Film Studies For Free: Danish cinema

Showing posts with label Danish cinema. Show all posts

Tuesday, 31 March 2015

KOSMORAMA! Great online resources from the Danish Film Institute

Short films from a small nation - marketing postwar Denmark (13 Nov 2014)

Fifty years before Borgen hit British TV screens, Danish directors were making films for British audiences. Driven by the need to market Danish produce and culture abroad after World War II, the government funded hundreds of short films in many languages, encompassing topics from pensions to bacon to handicrafts.

As the Spring break in the UK beckons, Film Studies For Free sparks back into life with some shorter entries.

The first of these results from some correspondence with Claire Thomson of University College London (who features in the excellent videoed talk, embedded above). Dr Thomson very kindly wrote to FSFF to point it in the direction of the following two online resources from the Danish Film Institute.

The Danish film journal Kosmorama was established in 1954, and since 2011 has been publishing 4-5 issues a year in online open access format, from its base at the Danish Film Institute in Copenhagen. Most of Kosmorama’s articles are peer-reviewed, but space is also reserved for writing accessible to a wide audience of cinephiles.

The journal also tries to strike a balance between publishing in English for a global audience, and catering for Scandinavian readers, with articles in Danish, Norwegian and Swedish. A clever feature of Kosmorama is its use of embedded film clips, images and documentation to illustrate arguments and analyses. The site also hosts a research blog, which is a place to share news on recent publications and upcoming workshops, lectures, conferences and call for papers, and readers can sign up to a newsletter so as not to miss a single issue.

Recent content in English includes articles on media in Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas, metafiction in House of Cards, state-sponsored short films, Mormonism in early Danish cinema, and a theme issue on Body Language in the Moving Image. Article submissions of around 5000 words on any aspect of cinema and television are welcome, and information for potential contributors can be found via Kosmorama’s English homepage: http://www.kosmorama.org/ServiceMenu/05-English.aspx

The Danish Film Institute is also home to an extensive web resource on the auteur Carl Th. Dreyer. Carl Th. Dreyer: The Man and His Work combines a growing collection of essays on Dreyer’s life, work and style with an extensively annotated filmography, film clips, stills, posters, and a searchable database of the Dreyer Archive. Whether you want to read about aspects of Dreyer’s style or filmmaking practice, research his correspondence, watch his short films, or find out what Lars von Trier inherited from Dreyer (answer: some stylistic tricks, and a tailor-made tuxedo), do visit the site here: http://english.carlthdreyer.dk/

Thanks very much to Dr Thomson for these. FSFF readers will be able to find lots of articles online at Kosmorama, but the ones in the latest issue have been listed and are linked to below.

ARTICLES / KOSMORAMA #258 – BODY LANGUAGE IN THE MOVING IMAGE

BODY LANGUAGE AND MEDIA CONTEXT Lennard Højbjerg
FIGURES IN LANDSCAPES Casper Tybjerg
EXPRESSING SUPPRESSION Henry Bacon
MAKING LOVE DETUMESCENTLY Mariah Larsson
MOVIE STARS IN THE FLESH Helle Kannik Haastrup

Thursday, 26 May 2011

30+ articles from the Journal of Aesthetics and Culture

Frame grab from The Wind (Victor Sjöström, 1928). Read Bo Florin's article on this film

[Traditionally, aesthetics] has been based on national perspectives and contexts, as well as contained within the limits of specific disciplines. However, the changing society has made this focus all too narrow. Due to globalization, media and territories merge and move in new ways, where regional, national, international, and global perspectives increasingly integrate. New contexts and new aesthetic strategies are also created, and traditional boundaries and hierarchies become transgressed, for example, between high brow and popular culture, or between art and technology. Aesthetics as well as culture thus need to be discussed and interpreted across the disciplines, through different media, over territorial borders. Finally, this is also a strong argument for Open Access publishing: to constitute a global platform and an interface for interdisciplinary discourse—free for anybody to read. [from first JAC Editorial by Astrid Söderbergh Widding, Lars Gustaf Andersson and John Sundholm]

Film Studies For Free had been meaning to post something about the Journal of Aesthetics and Culture for quite a while. It's an online open access journal, hence one very much after this blog's's heart, with a high percentage of very good quality film-studies related articles that FSFF has frequently linked to on Twitter.

Today, JAC published an excellent dossier on Transnational Cultural Memory, an event which provided a wonderful prompt to gather together, in one place, links to everything that JAC has published to date. And below, that is just what you will find.

FSFF has also added JAC to its permanent listing of excellent, Open Access film and moving image studies journals.

Vol. 1 (2009)