Academic literature on the topic 'Swedish cinema analysis'

This chapter focuses on Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs (1991). The synthesis of elements that create the look and identity of a film come from a variety of talents: from the director's original conception, to the cinematographer's realisation of the same; to the production designer. In the case of The Silence of the Lambs, these three elements are in perfect harmony, producing a visual signature for the film which is highly distinctive and very specific to Demme's vision. The chapter then details the first meeting and the subsequent interviews between Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling. The initial meeting between Clarice and the murderous psychiatrist Lecter is one of the great set pieces of modern cinema. While clearly adhering to the imperatives of popular cinema, the sequence is shot and acted with a rigour worthy of the ‘chamber cinema’ of the Swedish master Ingmar Bergman in his late 1960s films — and this is not the only occasion in which the more rarefied agendas of art cinema are evoked by Demme and his collaborators. Another popular sequence is a perfect concatenation of all three elements of acting, writing, and direction, in which Lecter makes his devastating (and cruel) character analysis of Clarice. The chapter also explores the horror film credentials and accoutrements of the film.

This chapter examines how Anita Ekberg in the American press and media was apprehended and constructed as a new Swedish star in Hollywood, and how notions and ideas about Sweden, sexuality, gender and stereotypes were negotiated and reproduced. This analysis also addresses the Swedish reception and construction of Ekberg, arguably more derogative and verging on harassment. Ekberg was one of the most famous blonde bombshells in Hollywood during the 1950s. Besides making films she became known as a model and pin-up girl which was an important way to fame during the fifties in the USA, and she was a staple in the magazines concerning her sometimes scandalous stories. She came to a United States permeated with discussions about sexuality and to a popular culture that favored sex, breasts and voluptuous female bodies more than anything else. The chapter thus investigates how Swedish sexuality and Swedish blonde were created, propagated and circulated in American cultural discourse.

Swedish composer Ludwig Göransson’s soundtrack for Black Panther represents a complex case study for how we understand not just superhero music, but the ability (or inability), as Edward Said famously put it, for the Orient, or in this case the cinematic ‘other,’ to musically represent themselves in contemporary blockbuster cinema. Despite Black Panther’s many achievements in terms of representation and grappling with the complex legacy of colonialism in the context of Hollywood, a nuanced debate remains regarding the film’s relationship with Africa and the African diaspora. This chapter pointedly asks where is the Black Panther’s sound from, and whose is it? Placing the film within the context of Hollywood’s long history of uncritically homogenizing the diversity of African music into a uniform otherness that reinforces the ethnocentric perspectives of Whiteness, the chapter analyses the development of sound and music in Black Panther and its potential to engage, critically or otherwise, with harmful stereotypes—or to subvert and resist them.