Nordic Exposures

Scandinavian Identities in Classical Hollywood Cinema

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by Arne Lunde

Type

Studies

Subject

Countries > United States

Keywords

Hollywood, Sweden, nordic

Publishing date

2010

Publisher

University of Washington Press

Collection

New Directions in Scandinavian Studies

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 224 pages
6 x 8 ¾ inches (15 x 22.5 cm)

ISBN

978-0-295-99045-3

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Book Presentation:
Nordic Exposures explores how Scandinavian whiteness and ethnicity functioned in classical Hollywood cinema between and during the two world wars. Scandinavian identities could seem mutable and constructed at moments, while at other times they were deployed as representatives of an essential, biological, and natural category. As Northern European Protestants, Scandinavian immigrants and emigres assimilated into the mainstream rights and benefits of white American identity with comparatively few barriers or obstacles. Yet Arne Lunde demonstrates that far from simply manifesting a normative unmarked whiteness, Scandinavianness in mass-immigration America and in Hollywood cinema of the twentieth century could be hyperwhite, provisionally off-white, or not even white at all.

Lunde investigates key silent films, such as Technicolor's The Viking (1928), Victor Sjostrom's He Who Gets Slapped (1924), and Mauritz Stiller's Hotel Imperial (1927). The crises of Scandinavian foreign voice and the talkie revolution are explored in Greta Garbo's first sound film, Anna Christie (1930). The author also examines Warner Oland's long career of Asian racial masquerade (most famously as Chinese detective Charlie Chan), as well as Hollywood's and Third Reich Cinema's war over assimilating the Nordic female star in the personae of Garbo, Sonja Henie, Ingrid Bergman, Kristina Soderbaum, and Zarah Leander.

About the Author:
Arne Lunde is assistant professor of Scandinavian studies at UCLA.

Press Reviews:
"Nordic Exposures is a revealing and often amusing examination of racial questions where we least expect them to arise."―Agust Guomundsson, Scandinavian-Canadian Studies, Vol. 20 (2011)

"This study does more than extend to another group the already voluminous literature condemning Hollywood's treatment of minorities. . . . Lunde concentrates on a more intriguing issue: the way Scandinavian identity conveyed a cluster of concepts about whiteness."―Choice

See the publisher website: University of Washington Press