Mette Hjort

• PhD (nouveau doctorat), EHESS, Paris; MA, McGill; BA Hons, McGill
• Head of Faculty at Hong Kong Baptist University

When it comes to meeting the multicultural challenge that currently confronts some of the smaller European nations, film-making has an important role to play. For a variety of reasons, documentary film-making has a particularly significant contribution to make. With its capacity to bring the concrete other into clear focus and its emphasis on basic...

THE PROBLEM WITH PROVOCATION: ON LARS VON TRIER, ENFANT TERRIBLE OF DANISH ART FILM Anyone interested in contemporary art is likely to have spent a good deal of time pondering the nature and role of artistic provocation. Provocation as a crucial feature of artistic practice was largely unknown before 1800 (Walker 1999: 1). The idea of 'shocking the...

Interviews with Danish directors and an introduction by the two editors to Danish Film Culture. Directors interviewed: Gabriel Axel, Henning Carlsen, Jørgen Leth, Christian Braad Thomsen, Jytte Rex, Erik Clausen, Anders Refn, Helle Ryslnge, Nils Malmros, Morten Arnfred, Søren Kragh-Jacobsen, Bille August, Jon Bang Carlsen, Lars von Trier, Ole Borne...

Focusing on the small nation state of Denmark, this article considers the implications of responses to COVID-19 for the dynamics of multiple belonging involving Western and Asian nations. The claim is that COVID-19’s cultural dimensions include the phenomenon of weakened attachments to an originary homeland on the part, for example, of non-resident...

This chapter focuses on Danish soft power, reform and democratization, and on dialogue and collaboration. Soft power here is as framed by the Danish Arab Partnership Programme, facilitating new forms of “direct speech” in the Middle East. Particularly significant in this regard is the work of small-scale institutions such as the AIF and SIB, and, m...

Canvassing a variety of types of value, this article seeks to identify the promise of moving images for fields such as medical humanities, health humanities, critical public health studies and health and culture. The use of moving images for the intended purpose of effecting health outcomes is given priority, the emphasis being on immediate instrum...

Talent development focusing on motion pictures is increasingly scaffolded through transnational structures and processes. The result is a growing emphasis on what I propose to call the ontological transnationalism of the film practitioner. I begin by identifying transnational talent development as a neglected, yet important area of inquiry for Tran...

“Gender Equity in Screen Culture: On Susanne Bier, the Celluloid Ceiling, and the Growing Appeal of TV Production” reflects on Bier’s career in light of the “unprecedented attention” recently directed at gender inequality in the film industry. Mette Hjort foregrounds, in particular, the fact that Bier’s success involved her overcoming challenges po...

The award-winning Danish director Susanne Bier has become increasingly known for her generic innovations and industrial fluidity, moving confidently between cinema and television at a time where the scarcity of women directors has become a subject of major critical and popular attention. Refocus: The Films of Susanne Bier is a dynamic, scholarly en...

To date consideration of negative emotions in the context of cinema has been largely limited to the issue of why spectators would be drawn to films that target psychological responses such as fear and disgust. The aim here is to consider the phenomenon of negative emotion as a motivating factor in the context of, not spectatorship, but film product...

The close-up of the human face is regarded as an effective means of fostering audiences’ identification with characters. Listen effects an empathic involvement with a character whose face remains covered throughout. A creative experiment with identification, Listen yields insights that contribute to debates in the philosophy of film.

Lars von Trier's Medea was commissioned for the Danish Broadcasting Corporation by Birgitte Price, who offered the then still emerging young director an already completed script and an almost fully selected cast to work with. Medea provides a visual spectacle, largely based on sea- and landscapes, that is not easily forgotten, and a murder scene so...

In a small-nation film and media ecology, cogent thinking about capacity building is of critical importance. In the context of Danish documentary filmmaking, twinning has emerged as a promising model. Twinning engages Danish filmmakers with a world beyond Denmark, thereby counteracting certain parochialisms. At the same time, this model ties in wit...

A Companion to Nordic Cinema presents a collection of original essays that explore one of the world's oldest regional cinemas from its origins to the present day. Offers a comprehensive, transnational and regional account of Nordic cinema from its origins to the present day Features original contributions from more than two dozen international film...

In the Nordic region, broad-based, enduring commitments to film and film culture find expression in the relatively long history of institution building in the area of practice-oriented film education. Different types of film training, capacity building, and talent development ensure multiple points of access to the field of film practice. In recent...

Norwegian filmmaker Knut Erik Jensen claims to be an ecological filmmaker. This article explores what this means. Selected examples of filmmakers' unsound attitudes toward nature are discussed to provide a context for the proposed definition of ecological filmmaking. The latter, it is claimed, goes beyond green filmmaking, by both exemplifying and...

This volume examines the challenges cinemas in small European countries have faced since 1989. It explores how notions of scale and »small cinemas« relate to questions of territory, transnational media flows, and globalization. Employing a variety of approaches from industry analysis to Deleuze & Guattari's concept of the »minor«, contributions add...

A review of Patricia White Women’s Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms (Duke University Press, 2015).

Interviews with contemporary Danish documentary filmmakers

Within a period of just half a decade, partnerships between political elites in the Middle East and the governing bodies of various top-tier American institutions have led to the creation of a number of high profile (and often architecturally remarkable) branch campuses in the region. A central element in a still-quite-novel “global network univers...

Adapting Simone de Beauvoir’s well-known phrase, one is not born a filmmaker, but becomes one.1 To ask about the nature of practice-based film education as it has emerged around the globe and exists today is to begin to understand how filmmakers become filmmakers. Inquiry along these lines sheds light on the process of becoming not only a filmmaker...

Adapting Simone de Beauvoir’s well-known phrase, one is not born a filmmaker but becomes one.1 To ask about the nature of practice-based film education as it has emerged around the globe and exists today, is to begin to understand how filmmakers become filmmakers. Inquiry along these lines sheds light on the process not only of becoming a filmmaker...

In this chapter, the write would like to argue that the universities, increasingly required to demonstrate their relevance to society, their fitness for purpose, and their ability to justify the allocation of public monies to their sector, they have become more or less willing players in a high-stakes game called Assessment. She discusses variants...

This work explores in detail how innovative academic activism can transform our everyday workplaces in contexts of considerable adversity. Personal essays by prominent scholars provide critical reflections on their institution-building triumphs and setbacks across a range of cultural institutions. Often adopting narrative approaches, the contributo...

While many scholarly books and articles devoted to film make passing reference to risk, no attempt has been made systematically to explore filmmaking as a process involving the actual taking of risks as well as the depiction of risk taking. As a mostly cost-intensive, collaborative activity that spans the worlds of commerce and art and aims to enga...

The language of risk is common coin these days, informing virtually all areas of our lives. Parent/teacher discussions, whether in Asia or the West, make reference to learner profiles, and these often include the idea of being a "risk taker." Thus, for example, a child may be encouraged proudly to report that the recent class excursion with Outward...

The phenomenon of risk has been seriously neglected in connection with the study of film, yet many of those who write about film seem to have intuitions about how various forms of risk-taking shape aspects of the filmmaking or film-viewing process. Film and Risk fills this gap as editor Mette Hjort and interdisciplinary contributors discuss film's...

Within cinema studies there has emerged a significant body of scholarship on the idea of 'National Cinema' but there has been a tendency to focus on the major national cinemas. Less developed within this field is the analysis of what we might term minor or small national cinemas, despite the increasing significance of these small entities with the...

Defending the inherent interest of contemporary Danish cinema to non-Danes almost two decades ago involved making much of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' decision to honour Gabriel Axel's Babette's Feast (Babettes gœstebud) and Bille August's Felle the Conqueror (Pelle Erobreren) with Best Foreign Feature awards in 1987 and 1988 re...

The field of transnational cinema studies is a burgeoning one, and I would like to contribute to some of the lively ongoing debates by looking at the ways in which film professionals belonging to small, relatively privileged nations and/or states have responded to the challenges and opportunities of transnational filmmaking. My focus will be on two...

Lone Scherfig was the first of a number of women directors to take up the challenge of Dogme, the back-to-basics, manifesto-based, rule-governed, and now globalized film initiative introduced by Danish filmmakers Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg in 1995. Entitled Italiensk for begyndere (Italian for Beginners), Scherfig’s Dogme film transformed...

Center Stage is widely recognized as a classic of the New Hong Kong cinema. The film's status has until now been attributed to the fascinating way in which Kwan combines a reconstruction of Ruan Lingyu's tragic life as a Chinese film star with sequences documenting the making of his film.

Themes play a central role in our everyday communication: we have to know what a text is about in order to understand it. Intended meaning cannot be understood without some knowledge of the underlying theme. This book helps to define the concept of ‘themes’ in texts and how they are structured in language use. Much of the literature on Thematics is...

RÉSUMÉ Les théories post-colonialistes nous ont montré à quel point l'absence d'une reconnaissance de la valeur de certaines formes culturelles produit des effets nuisibles. Ces théories ignorent pourtant la nature asymétrique des relations régissant l'interaction entre des cultures mineures et des cultures majeures, c'est-à-dire entre les grandes...

Ludvig Holberg. The Playwright and his Age up to 1730

This is the first comprehensive evaluation of Charles Taylor's work and a major contribution to leading questions in philosophy and the human sciences as they face an increasingly pluralistic age. Charles Taylor is one of the most influential contemporary moral and political philosophers: in an era of specialisation he is one of the few thinkers wh...

- Interview med Stephen Greenblatt.

This paper examines the practices of New Bibliography. The New Bibliographers have played a major role in constituting the canonical texts of the English literary institutions. This paper argues that current objections to the methods of New Bibliography fail to locate the presuppositions that motivate this textual approach. It is argued that Haberm...

Das Ideal: Ein Problem der Kantischen IdeenlehrePichéClaudeBonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1984. Pp. 181 - Volume 25 Issue 4 - Anne Mette Hjort

The work of the eminent French cultural critic Louis Marin (1931-92) is becoming increasingly important to English-speaking scholars concerned with issues of representation. To Destroy Painting, first published in France in 1977, marks a milestone in Marin's thought about the aims of painting in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A...

Written for the Graduate Program in Communications. Typescript. Thesis (M.A.) -- McGill University. Bibliography: leaves 148-156.

Thesis (doctoral)--Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1989.

Small Nation, Global Cinema engages the effects of globalization from the perspective of small nations. Focusing her study on the specific cultural context of the international film market, Mette Hjort argues that the New Danish Cinema presents an opportunity to understand the effects of globalization within the culture and economy of a privileged...