No description available.

The film representation of the Sámi people has evolved during the last century from the ethnographic portrayals that reproduce a romantic stereotype of the good savages, to feature and documentary films that discuss the Sámi identity and its colonial history. In recent years a new generation of Sámi and Swedish documentary directors have focused their work on analysing the impact that multiple structures of power actually have in the production of the Sámi identity and culture. In this research I explore the intersections of such structures in the documentary road movies Sámi Daughter Yoik (2007) by the Sámi-Swedish director Liselotte Wajstedt, and The Only Image of My Father (2004) by the Swedish director Kine Boman. The main purpose of the research is to examine the discussions of identity that these films propose and to analyse the strategies with which the directors question the simplistic representation of the Sámi people. Based on the postcolonial and intersectional perspectives, the text offers a critique of the discourses of authenticity that confine the Sámi identity into the frame of ethnicity. The study gives special attention to the different layers that the directors' identities involve and their role in the construction of alternative representations of the Sámi people. A relevant finding is that the directors have succeeded in representing the Sámi people as complex and heterogeneous, helped by their choices on genre, authorship and their own approach to identity as a performative, multidimensional and dynamic process.

This paper closely examines fairy tale films with road movie components, in particular those films featuring female protagonists. The study’s objective is twofold: first, to further develop existing research on the road movie by exploring one of the lesser known constituents of this broad genre and, second, to address gaps in scholarly literature on road movies when it comes to themes in female-led trips and the characterization of travelling females. Through a detailed analysis of the journeys of female characters in recent voyage-oriented fairy tale films—Peter Pan (P.J. Hogan, 2003), Alice in Wonderland (Tim Burton, 2010) and Tangled (Byron Howard and Nathan Greno, 2010)—the investigation shows that these new heroines significantly differ from those of old. Their travels are portrayed as being less difficult, and the traits that they exhibit while on the road, namely fearlessness, rationality and an undying optimism, are rather favourable when compared to those exhibited by former road heroines. Although these protagonists still face characters who wish to impede their movement away from a domestic setting, it is demonstrated that the protagonists are ultimately successful in not only acquiring power in the surroundings that they find themselves in, but also in carrying over their goals and dreams to their own worlds upon their return, privileges that most former road heroines did not have. Ultimately, the study shows that females can be as efficient travellers as males, and in some cases are portrayed as even more competent than their male counterparts.

This dissertation examines landscape as a concept for analysis and interpretation in film studies by considering the New Hollywood cinema in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Contextualized within the contested notion of nationhood at the time as well as the concern among filmmakers to probe the properties, practices and traditions of American cinema, this was also a period when landscape underwent widespread redefinition as a field of artistic and academic practice. From the outset an aesthetic and pictorial concept, landscape is understood as consisting of a number of interacting ideas and systems of representation which are addressed in terms of intermedial relations. Not something to be encountered or discovered and fixed on canvas or film, landscape involves an ongoing process of construction, appropriation and transformation. Departing from a discussion of the historical role landscape has played in cultural practices of self-representation and self-definition, this study is concerned with how it can be turned against itself and used as a point of departure for adversary and antagonistic views of national myths and media. The organization is roughly chronological, based around a series of reconsiderations of key films, mainly focusing on road movies and genre-revisionist work of the period. Rather than a repository of stable identities and values, each chapter shows how landscape can be advanced in a process of reflecting on attempts to impose meaning, order and linearity. Taken together, Out of Site argues that an engagement with the surfaces and depths of landscape enables new perspectives on the interrelations between the highbrow and the popular, aesthetics and ideology. Bringing attention to how story patterns and audience expectations are displaced, landscape is examined for the questions it raises regarding representational and narrative strategies, the formation of identity and memory, and our own habits of reading.