Opening up the Postwar World in Color: 1950s Geopolitics and Spectacular Nordic Colonialism in the Arctic and in Africa

• Main Author: Stenport, Anna Westerstahl
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Edinburgh University Press 2019
• Subjects: Arctic; Norway; Iceland
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474438056.003.0009

This chapter examines the ‘elsewheres’ that opened up Scandinavian film cultures globally in the 1950s, reflecting international developments in genre, style, and production mode and the increased post-war mobility of people and technologies. This includes access to new shooting locations, lighter cameras and better on-site sound uptake, a motivation to film increasingly in color and in spectacular ‘[Cinema]Scopes’ that could immerse cinema goers in (exotic) scenery. These films were all major investments, designed for global circulation. Constituting an overlooked corpus of Scandinavian ‘elsewheres’ in their portrayal of international or seemingly exotic locations, as well as indigenous populations and practices, these films also tie into period perceptions of Scandinavian politics abroad -- internationalist, pacifist, socialist, and “do-gooder,” spreading around the world the merits of the Scandinavian, especially Swedish, model of the cradle-to-grave welfare state and a Dag Hammarskjöld-inspired notion of a Third/Middle Way of international aid and solidarity. The films can also be seen as reacting specifically against the Cold War opposition between East and West, and illuminating the precarious status of small nation states wedged in between them, whether NATO members (Norway, Denmark, Iceland) or not (Sweden, Finland).