Contemporary Scandinavian Film: Cultural, Aesthetics, and Literary Approaches

Description

This course introduces students to contemporary Scandinavian cinema, with a focus on films made in the 21st century. The curriculum covers 8-12 titles that range from art films to popular genre films. The films are directed by well-established artists like Ruben Östlund and Joachim Trier as well as up-and-coming filmmakers, with a particular attention paid to Dag Johan Haugerud (and his Oslo trilogy) and Yngvild Sve Flikke, the director of Women in Oversized Men's Shirts . Students will learn to analyze and compare these films from a thematic and aesthetic perspective. The course is divided into three modules. The opening module explores the theme of the modern Scandinavian city. A more technically oriented module is devoted to film analysis using the vocabulary established in Bordwell and Thompson’s Film Art: An Introduction . A philosophically oriented module explores the philosophical concept of mimetic desire and discusses what it can tell us about contemporary Scandinavian society, by examining recent films. This concept, as formulated by René Girard (1923-2015), has as its main premise the assertion that our desires, contrary to popular belief, aren't rooted in our authentic being. We simply emulate how we believe that other people, especially the ones we, knowingly or not, appoint as our "models", desire. Girard's mimetic concept is said to have gained a new philosophical relevance with the impact of social media in the 21st century.