John Sundholm

Walls and fortresses: borderscapes and the cinematic imaginary

In tandem with a postnational imaginary nurtured by an ever-present promise of deterritorialized mobility and burgeoning migratory fluxes, walls and fences separating nation states multiply. This is a burning issue: even though nation states at the centre of the global order increasingly present themselves as postnational, calls for tighter border security (prompted by traumatic events such as the London Underground bombings, the riots in Paris’s banlieues, the September 11 attacks and the massive number of refugees and migrants drowning in the Mediterranean and being hit by trains after stepping over fences to enter in the Eurotunnel area, in Calais) undermine utopian notions of both a borderless New Europe and the USA as the Promised Land. This editorial of Transnational Cinemas introduces the special issue ‘Walls and fortresses: borderscapes and the cinematic imaginary’, which includes essays focusing on the interrelated motifs of borderscapes as they are represented in transnational cinematographies, from Palestine to Sweden, Spain, Finland and France, and as constituting premises of cinematic production. Through this critical movement, this special issue analyses the ways various cinematic practices, technologies and crossmedia developments impact questions of perception, experience and representation of borderscapes.

Visions of transnational memory

The paper is a short introduction to the “global turn” in memory studies and to transnational memory in particular. Both culturalist and normative positions are presented. After the conceptual overview, there follows an analysis of two films, Auf der anderen Seite (2007) and Caché (2005), with special focus on the two notions “translocal” and “inclusive distinction”, and on the theme of an ethics and morality of memory. This is in order to explicate the usefulness and importance of the notion of transnational memory. Finally, the concluding remark is made that research into transnational memory is significant due to its recognising of small-scale trajectories and memory practices beyond the framework of the nation, and because of the subtle dialectics between an ethics and morality of memory—thus leading to a persistent “transnational monitoring” of the national as well.

Editorial : Film Workshops in Europe

An introduction is presented in which the authors discuss various reports within the issue on topics including the concept of film workshops, the politicized film culture in Spain, and the British ...

The cultural policies of minor cinema practices: The Swedish film workshop during its first years 1973–76

ABSTRACT The essay is a description of the first years of the Stockholm film workshop, Filmverkstan, founded in 1973. The activities of the workshop are put into the framework of the new cultural policies of Sweden and the question of cultural democracy, as well as alternative ways of producing and distributing film. The output of the early years is set into generic and film historical contexts, connected to the problems of amateur film and minor cinema. One key topic is how this new venue for alternative film production was able to function together with other agencies, for example, the Swedish Film Institute, the Swedish Broadcasting Corporation and the FilmCentre coop. The essay offers an analysis of the implementation of state cultural policies within an alternative production context, the avant-garde and the alternative as a modified state apparatus.

A cinema of presence and proximity: Gunvor Nelson’s collage films and the aesthetics of the signaletic material before the electronic signal

Abstract This essay argues for the importance of an intersubjective and impure film theory in which the signal and the signaletic is considered as figures for approaching film. This in order to make the argument that the signaletic mode indeed enables a novel perspective on moving image history. The aesthetics of the signaletic has thus a history preceding that of electronic media, in particular when it comes to animation and experimental film. When constructing such an archaeology, however, dichotomies into sign and signal should be avoided; otherwise, the complexity of many of the films is reduced. In order to illuminate the latter point, four films by Gunvor Nelson is analyzed (both analog and digital), showing not only how both sign and signal interact but also how the aesthetics of the signal and the signaletic material is not dependant on the electronic as such. John Sundholm is Professor in Film Studies at Karlstad University. He has published extensively on experimental film and minor cinema and is the co-editor of several books on memory studies. He is also the editor of Historical Dictionary of Scandinavian Cinema (Scarecrow Press, 2012) and Gunvor Nelson and the Avant-Garde (Peter Lang, 2003). He has published work in English in journals such as Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Framework, New Cinemas and Studies in European Cinema. Together with Lars Gustaf Andersson and Astrid Söderbergh Widding he has written the first history on Swedish experimental film: A History of Swedish Experimental Film Culture: From Early Animation to Video Art (National Library of Sweden/John Libbey, 2010). He is also a member of the examination board of the PhD program in Fine Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki, Finland.

'I am a rhinoceros': memory and the ethics and aesthetics of materiality in film

Abstract In his book Vision and Painting Norman Bryson writes ‘the image that suppresses deixis [i.e. the act of pointing or designating] has no interest in its own genesis or past, except to bury it in a palimpsest of which only the final version shows through’ (Bryson 1983: 92). Brysons remark brings a set of questions and problems to the fore regarding memory and film; that the technique and material used for remembering and the making of memory intersects with what will be constituted as memory, and that a trace of the act of making memory should be present in the material. Consequently we cannot avoid considering both an ethics and poetics when approaching memory. The arguments are exemplified by a comprehensive discussion and analysis of two films that belong to the experimental film tradition: Malcolm Le Grices Little Dog for Roger (1967) and Gunvor Nelsons Red Shift (1984).

Spaces of becoming: the Stockholm Film Workshop as a transnational site of film production

The aim of the essay was to present the Stockholm Film Workshop (Filmverkstan, 1973–2001) and its significance as a transnational site of film production. The films and the filmmaking at the workshop are considered as part of a minor cinema film practice in David E. James’s sense. James’s theory is complemented by returning to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s original concept of minor literature in order to stress an analysis that is based on film as a means of production and cultural intervention. This point is emphasized by a presentation and analysis of how various professional and non-professional filmmakers from Colombia, Egypt, Greece and Turkey made use of film at the Stockholm Film Workshop in order to intervene in their new cultural situations. Thus, the textual model of film analysis that is prevalent in Hamid Naficy’s seminal work on accented cinema is complemented with theories of cultural production in order to enable an analysis of a transnational film practice that is on a par with the immigrant experience.

Stories of National and Transnational Memory: Renegotiating the Finnish Conception of Moral Witness and National Victimhood

while the constant avoidance of problematizing nationalist narrativization in Finland ensures a continuing memory practice and commemoration in the name of the nation, since the 1990s academia, politics, and everyday life have witnessed a turn to memory. This overwhelming interest in memory is, no doubt, the consequence of the rise of affordable and cheap technology that has made it easier to store and access material from the past, encouraging everyone to be his or her own archivist; of the end of the Cold War, which has forced nations and political communities to revise their narratives about the past; and of Europe’s admission to participating in the Holocaust, which has spawned a variety of commemorations and memorials. Yet in the renegotiations and reinterpretations of the so-called age of risk society, of late or second modernity, memory studies—memory being an ideal object of study for the humanities and social sciences—is afflicted by an increasing strain between what could be characterized as culturalist vs. universalist positions. Arising from a Bourdieuan disciplinary struggle over the right to interpret the past, this tension also sometimes marks a disciplinary divide between historians and social theorists: scholars who stress the necessity of a cultural connection between the past and the present vs. scholars who advocate for memory as a platform for future transnational solidarity.1

Introduction to the dossier on transnational cultural memory

This section of the Journal of Aesthetics and Culture is dedicated to the theme of transnational cultural memory. The papers of the dossier are written for the second meeting of the Summer School of the Nordic Research Network of memory studies, funded by NordForsk, hosted this year by Karlstad University on 20-21 June 2011. The dossier displays various approaches to the emerging topic of transnational memory studies, encompassing topical themes such as the remediation of transcultural memory, the ethics of memory in the age of globalization, the dynamics of cultural memory in the (re)-making of the national and the transnational, visions of transnational memory, the transnational archive, and socio-spatial aspects of the experience of displacement. The introductory papers are written by scholars from various backgrounds: history of ideas, philosophy, cultural geography, film studies, and literary studies, thus adhering to the principle of constituting memory studies as a truly interdisciplinary field. (Published: 25 May 2011) Citation: Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, Vol. 3 , 2011 DOI: 10.3402/jac.v3i0.7247

“The Unknown Soldier.” Film as a Founding Trauma and National Monument (John Sundholm) 111

Collective Traumas is about the traumatic European history of the 20th century - war, genocide, dictatorship, ethnic cleansing - and how individuals, communities and nations have dealt with their dark past through remembrance, historiography and legal settlements. Memories, and especially collective memories, serve as foundations for national identities and are politically charged. Regardless whether memory is used to support or to challenge established ideologies, it is inevitably subject to political tensions. Consequently, memory, history and amnesia tend to be used and abused for different political and ideological purposes. From the perspectives of historical, literary and visual studies the essays focus on how the experiences of war and profound conflict have been represented and remembered in different national cultures and communities. This volume is a vital contribution to memory studies and trauma theory. Collective Traumas is a result of the multi-disciplinary research project on Memory Culture that was initiated in 2002 at Karlstad University, Sweden.