense of explanation or consolation for a soon to be posthuman world, spectators are left in flux with a sense of melancholia for the abstractions of love, and a sense of emptiness, of an event that is not explained to them. Thus, the film confronts the linearity and conformity of much convalescent ecocatastrophe cinema, disabling any pleasure to be derived from The End. It’s All About Love wrestles with the limits of human comprehension of a planetary sense of illness and uses the theme of emotionality and affectivity to enforce this point – emotions, after all, are the predominant ways in which we make sense of events. Every time John gets precariously emotional, we flash to a blurred shot of the Gambian village reflecting the interconnectedness of the different parts of the world. It seems that Africa’s demise is a burden on the world’s consciousness as the film cuts to news footage of food and financial aid arriving, but it is also clear that these will have no impact – the contradictions of human logic, especially the tendency of the capitalist West to realize its exploitative impact too late, are additional flaws which the film evokes. One could argue that such a deliberately ambiguous cause and effect narrative refuses to acknowledge human complicity in climate change, or even provides an excuse not to consider one’s own role in this process. This is a valid concern and raises the suggestion that more direct genre films such as The Day After

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Tomorrow make the connection with spectators more efficiently. It’s All About Love’s ecoapocalyptic ambiguity is troubling, as to truly capture the ecoapocalypse, representations would necessitate conceptualizing a world divested of human logic. Cinema is an anthropogenic form by default, however, and eliminating the human from the picture connects this discussion to many of the concerns of ecocentric philosophy, especially its variation as deep ecology which emphasizes the absolute interrelationality of the human in the ecosystem. While such perspectives share much with other ecocritical writing, especially the fundamental need to blur the boundaries between human and nature, it remains a restricted approach due to its limitations in accounting for the already-­done damage to the ecosystem by the human, and its lack of clear critical correlation with the fundamental tenet of ecocriticism – its need to interrogate human activities in the wider ecosystem. Lawrence Buell discusses the ways literary studies have overcome this hurdle, suggesting that ‘one of first-­wave ecocriticism’s most contrarian moves is its pursuit of an “aesthetics of relinquishment” that marks environmental writing self-­consciously devoted to resisting anthropocentricism, sometimes to the point of wholly eliminating human figures from its imagined worlds’ (Buell 2005: 100). For him, this approach is not an entirely feasible avenue within ecocritical cultural studies due to the extreme positions it takes on hybridity. It’s All About Love’s noncommittal ecoapocalypse can be considered problematic precisely for these reasons, but simultaneously, it is also an indicator of both the immensity of the apocalypse as well as cinema’s inherent anthropocentric fallacies. I return to the transvergent implications of these concerns towards the end of the chapter, but for now, it is imperative that I explore this notion of the human in the ecosystem more thoroughly.

The human as organic material: Corporeal challenges As I suggested earlier, a hybrid perspective on the human’s ecosystemic role is entirely central to the type of innovative conceptualizations that characterize transvergent ecocriticism. Haraway (1991) and Whatmore (2003) are some of the key academics who have posed the hybrid as a philosophical challenge to anthropocentric logic, and cinema has adopted these ideas to confront the comfortable psychological distance between the human as agent and the human as degradable organic material. This distance is largely sustained by

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conservationist rhetoric arguing for the need to protect the environment from humanity’s detrimental effects. While conservationism is an instrumental facet in protecting threatened species and ecosystems from exploitation and depravation, as a philosophical approach, it relies on limitations such as the pervasive tendency to establish boundaries between the human and the natural in ways that shatter the hybrid connections Whatmore et al. encourage. Instead, its emphasis is on often well-­intentioned concerns regarding the best ways to protect the environment from human intervention. Conservationism seeks to preserve nature in its pristine state, but it is also a way to allow humans to compartmentalize their inherent organicity outside of ‘nature’. If we consider this dilemma through the aesthetics of relinquishment of first-­wave ecocriticism, conservationism would seek to expel the human from its thematic scope, rather focusing on the ‘authenticity’ of nature. This contradicts the inevitably anthropogenic nature of the cinematic apparatus and necessitates that we, at least to some extent, go along with Buell in accepting some of the inherent limitations of our chosen form. In any case, conservationism differs from a transvergent ecocritical perspective in that it does not concern itself with undoing the duality of the human and the natural. To these ends, gardening and other aspects of landscape artistry provide an intriguing topic for considering humanity’s conservationist impulses. In her discussion of Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982), Willoquet-Maricondi (2010) suggests the film challenges humanity’s role as the master of the natural environment. Greenaway’s film includes a mysterious figure known as ‘the Green Man’, who becomes a symbolic embodiment of the film’s challenges to normative conceptions of nature as a resource, conceptualized as such by the ‘rationalism’ of modernist, capitalist, industrial and scientific approaches to organizing and resourcing the less than human world, which are ridiculed by the Green Man’s contradictory hybridized presence. To contextualize this discussion of ecocritical rhetoric capable of addressing ecocinema’s embeddedness in the anthropocentric mindset in the Nordic context, I turn to two films about gardening, the Finnish Yksi jalka haudasta/ One Foot from the Grave (Vuoksenmaa 2009) and the Swedish Allt on min buske/ All About My Bush (Riegert 2007) to interrogate the limitations of conservationism. Both films incorporate a range of narrative and formative techniques to address the limitations of the conservationist mindset. Both of our Nordic case studies contain similar discussions of mastery of nature as The Draughtsman’s Contract, but they construct this relationship in distinctly different terms from

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the allegorical and even elusive methods of Greenaway’s film. It is this diversity that enables us to elaborate on the ways the anthropocentricity of cinema is negotiated through narratives of corporeality. The perspectives of both Nordic films emanate from a familiar dichotomy, premised as they are on their parallels between the estrangements of contemporary society and the healing power of nature. Different factors of the capitalist system emerge as the central dysfunction, with finance management and disrupted personal relations in All About My Bush, and the corrosive effects of the media world in One Foot from the Grave embodying the complications of the modern world. In All About My Bush, financier Nils takes over the financial management of a botanical foundation. He has no interest in botanics or gardening as he is only there to reorganize the foundation’s finances. Two sisters run the daily maintenance of the garden and their eccentricity soon irks Nils even as they charm his wife. The latter’s affection turns into a near romance with one of the sisters while their daughter befriends the oddball brother of the groundskeeper. Nils goes to excessive lengths to regain control of his dissolving family and blames the hippie-­like communality of the sisters for his problems. The collision between his individualist capitalism and the more earthly and authentic mentality of the sisters escalates as he laces the site with DSD. Nils is infected most by the substance and first sees the world turn into multiple colours. Soon his conscious perspective merges with the earth to see its organic growth, even as his corporeal nodes merge with the various plant roots. His perspective is literally altered as he is made to confront not only his inherent organicity, but the unsustainability of his dissociation from the material world. As with many heritage narratives, the film culminates in the shedding of the urban skin and mentality for the more authentic life of the countryside. While nature is associated with thriving sensuality and Nils’ immersion gestures to a pronounced sense of hybrid belonging, his actions are ultimately a part of the film’s encouragement of resource management despite any of the efforts made to divest Nils of the more financial incentives underlying his actions. To put it another way, even as he comes to realize the sublime magnificence of nature, his change of heart is only designed to make sure the site stays open as a nature reserve. Despite his immersive experience and awakened perspective, nature remains a form of property, something to be admired from the distance. This paradox also emerges in the film’s narrative construction as animals such as a peacock and a mouse are killed for both amusement and anthropocentric self-­ healing. In terms of human ecology (of trying to make sense of how humans can

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live as part of their environment), the film proposes an idyllic form of green living that does not amount to much more than simple green rhetoric. While it concretely narrates the awakening of hybrid consciousness, and the site of the garden remains important for its biodiversity and cultivation activities, All About My Bush remains limited by its constitutive anthropocentric approach and its evocation of conservationist appropriation of nature. Similar ideas are also present in One Foot from the Grave, where we have another idealistic gardener, Visa, pining for a garden of his own. As he is diagnosed with an incurable brain tumour, reporter Hanna takes up his story and makes his final wish – the garden – emotive headline news. Visa soon discovers that the diagnosis was wrong as the hospital gave him the incorrect test results. He now faces telling Hanna the truth and halting the construction of a new publicly accessible garden. As a moral narrative concerning the difficult choices faced by Visa’s green activist, the film provides a few minor gestures relating to the complex integration of green policy and media communications. More interestingly, we soon find out that things are not what they seem as the diagnosis has in fact been a hallucination and Visa is in reality about to die from his ailment. The garden project is secured, but this is no longer the main concern for Visa or the film. Instead, the rest of the film focuses on Visa’s attempts to balance his denial of his mortality and undo the false obstacles his mind constructs as ways to maintain his sanity. To emphasize the questioning of human logic and its capability to construct illusions that deny its part in the ecosystem, the climax of the film takes place in a church where Hanna is about to get married. Religion and agnostic acknowledgement of human corporeality provide two different ways of explaining human existence, allowing the film to confront the anthropocentric logic of religiosity. As Visa dies lying on the concrete floor, the film seeks to remind us that human preoccupation with affective connections for one another, or the preservation of natural spaces for the acquisition of cultural capital, prove ultimately only to be distractions in a much more fundamental form of connectivity – that of our corporeal form. To consolidate this acknowledgement, the opening and end credits take us on a (digitized) journey through the soil, reminding us that human life is premised on organic matter and corporeal decay. The twist in One Foot from the Grave provides an interesting contrast to All About My Bush. Whereas All About My Bush ends in a paradoxically utopian evocation of anthropocentric conservationist rhetoric, there is no such optimism for Visa. The social world of human existence is based on a mirage, as this world is too preoccupied with relationships and vanity conservation projects to

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conceptualize a more hybrid sense of being. Gesturing to an existence beyond the human allows the film to attain a level of ecophilosophical awareness that provides a fictional answer to some of the questions evoked by Matts and Tynan. The use of a twist narrative, designed to unravel our taken-­for-granted conceptions of the ecocinematic mainstream, One Foot from the Grave works as a provocative answer to McDonald’s emphasis on experimental cinema, at least in terms of its audience address. By disrupting the flow of its moral – ecological narrative of a gardener trying to do right by both nature and relationship – it forces us to reconsider the conventional roles we build for conserved nature in our narratives. If nature is ultimately a corporeal reality masked by its represented self, at least in much of the mediated rhetoric through which we are able to debate such matters, cinema needs to be seen on a similar level as an apparatus that inevitably comes to conserve nature and build the barriers that obfuscate the emergence of an actual level of hybridity. Ecocinema, then, is at least to an extent characterized by its inherent anthropocentric fallacy, and it is to this conundrum that we now turn.

Twisting worlds: Transvergent imaginaries in Christoffer Boe’s films As cinema inevitably operates as an anthropocentric view of the world, it may be pointless to rebel against its inhererently limited form. This does not mean that new perspectives cannot be envisioned, as cinema is capable of producing skewed perspectives that, at the very least, evoke an uncomfortable feeling of being confronted with fundamental challenges to one’s taken-­for-granted assumptions about the nature of the world. An illustration of how this works in the Nordic context emerges from the films of Christoffer Boe, whose art house fused philosophical musings provide intriguing twists on the perceptual abilities of the human to represent the navigational coordinates of the wider ecosystem, all presented as part of a conscious play on the film noir and the thriller genres. Boe’s debut film Reconstruction (2003) explains some of the ways his brand of experimental cinema challenges our perceptions of cinema’s abilities in abiding by and recreating ecosystems. As with It’s All About Love, Reconstruction is focused on affective relationships and the importance of sensory perception. The focus here is on deconstructing the affective operations of cinema through a complex narrative exploration of the breakdown and rebuilding of a

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relationship. The film’s dismissal of a conventional narrative in favour of a more cyclical exploration is crucial in providing the sort of self-­reflexivity required for breaching the taken-­for-granted centrality of anthropocentric logic. To attain this perspective, the opening and closing scene of the film shows a tuxedoed man floating a burning cigarette between his hands. The point is to show how even if we know something to be unreal – such as the cinematic world confronting us – we are able to invest in it. The ways Reconstruction foregrounds this suspension of disbelief inherent to the cinematic diegesis enables us to acknowledge the fact that we are watching a film, but we are also emotionally invested in the lives of the protagonists, a couple whose life together is unravelling. The point of discussing Reconstruction here is not so much to investigate it as a specifically ecological text as to introduce it as an invitation into the peculiar and complex dynamics of space in Boe’s Allegro (2005), an experimental evocation of human perception. Zetterström, our lead into this peculiar world, is a focused concert pianist who has forsaken all aspects of his life in devotion to perfecting his profession. Effectively operating as an automaton, his sensory experiences are awakened when he comes face to face with the Zone, a bubble-­ like impenetrable formation that erupted in the middle of Copenhagen for no apparent reason. Zetterström’s need to lock away his memories is challenged on his initial visit to the Zone as he loses his talent when emerging back to the ‘real’ world. When he goes back to the Zone to retrieve it, he is challenged to dig deep into his past and undo mistakes he has made in his relationships. While this provides fodder for a distinctly anthropocentric tale of self-­realization, its simplicity is confounded by all aspects of the film coming together to decentralize human logic and rationale as the only ways to organize the world into patterns which it can understand. To emphasize this sense of decentralization, the cinematic construction – that is, the mise en scène and narrative – turns into an impenetrable maze. Both Reconstruction and Allegro rely on shots of the protagonists running around their semi-fictional constructions, encountering past and future selves, with time and spatial logic folding on itself. This is a feeling they generate in the spectator as well as we try to piece together the structures with which we are presented. The protagonists have been made into headless chickens by the loss of their emotional and cognitive coordinates and now they desperately roam the shifting streets of their subjective constructions. By divesting the narrative of its forward momentum and the cinematic apparatus of its power to organize space and time, the films question the very ability of the human to narrate its own existence.

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As a metaphoric encapsulation of resetting anthropocentric coordinates, the Zone is a sort of no-­place where one can start to rethink one’s being in the world. While it is distinctly an anthropocentric place – only seemingly operating on and affecting human existence – the ways the Zone twists the city space to alternatively challenge and conform to Zetterström’s perspective is central to its ecological potential. The Zone is a form of heterotopia designed to question our conceptions of the ‘natural’ world in ways that move past the strict confines of anthropocentric logic. If all representations of nature are constructed, designed to organize humanity’s relationship with the environment for diverse appropriative purposes, films emphasizing this constructedness shatter the illusion of reality on which our abilities to narrate ourselves depends – and which is key to cinema’s abilities to create message-­bearing narratives and affect. By twisting our perceptions of cinema’s suturing abilities, we are made to confront the fundamental fallacies underlying ecocinema’s ecocritical logic and the realities with which it has to operate, that is, its abilities to be an anthropocentric representation critical of anthropocentric representations.

Transvergent approaches to the anthrobiogeomorphic machine Allegro’s Zone is a direct reference to The Zone in Andrei Tarkovski’s Stalker (1979). In that acclaimed science fiction masterwork, The Zone is a way for individuals to rethink the boundaries of their existence. Adrian Ivakhiv suggests that The Zone is a way to unravel humanity’s self-­created central position in the universe and see the human as something less and simultaneously more than the master of the universe. The point is that the human is certainly an organic part of the ecosystem, but which, if we are to strive for a more ecological understanding, needs to be understood in hybrid terms. This is also the underlying idea underscoring Allegro, a connection made more explicit by situating Boe’s film with Ivakhiv’s description of the cinema as an anthrobiogeomorphic machine. This machine is a model of cinema that expands on Agamben’s notion of the ‘anthropological machine.’ It does this by drawing on Martin Heidegger’s description of the human (Dasein) as a world-­bearing being and of language, poetry, and art as ‘world-­disclosing,’ and on a Whiteheadian and Deleuzian understanding of the universe as a lively and eventful place in which subjects and objects

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are persistently coming into being, jointly constituted in the process of their becoming. According to this model, cinema is a machine that produces or discloses worlds. Ivakhiv 2010: 2

For Ivakhiv, the cinematic machine operates on three levels: the anthropomorphic that creates a human-­like social world, a subject-­world; geomorphic that sees films resemble a world with established geographical coordinates and laws, an object-­world; and the biomorphic one, that makes what we see resemble real life with all its animates and interactive (textual) elements, a thing-­world. Boe’s cinematic evocations confirm Ivakhiv’s stance by revealing the ways these three levels work in cinema where ‘worlds’ are not objective realities but subjective constructions. The role of cinema as an anthropocentric worldmaker is here exemplified by creating a world within a world in the Zone of Allegro. By divesting this world of the logical coordinates governing human agency and subjectivity, the anthropomorphic power of the cinema machine becomes highlighted by subverting the linearity of its geomorphic coordinates. Finally, the ways the films strip the mythical dimensions of emotional investment generated by cinema with its narratives de- and reconstructing the formation of affective relationships, puts taken-­for-granted anthropomorphic dimensions of the cinematic machine to question. Drawing on the work of Guattari, Ivakhiv argues that cinema’s ability to represent human experience implies an interactive relationship between a film and the world that pre-­exists its capture (Ivakhiv 2011). Ecocritical perspectives in a film like Stalker can be used to question our relationship with the Earth, but simultaneously such perspectives can come through in city-­based films like Allegro. Cinema relies on creating subjective worlds, but what if the world being created questions our very ability to cohesively create such worlds? To illustrate this questioning, the deconstructive qualities of Boe’s films rely on transvergent mappings of Copenhagen, conducted through animated maps locating each protagonist in relation to the city streets and one another. Transvergence, as a way to question established parameters of ecosystemic placement, is especially prominent in Allegro as streets are never located in the same place and individuals who inhabit them seem to exist on a different level of reality from each other. If one asks for simple directions in basic Danish, the locals seem not to be able to understand the language (even though they of course speak it perfectly). The refusal to play by the rules of cinematic worldmaking is precisely the type of expansion of the material world that McDonald (2004) discusses.

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The key to understanding these challenges emerges from considering the perceptual activation that cinema requires and which Reconstruction notes in its opening and closing moments. We are aware of the fabrications of the diegetic world but our affective identification with the narrative, among others, sutures this. We are also aware that the cityscapes may not follow our subjective understanding of their actual geography, but we have learnt to abide by the creative geography of the cinematic machine. Boe’s films dissolve the suture as they show us the gaps in our viewing perception and suspension of disbelief. Just as it is impossible for a living baby to be born from a rotten corpse, as takes place in one of the subjective mappings in the Copenhagen of Allegro, it is impossible to fully complete the gaping wound in our perception. But as is clear from the very act of affective spectatorship, which both of the films highlight, we willingly need to give in to the anthrobiogeomorphic world-­bearing of the cinematic machine. And this is ultimately what both films urge us to do. Through the complex confrontations with spectatorial processes, they urge us to let go of our cynicism and embrace what we have, reminding us of Buell’s advice to work with our anthropocentric limitations. It is only through such acknowledgement that things start to make sense and we can see the world for what it is. Boe’s films are not very ecological in the traditional sense, nor do they need to be, but they can be vital indicators of the ways transvergent conceptualizations enhance the ecological potential of the anthrobiogeomorphic machine. The potential here is to do with acknowledging that perceptual ecologies can be both anthropocentric and hybrid. By hybrid, we mean that even those approaches that are inherently embedded in anthropocentricity need not take the parameters of this approach for granted. This applies to our analytical positions as well as how both the critic and the spectator view these hybrid worlds from an anthropocentric perspective. We should not expect that they can somehow transcend their embeddedness and attain an absolute level of hybridity themselves. They remain spectators rooted in the context of the viewing, working with the material means available to them. Rather, the self-­reflexivity generated by films such as these can train the spectator to a further level of awareness (in a way endorsed by McDonald), which generates a distance, an elevated perspective of sorts, that is entirely open to multiple levels of cognitive association. Transvergent approaches acknowledge that the analyst is human and the materiality of film prohibits thorough synergy. But we have to work with what he have, and films such as these can allow us to address our own shortcomings in our subject position and work towards more complex forms of ecocinematic comprehension.

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The end of ideology and the apocalyptic ecoimagination My exploration of the anthropocentricity of ecocinema was initiated by Tynan and Mills’ work on ecological melancholia. Much of this argumentation draws on thematic concerns arising from Lars von Trier’s apocalyptic film Melancholia (2011). As they suggest, the film’s evocation of melancholia captures the ultimately unobjectifiable and unnaturalizable realization of the implications of the apocalypse. This sort of extreme posthuman condition results in Adrian Ivakhiv arguing that Trier’s film is a direct hit at an anthropocentric worldview (Ivakhiv 2011). But how do these extremes manifest in this anthrobiogeomorphic product? Melancholia is a condition embodied by the protagonist of the film, Justine, who experiences a psychological breakdown during her wedding preparations. She collapses in an indescribable depression and eventually rejects her groom. Melancholia emerges as a psychological condition which forms the basis for the film’s wider challenges to anthropocentric thinking, as Tynan and Mills point out. The first half focuses on psychosocial dismantling of cultural logic as it shows the ways Justine’s melancholia challenges the parameters of conventional social behaviour, but once we reach the second half, another level of destruction – and an even more unexplainable and unresolvable event – becomes apparent. The planet Melancholia is bearing down on Earth and will destroy all life. While the rest of the characters flail about in desperation having come face to face with an unprocessable motion, Justine finds a sense of balance in this event that refuses any anthropocentric sense. Mette Hjort suggests that Trier’s cinematic politics are those of a ‘self conscious provocateur who makes a point on a regular basis of adopting politically incorrect views that fly in the face of various national pieties’ (Hjort 2006: 114). If Trier is an infallible pessimist and self-­conscious provocateur, any attempt to gauge an environmentalist agenda in Melancholia comes face to face with his self-­consciously contradictory films. But this does not mean that we are not able to detect an ideological agenda at work. Mads Bunch suggests that reading Lars von Trier’s oeuvre through a philosophical prism enables us to see how ‘all ideologies fail when applied rigidly to real life’ (Bunch 2010: 153). This end of ideology as an actual form of ideology is a key theme in much of Trier’s work and is often used to deconstruct the normativized institutions and politeness of civil society. Bunch also shows how seemingly idealistic societal conventions and ideologies often mask much more egoistic and despotic impulses. For example, in Trier’s

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famed Idioterna/The Idiots (1996), the ‘spazzers’ conduct performances to confront society’s hypocrisy by exploring how others relate to the ‘abnormal’ members of society. These performances are vital for attacking societal hypocrisy, but the acts also work as forms of identity building for the spazzers, especially as they are used to vindicate the self-­importance of these societal ‘critics’. Through this deconstructive performance and Trier’s chronicling of its underlying motives, both critics and the targets of criticism are forced into ridicule. Similar methods apply to Melancholia’s evocation of the limitations of anthropocentric worldviews. The direct hit to anthropocentric thinking, which Ivakhiv sees as key to the text, occurs when Justine constructs a makeshift tent for her sister’s son to protect him from the impending doom. While the tent has no real protective value, of course, it acts precisely as the type of normalization device that enables one to narrate The End. Ultimately, the film and Justine are aware of the nothingness of the post-­end, but the film acknowledges the importance of such narratives for the human psyche. As the film culminates with Melancholia crashing into Earth, all of these preoccupations are annihilated and the film confronts us with a lingering sense of disillusionment. Such divesting of the layers of psychological protection enabling the human mind to process an apocalyptic event qualifies a film such as Melancholia as an ecological text, especially in its affront to conventional anthropocentric logic. But as is the case with most ecocritical rhetoric, Melancholia’s pessimistic take on human existence avails itself to alternative readings. Can its nihilistic tendencies also operate in an alternative, anti-­environmentalist way, suggesting that melancholia is a condition that disables any sense of caring or pro-­ environmentalist activity? Indeed, one can spot certain similarities between the film’s ecoapocalyptic discourse and climate reductionism as defined by environmental scientist Mike Hulme: [Climate reductionism] is nurtured by elements of a Western cultural pessimism which promote the pathologies of vulnerability, fatalism and fear . . . By handing the future over to inexorable non-­human powers, climate reductionism offers a rationalisation, even if a poor one, of the West’s loss of confidence in the future. Hulme 2011: 265

This sort of nihilist perspective could, for example, be connected to the climax of Trier’s film as, according to its conclusion, it is only when we are faced with the destruction of everything we know that we are able to transcend our self-­ absorption. Taken from such an angle, it would not be too difficult to suggest

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that the film reduces ecoapocalypse to an inevitable and thus redundant event – but simultaneously, in some optimistic way, it encourages us to embrace a ‘carpe diem’ attitude. Indeed, from this perspective it would not be too difficult to see Melancholia as a celebration of (the brevity) of human life. Whether the film is a provocation challenging human attempts at self-­ delusion or a film that urges us to make the most of our brief existence, the contradictions and ambiguity pervading Melancholia’s ecological dimensions emphasize the problems ecocritical rhetoric inevitably faces. On one hand, the film can be interpreted as a critique of the fundamental inability of the human mind, and that of the cinematic apparatus, to suture the inherent anthropomorphicity of its approach. On the other hand, its nihilism can be critiqued as a way to ignore the politicized rhetoric inherent to much of ecocinema. Whatever the case, Melancholia is important for its ability to generate discussion over the ways human logic conceptualizes its own existence as part of the wider planetary ecosphere. In this way, it can be understood as almost a self-­reflexive form of participating cinema as it urges spectators and analysts to engage in ecophilosophical self-­questioning. While it is neither directly an ecoactivist text, nor one that provides clearly defined politicized rhetoric, it is one that contributes much to the ecopolitical dimensions of Nordic cinema as a whole, if only in its calls for a more inclusive approach to critiquing anthropocentric argumentation.

Conclusion By creating a distinctly ‘different’ take on the disaster movie genre and its ideological preoccupations, even deconstructing the very premises from which audiences derive pleasure, Melancholia shows the ways Nordic genre cinema is attuned to global patterns and influences in popular film culture. Both Trier and Vinterberg are well aware of the genres and the commercial realities in which they operate. They take an explicitly deconstructive approach to the genre, taking it apart and reconstructing it to reveal its inner machinations. By conducting these acts, they consciously aim to challenge genre expectations and shock the viewers into confronting the conventions and pleasures they may take from narratives of societal and environmental destruction. The creation of troublingly abstract ecocritical messages confronts us with the ways in which the most basic of narrative pleasures emerge from the destruction of other human beings or

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parts of the ecosystem, with this crude emphasis on the spectacle of annihilation going so far as to conventionalize and commercialize the ecoapocalypse. While this chapter has discussed a range of ecoapocalyptic genre examples – some owing a larger debt to their imported counterparts than others – we have for the most part ignored questions of culture. This has been entirely intentional as the ecoapocalyptic visions discussed in this chapter transcend such considerations. Purely from the basis of such challenges, these films fit in with what I have called a transvergent approach to ecological representation. The point of such approaches is to question the anthropocentric logic pervading cinema, something made especially clear in Boe’s twisting sensoriums. By evoking the inability of the human imagination to imagine a post-­apocalyptic world – or even to face up to human corporeality, as was the case with my two ‘garden’ examples – the films I have discussed in this chapter pose fundamental questions which have relevance well beyond their immediate context. By evoking such transvergent positions, they are clear indicators of the viability of eco­­ cinema studies for fostering better understanding of the diversity of Nordic film culture, and the key role Nordic cinema can play in global forms of cultural ecocriticism.

Openings and Conclusions The scope of ecocinema produced in the Nordic countries varies extensively, ranging from the appropriation of nature for culture and capital to valorizations of deep ecology and complex hybridity. I have identified three poles of ecological argumentation – convergent, divergent and transvergent – which characterize different approaches to representing the relationship between the human and nature. This diversity is both a strength and a challenge in terms of writing a book on the topic, as for those readers well versed in Nordic cinema, the limited range of case studies in this volume must pose a clear flaw. For specialists in the environmental humanities, the range of topics tackled must inevitably appear lacking. But what may seem like flaws or omissions in scope must be taken as indicators of the richness of the field and future potential of ecocritical studies in Nordic film cultures. Far from a marginal field or an excessively reactionary form of ‘green’ rhetoric, ecocriticism is a vital tool for drawing out meanings and addressing areas hitherto unexplored in studies of Nordic cinema. Simultaneously, the focus on Nordic cinema provides a unique angle on ecocritical film studies. Here, the connections between cinema and Nordic culture, society, economics and politics enables me to pose some fundamental questions about the ways nature is appropriated for the benefit of affluent Western self-­conceptualizations as well as projections of these ideas on a global scale. Through this, the diverse areas of Nordic cinema attest to Paula Willoquet-Maricondi’s precondition for an ecocritical approach to cultural studies, premised on the understanding that ‘the world is composed of the social sphere and the ecosphere, that the two are interrelated, and that the former cannot be considered outside of the context of the latter’ (Willoquet-Maricondi 2010: 3). By drawing on key academic works in the study of Nordic film culture and interrogating the analyses and arguments of writers such as Hjort, Nestingen, Koivunen and Thomson through an ecocritical lens, we have moved from the study of culture and society to highlighting and questioning the anthropocentric

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principles under which even these studies must operate. Moving from the convergent logic of heritage films to multiculturalist rhetoric, from the prevalence of global exceptionalism to ecophilosophical ruminations with a distinctly universalist scope, the analysis of ecocinema, as discussed in this work, demonstrates that ecosystemic conceptualizations – both of the environmentalist and of the more socio-­political variety – are at the heart of the Nordic project. Simultaneously, it shows that this project and its assorted ideological frameworks can be limiting for the types of arguments the films conduct. While cinema is a distinctly anthropocentric and anthropogenic machine, it is also one that fosters a concrete connection with the public and the politics of the society in which the films are produced. This is a point that seems especially central to Nordic cinema and is frequently emphasized by academics working in the field. As I have discussed throughout, the reasons for this emphasis on societal commitment stem from both the history of the Nordic welfare state project and the prevalent discourse of exceptionalism that these societies utilize globally. Ultimately, what is at stake here concerns the participant impact that films can have, including their potential for generating wider understanding of ecological considerations. Nestingen suggests that cinema and other forms of popular fiction are key to conceptualizing the ways in which the ‘Nordic region is undergoing a transformative struggle over the moral order’ (Nestingen 2008: 38). He uses Charles Taylor’s concept of spaces of display as a way of characterizing the ways popular culture partakes in these struggles over egalitarian politics and moral exceptionalism. The point is not some idealistic politics of equality, but a way to conceptualize public space as a forum for diverse and even contested views. For Nestingen, this conceptualization gets to the heart of the Nordic project – the provision of equal chances to be heard and understood within society. Demand is an integral part of Nordic ecocinema, which, by definition, is premised on an activist stance of the producer as well as an aim of generating similar responses in spectators. The use of cinematic means of affect and identification and politicized calls for participation are key to creating this participant agenda. Ecocinema certainly forms a vital space of display for an environmentalist agenda, but it is also prolifically used to generate anti-­environmental demands and utilized for a range of ideological purposes that deter from most sensible ecological activity, often in unacknowledged ways. Thus, the space of display is contested ground in terms of its environmental use, with films like the lifestyle consumption comedy Nina Frisk and the anthropocentric

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argumentations of Wolf countering the explicit environmentalism of documentaries like The Red Forest Hotel or the hybrid dystopian geographies of Metropia. But all of these texts have something to contribute to our ecological understanding of cultural production. Instead of only focusing on films with clearly pronounced biocentric or non-­anthropomorphic values, whatever they may actually be, I more or less agree with Monani and Rust (2012), who suggest that most, if not all, film productions contribute to environmental understandings – even if these are of the most negative kind. Lawrence Buell suggests that it is ‘entirely possible without hypocrisy to maintain biocentric values in principle while recognizing that in practice these must be constrained by anthropocentric considerations, whether as a matter of strategy or as a matter of intractable human self-­interestedness’ (Buell 2005: 134). While film production uses the resources of the environment, both cultural and capital, and its production and content may be inundated with greenwashing, this does not mean that cinema is not capable of penetrating and complex forms of ecocritical rhetoric. Buell’s suggestion of the realities of the rhetorical ‘ecosystem’ indicates that ‘speaking both to humanity’s most essential needs and its non-­human creatures independent of those needs, as well as to the balancing if not also the reconciliation of the two’ (Buell 2005: 127) will in the end always necessitate some adaptation of ideological principles. This brings us to future considerations for ecocritical studies of Nordic cinema. In as much as this collection proposes a clear intervention to both studies of Nordic film culture and studies of ecocinema, it can only lay claim to charting some of the main patterns in which the ideological and political contributions of the films operate. To study the ways these films influence the wider public will be the focus of future projects, where especially the production infrastructures of the Nordic film industries as well as their audiences are deserving of further research. To investigate the ecological footprint of Nordic productions, researchers are encouraged to expand on Nadia Bozak’s (2011) work by focusing, among others, on the ways certain stylistic inventions, such as the lingering presence of the Dogme aesthetic, influences said footprint. As Hjort and Petrie (2007) point out, Nordic film industries are small nation cinemas, indicating that the smallness of these industries could act as a potential focus. In addition, the recent innovations in digital technology come with their own set of risks as Maxwell and Miller (2012) outline. Any assessment of Nordic cinema’s ecological viability must engage with these areas. But ultimately, it all comes down to the level of the audience, with whom we need to engage more

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thoroughly to move past the ‘educated conjecture’ that textual readings inevitably and invariably are. For now, this brief evocation of key future research directions urges us to keep in mind that while demands may be made, they may also go unheard in society, and it is here that audience research can make its most significant contribution. The contradictions inherent in ecocritical study are multiple, but most of the academics and practitioners who identify with the label share an understanding of the perilous conditions of natural resources and Earth’s ecosystems. The shared idealism and ideological contestations can be extrapolated through one final film example, Lukas Moodysson’s Tillsammans/Together (2000), in which a hippie community, Tillsammans, breaks up because two of its members bring a television to the house. Members of the Tillsammans commune also disagree over the presence of Astrid Lindgren’s well-­known Pippi Longstocking children’s books in the house as Pippi’s materialism and capitalist tendencies contradict the principles of the communist commune. Others find such perspectives ridiculous forms of over-­analysis and dismiss the couple who move to a new commune called the Mother Earth. The idealism and internal frictions of Tillsammans reflect some of the parameters of the ecocritical community. We all agree with (at least some of) the basic principles of ecocritical philosophy and aspire to make some impact in the wider community. Some of Tillsammans’ members are more extreme in their Marxist-Leninist views, while others are there to escape mediocrity and the banality of suburban complacency. For some, there is clear devotion to the cause, but not the willingness to make a concrete stand. While community harmony may (and should?) be little more than a fantasy, the progress of ecocritical film studies will likely be as conflicted, but unifying as playing football in the snow, as the conclusion to Moodysson’s communitarian utopia shows. The diversity and the contestations of the ecocritical community are precisely those elements that enable it to thrive. To maintain this level of diversity, we must continue to explore how, as Stephen Rust puts it, films ‘shape and are shaped by the world around them’ (Rust 2012: 204). In the reciprocal space of display concerning the interactions of producers and audiences, as well as the inter­ sections of ecology and culture, opinions and ideological perspectives vary. In this, we must be aware of Felix Guattari’s words on the ways constitutive ideologies operate on an almost unconscious level. It is up to the ecocritics to question and critique such operations, conducting arguments that will have to work ‘towards rebuilding human relations at every level of the society’ and countering

Openings and Conclusions

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the negative influences of anti-­environmentalist logic, which is ‘extending its influence over the whole social, economic and cultural life of the planet . . . by infiltrating the unconscious subjective strata’ (Guattari 2000: 49). To capture the ways ecological film culture operates as a complex sphere of contesting perspectives as well as critique the underlying hegemonic ideological frameworks, we need to be able to confront our own idealism and our embeddedness in the constitutive ideological structures we criticize. While explicit environmentalist rhetoric and rethinking of existing anthropocentric paradigms is absolutely vital to the ongoing development of the field, ecocinema needs to be understood as both an anthropocentric and ecocentric form of communication, both reflecting the often unconscious constitutive ideologies of the society as well as challenging the limitations these ideological formations pose for contemporary policy and awareness level of the general public. While academics working in both Nordic studies and the environmental humanities continue to conduct important work, it has been my intention to show how combining these areas of study, and also pervasive criticism of their founding principles, can contribute to rethinking and regenerating both fields and make them even more relevant beyond the confines of their academic parameters. This discussion is far from over, however, as even more intricate critical analyses of Nordic ecocinema’s diverse transmutations and the polyvocal perspectives of which it consists, await.

Notes Introduction 1 Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) chronicles the negative impact of pesticides on birds and the wider ecosystem and argues that the uncontrolled industrial use of such substances poses a substantial threat to humankind. Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968), on the other hand, explores the relationship between unlimited population growth on a planet with finite resources. 2 The articles focus on the ‘three Chinas’, The People’s Republic of China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, and pose a regional argument with some similarities to my approach, namely the focus on political and social similarities and differences in a given ‘cultural’ context.

Chapter 8 1 Other more complex depictions emerge in Kukushka/The Cuckoo (Rogozhkin 2002), a Russian production focused on a Sámi woman who discovers a Russian prisoner of war and a Finnish soldier chained to a rock during the Continuation War (1941–4) between the two nations. The film provides an intriguingly pacifist view of cultural conflicts, while it also affords the Sámi woman a grounded role in the conflicts between the two men. Instead of presenting her as the victimized party or some sort of mystical facilitator of higher knowledge, she provides a sensible perspective on the interpersonal and political conflicts, ultimately serving as the locus for the film’s anti-­war message. 2 http://www.samifilmfestival.no/media/dokument/andreversjon_programhefte% 5B1%5D.pdf.

Chapter 10 1 Certain documentarists aim at total impartial observation, such as Michael Stenberg, Johan Söderberg and Linus Torell’s The Planet (2006). There is very little Nordic specificity in this feature documentary focused on interviews with scientists and professors from around the world concerning the destructive effects that the anthropocene (‘the age of man’) has had on the state of the planet.

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Index Abram, David 71, 75 Adam’s Apples 136–139, 145 Adamson, Joni 170, 253 After Earth 217 After the Wedding 188–190, 191, 192, 193 Alfredsson, Daniel 54 Alfredsson, Tomas 140 All About My Bush 222–225 Allegro 226–230 Ambassador, The 194, 200 Andersen, Hans Christian 90, 91 Andersen, Steen 28, 132 Anderson, Benedict 48, 243 Andersson, Roy 112–115, 124, 125 Antz 93 Appadurai, Arjun 157, 243 Armadillo 190–193 As If I Wasn’t There 149–152 As White as in Snow 42–49 Atanarjuat – The Fast Runner 173 Autio, Minna 243

Border, The 14 Bornedal, Ole 10, 42 Bozak, Nadia 51, 237 Braveheart 173 Brereton, Pat 2, 3, 14, 25, 51, 53, 60, 61, 62, 67, 142, 152–153, 217, 218, 243 Bresson, Robert 42 Bride of the Seventh Heaven 175–177 Bridget Jones’ Diary 183 British cinema 2, 14, 27, 34 Browning, Christopher 187, 215 Bruckner, Lynn Dickson 98, 244 Brummer, Hans 28, 244 Brundtland, Gro 119 Brügger, Mads, 194–195 Buell, Lawrence 12, 48, 125, 132, 177, 193, 202, 221–222, 229, 237, 244 Bunch, Mads 230, 244 Bustello, Eduardo 118, 244 Bustnes 110 Bye Bye Bluebird 152–157

Bacon, Henry 117, 243 Bakoy, Eva 161, 243 Baltic Sea 12 Bananas 197–200, 203–204, 215 Bargher, Reza 108, 160 Bate, Jonathan 96, 243 Berghall, Jonas 37 Bergman, Ingmar 28 Bergroth, Zaiga 108 Berila, Beth 39, 243 Beyond 109 Bhabha, Homi 48 Bier, Susanne 187 Big Boys Gone Bananas 199–200 Blade Runner 142 Body of Water 85–87 Boe, Christoffer 221–229, 233, 245 Bondebjerg, Ib 13, 27, 52, 71, 106, 187–188, 243 Bong, Joon-ho 217

Cameron, James 19 Canned Dreams 209–211, 215 Cantell, Sara 110 Capricciosa 108 Carlgren, Andreas 9 Carmichael, Deborah 25, 53, 217, 244 Carson, Rachel 3, 244 Celebration, The 219 Children of Nature 11 Christensen, Cato 164, 244 Christensen, Johannes 138, 244 Clement, Keith 8, 18 Cohan, Steven 60 Cohen, Sacha Baron 194 Cold Fever 14, 126–128, 152, 155 Commission of the European Communities 12, 244 Constant Gardner, The 128 Contagion 67 Copenhagen Summit 8

256 Crews, Chris 96, 245 Crime and Punishment 116 Cry to the Wind 165, 170–171, 174, 178 Cubitt, Sean 3, 6, 44, 51, 142, 174, 244 Cuckoo 241 Dahl, Hanne 105 Dark Side of Chocolate, The 194–195, 200, 215 Day After Tomorrow, The 22, 217 De La Garza, Armida 16 Dead Snow 68, 75–79, 80, 87 Deleuze, Gilles 71 DeCODE 9 Disco Worms 91–95 Dobrin, Sidney 3 Dog Nail Clipper 97 Dogme 95 194, 237 Dosenrode, Sören 32 Draughtman’s Contract, The 222 Dreyer, Carl T.W. 42 Du Bois, Thomas 33, 34, 37, 245 Earth is a Sinful Song 148 Earthlings 209 Ehrlich, Paul 3 Elias and the Kingship 98–100 Elias and the Hunt for Treasure 98–100 Elkington, Trevor 13, 25, 51, 65, 181, 245, 247, 250, 252 Emmerich, Roland 22, 217, 218, 219 Enestam, Jan-Erik 12 Environmental Energy and Study Institute 8 Eternal Moments 42–45 European Union, The 1, 8, 12, 30, 32, 34, 210 Ezra, Elizabeth 15, 245 Fares, Josef 160 Fast and the Furious, The 22 Featherstone, Mike 16 Fedja 11 Fellman, Susanna 18, 23, 117, 245 Feodoroff, Pauliina 167, 174 Five Obstructions, The 195–197 Fleisher, Richard 3 Foucault, Michel 61

Index Franklin, Richard 142 Friðriksson, Friðrik Þór 12, 14 Friday the 13th 69 Frostbite 87 Fuller, Matthew 4 Fuse, Rie 154 Galt, Rosalind 2, 27 Gaup, Niels 147, 148, 152, 164, 170–177 Gauriloff, Katja 165, 171, 174, 209–210 Gertten, Frank 197, 200–205, 211, 252 Gilliap 112 Goodbody, Axel 4 Google Earth 144 Gordon, Tuula 36 Greenaway, Peter 220 Greenpeace 73 Griffith, D.W 42 Griffith, Tony 108, 109 Grizzly 67 Guattari, Felix 228, 238 Gunnlaugsson, Hrafn 10, 29, 53 Gustafsson, Annika 115 Gustafsson, Tommy 17, 49, 110, 194, 217 Guy in the Grave Next Door, The 31, 53 Habermas, Jürgen 143 Hageman, Andrew 6, 19 Hansen, Bjarne Håkon 110 Hansen, Malin 18 Happening, The 67 Haraway, Donna 219 Härö, Klaus 149 Hautala, Heidi 203 Health Factory 110 Heartbeats 110 Hedegaard, Connie 12 Hedling, Erik 28 Heikkilä, Matti 105 Heima 33 Heise, Ulrike 17, 94, 119, 143, 184, 200, 245 Help, I’m a Fish 94–100 Heumann, Joseph 22, 40, 51, 89, 92, 142 Here Beneath the North Star 11 Herzog, Werner 22 Higson, Andrew 2, 27, 31 , 33, 34, 46, 51 Hjort, Mette 10, 12, 41, 51, 106, 109, 121, 132, 138, 145, 148, 155, 181, 230, 235, 237

Index Hollywood 2, 3, 25, 28, 51–52, 67, 69, 71, 90, 92, 94, 102, 173, 181, 211, 243, 244 Honkasalo, Pirjo 42 Horse Whisperer, The 39 Hotakainen, Mika 37 Hristov, Tonislav, 173 Hughes, Helen 193 Hulme, Mike 231 Hunters 58–131 Hvinden 105 Hyvönen, Hannu 164

Kivihalme, Elina 42 Kivimäki, Sanna 117 Knowing 217 Knudsen, Britta Timm 156, 199 Koivunen, Anu 35, 46, 71, 118, 235 Korch, Morten 11 Kormákur, Baltasar 19, 121–124, 125, 126 Koskinen, Mika 200–205 Koyaanisqatsi 113 Kreck, Shepard 168 Kvist, Jon 105

Import Export 161–162 I am Dina 42, 46 Idiots, The 194, 231 In China They Eat Dogs 32 Inconvenient Truth, An 205 Ingram, David 2, 4, 135, 142, 210, 247 Into Eternity 9, 206–210, 211, 215 Iris 150 Iron Sky 52 It’s All About Love 219, 221 Ivakhiv, Adrian 23, 26, 227, 228, 230, 231, 247 Iversen, Gunnar 1, 11, 27, 28, 52, 53, 54, 68, 107, 164, 171 Iversen, Martin Jes 18, 132

Land of Love 161 Lapland Odyssey 61–64, 153 Lapsui, Anastasia 163, 175 Ladino, Jennifer 56, 62 Lahelma, E. 36 Lake of the Dead 68 Larsson, Mariah 51 Lash, Scott 16 Last Cowboy Standing 108 Last Wedding, The 30, 33 Last Yoik in Sámiland, The 164 Lehtinen, Kai 40 Lehmuskallio, Markus 163, 175 Leibfreid, Stephan 105 Leth, Jörgen 194, 200 Lindgren, Astrid 90 Lindqvist, Ursula 112, 114 Linna, Väinö 10 Linnasalo, Timo 142 Land and Sons 128 Let Me In 141 Let the Right One In 52, 140–141, 145, 245 Lorax, The 89 Lord of the Rings, The 51 Lu, Sheldon, 3, 4, 25, 217 Lunde, Arne 181

Jansson, Tove 90 Jar City 126–130, 142, 145 Jarva, Risto 29, 142 Jaws 67 Kääpä, Pietari 17, 30, 49, 51, 52, 61, 62, 107, 116, 117, 126, 148, 155, 161, 181, 194, 197, 217 Kalevala 10 Kamome Diner 154–157 Kari, Dagur 7 Karkama, Pertti 107 Karukoski, Dome 61 Kaurismäki, Aki 42, 60, 108, 109, 125, 155 Kautokeino Rebellion, The 164, 171–174, 178 Kautto, Mikko 105 Kettunen, Pauli 105 Kivi, Aleksis 11

MacDougall, David 2 Madsen, Michael 9, 207, 208, 209, 210 Magic Crystal, The 100–103 Mammoth 182–187, 190, 191 Man Without a Past, The 116–124, 155 Marklund, Andreas 51 Massumi, Brian 55

257

258 Match Factory Girl, The 116 Matts, Tim 217–220 Max Manus 14 Maxwell, Richard 237 Mazierska, Ewa 60 McDonald, Scott 2, 5, 21, 115, 193, 215, 228–229 Me and Morrison 109 Melancholia 230 Mellor, Mary 42 Metropia 140–145, 237 Merz, Jon 128 Metz, Janus 190 Mi, Jiayan 3, 4, 25, 217 Michaels, Lloyd 28 Mies, Maria 42 Miller, Toby 237 Mistrati, Miki 194 Monani, Salma 3, 6, 237, 243 Monbiot, George 208 Moller, Birgir Thor 11, 121 Molloy, Claire 90, 93 Moodysson, Lukas 182, 185, 237, 239 Morin, Sean 3 Moseng, Jo 76 Mosku – Lajinsa Viimeinen 54–58 Murray, Robin 22, 40, 51, 89, 91, 142 Naess, Arne 21, 169 Nanook of the North 2, 197 Necef, Mehmet 160 Neijmann, Daisy 28, 250 Neri, Corrida 51, 250 Nestingen, Andrew 25, 34, 44, 51, 52, 65, 107, 110, 117, 118, 120, 132, 140, 148, 149, 155, 161, 173, 181, 235–237 New Man, The 195 Nicholls, Bill 194 Niko – The Way to the Stars 94, 103 Nina Frisk 182–187 Noi the Albino 7, 245 Non Profit 167–170 Nordfjörd, Björn 7, 10, 27, 28, 54, 121 Nordkraft 136–142 Norse sagas 10, 29 North 63, 72 Novak, Marcos 21, 22

Index Nummiooq 179 Nussbaum, Martha 148 One Foot in the Grave 222–225 One Man’s War 29, 35 Open Season 68, 71, 77, 82 Open Season 89 (2006) Orion’s Belt 68 Orphanage, The 86 Others, The 86 Pantti, Mervi 107, 251 Pathfinder 52, 53 Pelle the Conqueror 10 Petrie, Duncan 12, 106 Pike, Deirdre 90 Pippi Longstocking 238 Plumwood, Val 41, 44 Popular Music 182–187 Promise, The 42, 46 Proyas, Alex 217 Pudana – The Last of his line 175 Pusher 130–136 Pölönen, Markku 30, 33 Qvist, Per Olov 29 R 130–134, 142 Rae Hark, Ina 60 Raimi, Sam 68 Rascaroli, Laura 60, 249 Rare Exports 78–83 Recipes for Disaster 204–205 Reconstruction 221–225 Red Forest Hotel, The 200–207, 208, 211, 215, 237 Red Horses, The 11 Rees, Ellen 32 Reeves, Matt 141 Refn, Nicholas Winding 130 Renvall, Eva 10, 52, 71, 106, 187–188 Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre, The 72 Reykjavik 101 121–124 Richie, Guy 130 Rigby, Kate 4 Rinnekangas, Rax 211 River Runs Through It, A 39

Index Riverglass 21, 22 Road Home, The 30 Rowden, Terry 15 Rust, Stephen 3, 6 Räikkönen, Timo 5 Rölli 90 Römpötti, Tommi 60, 154 Sagal, Bori 3 Saleh, Tariq 140 Salmi, Hannu 52 Sauna 82–84 Say that You Love Me 160 Scherfig, Lone 11 Schlepelern, Pelle 27 Scott, Ridley 142 Sea, The 19 Sensuela 39 Shaw, Deborah 16 Shooting the Sun 53–54 Shyamalan, M. Night 217 Siebert, Monika 173 Sigur Ros 33 Sihvonen, Jukka 28, 30 Simma-Charles, Åsa 179 Sjögren, Hans 18, 56, 113, 245 Smith, M.J 23 Snowpiercer 217 Söderberg-Widding, Astrid 1, 28, 107 Soila, Tytti 1, 28, 34, 65, 107 Solar Wind 142 Solum, Ove 28 Songs from the Second Floor 112 Sørensen, Bjørn 28, 53 Soylent Green 142 Stalker 227 Statsoil 18, 28 Steam of Life 37, 82 Stein, Rachel 128 Still Brook 11 Stora Enso 8, 18, 200, 202 Strike! 29 Sturges, Preston 30 Störmare, Peter 59 Substitute, The 87 Sullivan’s Travels 30 Summer by the River 33, 37, 39, 41 Sundholm, John 28, 34, 142, 245

259

Sundvall, Kjell 31, 58 Suominen, Tapio 54 Swedish Love Story 112 Take Care of Your Scarf Tatjana 118 Tali-Ihantala 1944 42 Tarantino, Quentin 130 Tarkovski, Andrei 227 Taylor, Charles 159, 164 Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The 73 Thale 83–85 They Call Us Misfits 29 Thomson, Claire 15, 48, 52, 65, 125–129, 151, 152, 155, 235, 247 Thue, Lars 18 Time of Roses 142 Together 238 Toiviainen, Sakari 29, 40, 142, 175, 244 Tomlinson, John 16 Tong, Chris 5, 6 Topelius, Zacharias 90 Treadwell, Timothy 22 Trier, Lars von 11, 194–197, 200, 219, 230–234, 245 Troell, Jan 42 Troll Hunter 78–83 Twigson 90 Tulio, Teuvo 11 Tunkrova, Lucia 1, 8, 12, 253 Tynan, Aidan 217–218 Ugly Duckling and Me, The 91–94 Ullman, Liv 42 Unknown Matron, The 42–47 Unknown Soldier, The 42 Uusitalo, Hannu 105 Vibeto, Andreas 75 Village Shoemakers, The 11 Vinterberg, Thomas 219, 232 Von Bagh, Peter 29 Wallengren, Ann-Kristin 28 Warren, Karen 41, 44 Webster, John 204 Wenbo, Guan 181 Whatmore, Sarah 14, 48, 52, 65, 75, 151, 156, 219

260 When the Raven Flies 53 White Reindeer, The 39, 148 Wilderness 68, 77 Willoquet-Maricondi, Paula 3, 4, 7, 21, 22, 222, 235 Wings of Glass 161 Wolf 54–58 Wood, Robin 28

Index Wright, Rochelle 147, 149, 153, 253 Yimou, Zhang 30 You the Living 114–117 Žižek, Slajov 19, 157 Zuck, Virpi 27, 253