Anna Mrozewicz

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• Dr
• Professor (Associate) at Lund University

The Baltic Sea has effectively separated the Scandinavian and Eastern European countries, especially in the period when this body of water constituted a part of the Iron Curtain and functioned for Scandinavians as an imaginary protective moat. From the East-Central European perspective, the Baltic Sea offered a hope of escape to freedom, encapsulat...

The article examines the ways in which the slowly evolving and invisible processes of the ongoing ecological crisis can be represented in the format of a contemporary serial television drama. The author argues that despite heavy reliance on spectacular and captivating character-born plots, the long-form storytelling of new television narratives can...

Gräns ( Border ) (2018) is an adaptation of a short story by Swedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist (2006). The film retains large parts of the literary plot as well as its focalization through the troll-protagonist Tina/Reva. At the same time, Border introduces significant modifications. I argue that by expanding the plot to include a number of new...

This article examines the Norwegian climate fiction television series Okkupert [Occupied] (2015–), focusing on the ways in which it reveals the complicity of Nordic subjects in an ecological dystopia. I argue that in illuminating this complicity, the series reimagines the Norwegian national self-conception rooted in a discourse of Norway's exceptio...

This book addresses representations of Russia and neighbouring Eastern Europe in post-1989 Nordic cinemas, investigating their hitherto-overlooked transnational dimension. Departing from the dark stereotypes that characterise the hegemonic narrative defined as ‘Eastern noir’, the author presents Norden ’s eastern neighbours as depicted with a rich,...

The first chapter is concerned with the cinematic narratives of Eastern noir, which adopt a border discourse and imagine Russia (and thereby often Eastern Europe) as a crime scene. In these crime narratives, Russia is essentialised as a crime scene, where the traces of crime comprise evidence of an omnipresent evil emanating from the centre of powe...

While Chapter 3 analyses how the Baltic morphs from a border to a boundary, Chapter 4 concentrates on the less illustrious aspects of neighbourhood and movement of commodities across the Baltic. In the first part, two Swedish films are discussed ( Lilya 4-ever by Lukas Moodysson and Buy Bye Beauty by Pål Hollender), which stage the Baltic as a mora...

This chapter focuses on the films whose plots are set in the period following the break-up of the Soviet Union and in which the Baltic Sea undergoes symbolic transformation from a metaphor of liminal space into a space which links the Nordic peripheries of Europe with neighbours on the opposite shores. Rather than being positioned as small nations...

Whereas Eastern noir narratives reproduce the ‘iron’ border and operate by means of clear-cut national identities, Chapter 2 reconsiders the hard border promulgated by the master narrative of the Cold War. Devoted to a set of films which address historical themes (late 20th-century and 21st-century productions looking back to the Cold War and earli...

The introduction looks at the importance of geopolitical borders for Nordic cinematic constructions of the neighbouring countries that lay behind the Iron Curtain. Offering an overview of rich depictions of Russia and Eastern Europe from the silent film era to the end of the Cold War, the chapter traces anti-Russian and anti-Soviet sentiment in ear...

This chapter looks at films revolving around Polish migrations to Scandinavian countries (Norway, Denmark, Sweden) after 2004 (Poland’s accession to the European Union). It utilises the concept of spectral agency (theorised by Esther Peeren) – that is, the agency of the dispossessed, the marginalised (the ‘living ghosts’), and those made socially i...

Chapter 5 embarks on the analysis of one of the most widespread (stereotypical) tropes associated with Russia, in which the ‘Russia as a crime scene’ conception plays a potent part: that of the Russian soldier. The analyses are concerned with pictures which – not seeking to deny the militarisation of contemporary Russian society – look for historic...

The afterword discusses the Finnish film Sauna which, albeit utilising conventions of the horror genre, makes a powerful breach in the border discourse and disturbs easy dichotomies. The film combines a popular format potentially appealing to a wide audience and complex philosophical content which approaches ‘border’ in a manner typical of weak (ra...

The article offers a discussion of Sofi Oksanen’s novel Purge, focusing on the book’s strategy of evoking stereotypical narratives about Eastern Europe, such as the (postcommunist) fallen woman and (Russian) return home narratives, as well as related intertexts, primarily Lukas Moodysson’s film Lilya 4-ever. I argue that Oksanen constructs the plot...

The article investigates the ways in which Pirjo Honkasalo’s documentary The 3 Rooms of Melancholia (2004), examining the impact of the Russian-Chechen war on children, engenders a transnational audience through cinematic qualities, and most importantly through embodiment, producing a strongly affective resonance in the spectator. I argue that thro...

In the article, I argue that by means of qualities intrinsic to the medium of the photobook, the renowned Danish photographer Krass Clement (b. 1946) constructs a complex narration, which, on the one hand, seeks meta-refl ection on the relationships between photography, memory, and the perception of reality, and, on the other, explores the post-GDR...

The article discusses three feature films produced in Denmark and Sweden in the 1990s: Kajs fødselsdag/The Birthday Trip (Scherfig, 1990), Torsk på Tallinn/Screwed in Tallinn (Alfredson, 1999) and You Can’t Eat Fishing (Windfeld, 1999). All of them, applying various genre conventions, take up the subject of encounters between Scandinavians and ‘Eas...

The article discusses three documentaries made since 2000 by Scandinavian filmmakers: the Finnish director Marja Pensala’s The Eclipse of the Soul (2000) and two films by Danish authors: Boris Bertram’s Tankograd (2010) and Ada Bligaard Søby’s The Naked of Saint Petersburg (2010). All the films are portraits of Russian cities and their residents. I...

The paper discusses a series of five graffiti pieces made in 2005 on the Israeli-Palestinian separation barrier by the English street artist Banksy. Location is here key to the understanding of the messages. The departure point for my analyses is, on the one hand, the meaning connoted with the ‘wall,’ the aim of which is to separate two peoples in...

The last mute film in Carl Th. Dreyer’s oeuvre, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), is often referred to as a film “made of close-ups” and purely cinematic. Dreyer used to stress himself that close-up was the specific cinematic device that asserted film’s position as autonomous art. He especially insisted on film’s independence from theatre. Thus, i...

RETURNING TO UNFAMILIAR PLACES. PLACE AND POSTMEMORY IN THE WORKS OF JACOB DAMMAS, JACOB KOFLER, AND MAJA MAGDALENA SWI-DERSKA | The emigration of three thousand Polish-Jewish citizens to Denmark as a result of the events in March 1968 in Poland has only recently attracted attention from filmmakers and writers in Denmark. Two documentary films and...