Nordic Noir: The Story of Scandinavian Crime Fiction

I’m a movie buff and in the last few years, Scandinavian movies have shouted out, drawing deserved attention to themselves.

As a youngster, Ingmar Bergman of course was well known, but he was all that was Scandanavian cinema, at least in my eyes anyway, but as I said, that perception changed in the alst few years. Now, I like to try and hunt out these kinds of movies. Note: European cinema in general usually provides the best cinema as opposed to US, hedonistic cinema.

Hence, I was rather pleased to unexpectedly come across this:

Time Shift – Nordic Noir: The Story of Scandinavian Crime Fiction

h_ttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiwObVhyoc8
A bonus is that it’s narrated by Mariella Frostrup – who I’ve always had a bit of a ‘thing’ about!

This documentary, given the recent massacre of about 90 pro-Palestinian youths by Anders Behring Breivik on that Island, is made all the more interesting as it shows ‘signs’ that a Breivik style incident was quite possible. Hindsight of course, does have that property which often makes past thinking (present at the time) look rather dismal, but you must admit, that here, for example what happened to Steig Larsson, does rather force one to think that some kind of attention should have been paid to the these far right groups, be that initiated or strengthened.

The Scandinavian countries seem to have had relatively humanistic governments (although that statement could legitimately be challenged with regards to the odd action by the said governments in the recent past) and they have seemed quite open to take in refugees and so on. An USan Dr. of Philosophy Dr. Samuel Embo who I’ve had the pleasure of chatting with a couple of times did a study of anti-Islamic sentiment amongst Sweeds and his findings also make me think that the authorities should have noticed the growth of this ‘hot-spot’ issue, with its potentially lethal concequences, consequences which these  unchecked pro-Nazi (hence pro-Zionist) bunch of thugs have made materialise.

Anyway, back to the movies. The documentary gives a simple possible explanation as to why Scandinavian crime fiction has grown more popular, but they left out a very important point, which most people leave out when they talk about good movies, and that is, the thing that makes these movies very good (can be found in other usually lower budget – read less computer manipulation – movies) is that of the HUMAN element. When the human elements (emotions, experiences, hard times etc) are strong, it really strengthens the movie. That US Hollywood movies focus on SFX shows why they tend to be, in general. much more shallow. That isn’t to say all SFX movies are automatically more lame, Avatar without CGI (which still looks synthetic, although the least irritatingly synthetic CGI I’ve seen) cannot really escape it but was still an OK movie overall… but of course it hid behind a ‘human’ element, without which it would have sucked.

–

–

–

–

–

–