The Politics of Nordsploitation

The Politics of Nordsploitation starts with an ambitious goal to rewrite Nordic film history with its focus on exploitation films that do not adhere to any national project or mainstream film culture and have, therefore, been “forgotten” and categorized as “cheap and irrelevant by cultural authorities” (p. 6). Tommy Gustafsson and Pietari Kääpä provide a historical overview of the politics of exploitation cinema that shares characteristics with global and particularly European exploitative films, but is also uniquely intertwined with the history of film censorship and state-supported film production within the Nordic welfare states. In comparison with global exploitation cinema, the strict state censorship that they focus on throughout the book made the inclusion of violence and gore in Nordic films a more complex process, and the smallness of Nordic nation-states and national cinemas made it more difficult for exploitation film producers who did not have access to the government subsidies that are otherwise instrumental for these small film industries. The clever neologism “Nordsploitation” encompasses both a new variation on exploitation cinema and a gesture toward the ways in which Nordicness is exploited. Gustafsson and Kääpä’s book is a novel contribution to the scholarship of Nordic cinema and exploitation cinema more broadly.The analyses of the material in The Politics of Nordsploitation are structured chronologically, with chapter 2 providing an overview of the pre-1970s history of Nordic exploitation and the following seven chapters focusing more in depth on various elements of exploitation films from 1970s until 2019. Because of the novelty of this topic in scholarship on Nordic cinema (with the exception of sexploitation that Gustafsson and Kääpä acknowledge and briefly refer to), and in order to cover the aspects of exploitation cinema in all five Nordic countries, the book focuses primarily on source material related to production, distribution, and reception of these films. This means that analyses of film texts have “minor importance in this study” (p. 21). The extensive analysis and commentary of debates, articles, official censorship material, VHS covers, marketing materials, fan sites, official governmental reports, material from film institutes and filmmakers justify this decision and illustrate the claim that in order to fully understand the politics of exploitation films (particularly the Nordsploitation films), it is crucial to know about their position in both local and global film industries.While there was no established tradition of Nordic exploitation films before the 1970s, chapter 2 traces the exploitative elements and exploitation films of the early twentieth century, such as the Swedish documentary short Göta Elf-katastrofen (dir. Charles Magnusson, 1908; The Göta Elf Catastrophe) that included the recovery of corpses from a capsized canal boat Göta Elf. While this and other similar films gained attention and attracted viewers (Magnusson became the director of Svensk Filmindustri), they also contributed to the introduction of film censorship in all the Nordic countries during the 1910s. Gustafsson and Kääpä bring out that sensational films such as Urban Gad's Abyss (1910) are clearly exploitative but have been redefined as “innovative early examples of film art” (p. 35), which illustrates the manifestations of art as exploitation/exploitation as art, a connection typically not drawn in Nordic film history. They also analyze the exploitative elements in educational films (particularly sex hygiene films) and exotic documentaries.Chapter 3 explores the changing landscape of exploitation cinema in Denmark and Sweden in the 1970s where the decriminalization of pornography inspired a wave of sexploitation films. Gustafsson and Kääpä focus, however, on films that stand out in Nordic sexploitation by combining hard-core sex with violence and gore, which caused most of them to not get through censorship. As the Swedish Film Institute rejected applications for these productions, such as Bo Arne Vibenius's films, Vibenius conceptualized his films as a commercial enterprise that was frowned upon in the 1960s and 1970s. While Vibenius's rape and revenge film They Call Her One Eye (1974) became an inspiration for internationally well-known exploitation films, including Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003) and Volume 2 (2004), Gustaffson and Kääpä interpret this and other similar productions ultimately as films that broke moral and legal laws “just for the sake of making some money in a period when plain pornography did not cut it anymore” (p. 72).Chapters 4, 5, and 6 discuss the development of exploitation cinema in the 1980s when there was a global wave of conservative neo-moralism that went against provocative displays of sex and violence in media. Chapter 4 focuses on the moral panic regarding the VCR as a new and foreign media for moving images in Sweden. It analyzes closely the ways in which Swedish public television broadcaster's (SVT) programming provoked panic regarding this new technology, particularly by focusing on a narrative that it spreads “evil things to defenseless children without any control or regulation” (p. 82), using clips from the low-budget exploitation films such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). This connected the VCR and videos to the “perceived danger of low culture and bad taste entertainment” (p. 91) that was seen as originating from the United States. Chapter 5 identifies two distinct forms of Nordsploitation that emerged in the 1980s: the domestic or localized exploitation film that incorporates international genre formats but is mostly aimed at domestic markets; and the global exploitation film that is typically aimed at international markets and tends to use international actors and English as the main language. In order to exemplify the domestic exploitation film, Gustafsson and Kääpä analyze Icelandic films such as Hrafninn flýgur (dir. Hrafn Gunnlaugsson, 1984; When the Raven Flies) that combine elements of saga traditions and violent elements of imported genre production. These films adhere to domestic standards for censorship and cultural norms, but at the same time challenge them through “moderated transgressions from these norms” (p. 111). Sometimes categorized as part of the popular heritage films supported by Nordic film institutes, these films included violent content and genre conventions of, for example, Spaghetti Westerns. Perhaps the most significant contribution of the chapter is the discussion of the films that tried to reach “international standards” of genre cinema but were labeled exploitative by Nordic cultural authorities and critics, thus exemplifying the argument that “exploitation” has “inherently to do with the socioeconomic and political foundations of the Nordic welfare state model—which extends to its cultural industries—where to be exploitative would not have the same moral or political connotations as in other film cultures” (p. 137). Chapter 6 provides a close analysis of Swedish filmmaker Mats Helge Olsson's production of low-quality genre films (primarily action films) that were targeting international audiences. Olsson exploited the local “Nordic” flavor for global audiences (for example, by including Nordic snowy set pieces) and also the Swedish Film Institute's funding system, making his films an interesting case study for defying the state-sanctioned system.In chapter 7, Gustafsson and Kääpä explore the increasing emphasis on popular cinema and genre during the 1990s and the early 2000s in the Nordic region. While the Swedish low-budget Evil Ed's (1997) use of horror and splatter were received positively as a new perspective in domestic film production, the goal of the film was reduced to its shock value. They compare the production/reception of Evil Ed to a much more expensive production of a Norwegian slasher, Dead Snow (2009), that continued in the line of localized genre production and was very successful among audiences. The reception of Dead Snow, which incorporates plenty of gore and refers to mainstream genre films, did not see these aspects as extraordinary. The film's placement in both localized exploitation (using Norwegian language and domestic cultural contexts) and in the international genre marketplace illustrates the integration of localized and global exploitation narratives. The chapter also discusses the reasons for this change, including new incentives in financial support from the state during the turn of the century when the Nordic film industry was challenged by the competitive global film industries, which resulted in a much more open attitude toward genre cinema, even if the film institutes still did not fully acknowledge more explicit exploitative content or films too close to the values of Global Hollywood with targeted funding. This chapter comments also on how more artistic films such as the Swedish Let the Right One In (2008) challenged normative taste perceptions. By combining bleak social realism with extravagant genre content, the film, as Gustafsson and Kääpä argue, exploits “two essential realms of the Nordic film policy and industry environment of the 2000s” (p. 192).Chapters 8 and 9 discuss the emergence of a more self-aware form of global exploitation cinema in the 2000s, characterized by intertextual references and more explicit exploitation topics such as Nazisploitation and rape-revenge films. Including the history of Nazis in cinema, chapter 8 emphasizes the problematic trend in Nazisploitation films that exploit history and repackage Nazis as a spectacle without historical depth. The chapter further analyzes Dead Snow, which features Nazi zombies and references to Norwegian cinema and culture, thus giving the zombie genre a unique taste in both international and domestic markets. Gustafsson and Kääpä also discuss the significant fan culture around the films with Nazi iconography that was used to create a cult reputation. Finally, chapter 9 looks at the most recent decade of Nordic exploitation film (2010–2019) as an example of proximity and distance strategies that, according to Gustafsson and Kääpä, exist to a varying extent in most Nordic exploitation films. This means that films such as Kung Fury (2015) distance themselves from domestic norms (by referencing international genre norms) and from the international genre norms (by referencing their small nation film culture contexts). The films’ affiliation with both of these norms contributes at the same time to a sense of proximity and to the commercial success of these films that is now seen as a desirable quality in the Nordic small nation film cultures (while in earlier decades, commercialism was actively shunned). However, the substantial part of the support of Film Institutes and other cultural organizations continues to be devoted to the artistic or experimental cinema, which means that “even relatively non-sensationalist genre cinema can take on exploitative connotations due to their explicitly commercial approach” (p. 261).Gustafsson and Kääpä conclude the book by reflecting on Lars von Trier's most recent film The House that Jack Built (2018) as, on one hand, an ultimate example of exploitation cinema because its shock value is based on genre thrills and gore effects (including the response of audiences walking out of the movie theater). On the other hand, von Trier's film is also a high-quality and prestige production that received millions of euros from Danish and Swedish Film Institutes and other organizations, which is likely due to the status of a revered male auteur in Nordic film culture whose misogynist and excessively exploitative films are typically accepted. This critique of Lars von Trier's questionable representation of gender in his films or his often disturbing public persona functions in the conclusion of Gustafsson and Kääpä’s delineation of Nordic exploitation cinema as a way to primarily challenge the dominance of Nordic Film Institutions and their preference for supporting “revered film artists” (p. 266). While this argument is necessary, and it supports the main goal of the book to uncover alternative histories of Nordic film, within it lies also a question that the book could have elaborated on more: What to do with the fact that many of the exploitation films representing the alternative histories are misogynist or use racist history for entertainment purposes? I believe that a project that sets out to rewrite Nordic film history that has been dominated by white male auteurs should address that the alternative histories of its analysis are still dominated by white male filmmakers. However, the book's strong and original discussions on production politics and reception of Nordic exploitation films provide a much-needed and extensive overview of the unique Nordic cultural context with state supported film industries for exploitation films in the most conventional meaning, and for films that are seen as transgressive because of the regulations of the national Film Institutes. This is an accessible book for a wide range of readers (including undergraduate students) interested in film and cultural studies, and its commentary on the intricacies of moral politics in the Nordic countries is definitely a contribution beyond exploitation or Nordic film studies

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