The Beguiled

”The slaves left”: White Womanhood in The Beguiled

When looking through the filmography of Sofia Coppola, two things stand out: the fact that her films almost exclusively focus on young women, and that these women are exclusively white. While the first fact is commonly lifted to characterise Coppola’s films, the second fact – that of whiteness – is not as often pointed out. One occasion that it was, however, was in the midst of the release of The Beguiled in 2017. Coppola’s sixth feature is also the second adaptation of the novel by Thomas Cullinan, the first being Don Siegel’s film from 1971. It centers around a small girls’ school in Virginia during the civil war in 1864, that takes in and hides a wounded solider. In the novel as well as in the first film adaptation, there are slave characters, but in Coppola’s script these have been taken away; a choice that has been wildly discussed and criticised.

This essay is occupied with one line from the film: “The slaves left”. This line marks a lack in the film; a lack of black characters in the diegesis and a lack of perspectives other than that of white people in the narrative. In this essay, I aim to deconstruct notions of whiteness that are conveyed, and to engage with the marking of absence and its implication for the racial politics of the film. By doing so, I hope to draw attention to otherwise invisible ideas of normalcy connected to whiteness. I will engage with the theoretical framework on whiteness articulated by Richard Dyer, and moreover assess Sofia Coppola’s position as a storyteller in relation to Linda Alcoff’s discussion about speaking for other.

What Dyer does in his ground-breaking book White, is to critically establish whiteness as a racial category. He argues that our world is built upon a racial imaginary, and in order to properly grasp and deconstruct this imaginary, the invisible norm of whiteness must be made visible and its particularities dissected. Whiteness can be difficult to pin down since it is seldom talked about – it is much more common to stumble across terms such as African American, black, Asian, Hispanic and mulatto in relation to people of various ethnicities or skin colour – and that is exactly the point. Whiteness is seen as a colourless colour. Dyer argues that notions of whiteness are seldom deliberately emphasised, but nevertheless present, whether or not the author intended it. Although difficult to make generalisations, Dyer finds that whiteness is often associated with Christianity and its emphasis on corporeality. For women, the Mother Mary-figure is prominently referenced in popular culture, which ties into a second trope, namely, whiteness as associated with heterosexuality. Heterosexuality is the reassurance of a “continued whiteness”. The Mary-figure therefore bears an impossible ideal: both passive and asexual, but also the carrier of “white blood” through maternity and reproduction, embodying the classical whore-Madonna-complex.

As a southern gothic, The Beguiled draws on myths of the South. In contrast to the Western, a genre built upon a romanticising narrative of the victorious conquest of lands historically inhabited by native Americans, myths of the South signal loss and nostalgia. This is done so partly in the framing of landscape. In the Western, the open landscape connotes endless opportunity, whereas the murky marshlands and woods of the South connotes a backwardness, mirroring the historical defeat of the south in the civil war. In The Beguiled, the surrounding nature is depicted as beautiful yet overgrown, and it has an almost mythic quality to it. Moreover, the film ties into Dyer’s notion of whiteness as associated with heterosexuality and corporeality. The seven girls and women in the school live by a Mother Mary-ideal of sorts, often dressed in white, careful to practice kindness and compassion. However, as the narrative unfolds, the solider John McBurney trigger different “forbidden” reaction in the girls and women – lust, passion, jealousy. After having symbolically amputated McBurney’s leg, stripping him of manliness and agency, they kill him. While the film on one hand confirms heterosexuality as a norm, it also challenges it. By killing McBurney, the women destroy any hope for reproduction with the only male character in the film, prioritizing their independence over motherhood. In this reading, whiteness is undermined in a double sense: both with the knowledge of the South losing the war, and in the women killing the only hope of reproduction.

Controversy has been following Coppola throughout her career. She has, for instance, been accused of distorting history in Marie Antoinette (2006), a film that largely ignores the politics of France’s infamous queen and solely focuses on her punky persona. In The Bling Ring (2013) as well as in The Beguiled she has been accused of whitewashing; in the former for leaving out a Mexican individual from the real life group of teenagers that the film is based on, and in the latter for turning the mixed race character of Edwina into a white woman played by Kirsten Dunst in the 2017 adaptation (I will not engage more deeply with the issue in this essay, let me just note that I believe this to be problematic). Lost in Translation (2003) has in turn been criticised for the way it depicts Japanese culture as alien. It seems not only the slaves left, but also the Mexican and Japanese perspectives.

While the whitewashing of Edwina is one issue in The Beguiled, the question of the left-out slaves has more to do with distortion of history. What critics point out is that by leaving out the slaves, Coppola romanticises history by refusing to acknowledge the horrific history of slavery, undermining other perspectives than that of white people. Romanticising, sure – Coppola has an apparent fascination with the southern gothic aesthetics (and has even said in an interview that she finds the South ‘exotic’) – but racist? The reason that movies like The Beguiled stir controversy is because we as spectators are invested in the idea of truth. The film never claims to be based on true events; it is fiction. Nevertheless, it makes truth claims: it gets historic details “correct” in order to make it believable, in anything from clothing to battle references. Though we know it to be fiction, we seem to expect more from it, assumedly because we know what sort of power film narratives have on our perception of the world and how it can lead to misreading of history.

Although the only mention of the absent slaves is in the line “The slaves left”, their absence is marked in other manners. The garden is overrun, and the girls are forced to conduct all sorts of household work, including heavy work in the garden. In one scene, the young woman Alicia is seen with a rake in her hand. She is giving the work minimum effort, clearly fatigued and bored: this is not something white people of her class usually have to put up with. I believe this scene effectively illustrates white privilege. The girls’ school is barely managing to make ends meet since the slaves left, acknowledging the extent to which the myth of the South is dependent on slavery. In that sense, the film can be read as a deconstruction of the romanticism that it also engages in, and a (critical) acknowledgement of the racial politics of its time. Imagine there were slave characters. Would this be unproblematic? I would think not. In fact, such characters might even have come to reinforce stereotypical depiction of African Americans, who have historically been limited to roles as slaves, servants, entertainers or villains in films.

What Coppola does, in only depicting white characters, is a sort of retreat response, in the words of Alcoff. Alcoff problematises the notion of speaking for others, while also problematising the critique held against people who do so. The problem with speaking for others, simplified, is that it often reflects and reinforces a power dynamic where a colonized subject is made invisible. On the other hand, Alcoff is critical of the presumption that a person’s location is the determining factor for the content in his or her speech. But where do you draw the line? Can I, as a woman, legitimately “speak for all women”, or only for white, Swedish, middle class women aged 27? Of course, there is no simple answer. One “solution” that Alcoff formulates is the retreat response, the refusal to speak for anyone else but oneself in order not to misinterpret or obscure other perspectives. The problem with this strategy, according to Alcoff, is that it can lead to a narcissistic navel gazing that does not bother with taking in other perspectives. It can furthermore be argued that Coppola reinforces whiteness as a defining trait in excluding people of colour from her films, since she obviously has no problem in engaging with the life of a French queen who died 230 years ago, but who was white.

I would argue that this sums up the issue with the absent slaves in The Beguiled rather well. Coppola’s film center exclusively around white women, like herself. Narcissistic – sure. But would we really want her to depict African Americans, or should that task be left to someone else? Overall, Coppola’s choice to exclude the slave characters can be seen as expressive both of an arrogance of her own power position and of a consciousness about it. In this essay, I have argued for the relevance of whiteness as a critical racial category and shown how it can be used to better grasp the racial politics of a film like The Beguiled. When this category is established and applied, I believe interesting reflections of white womanhood begin to show, that Coppola herself might not have been aware of.

Alcoff, Linda. “The Problem of Speaking For Others”, Cultural Critique, No. 20, 1991–1992: 5–32.

Atad, Corey. “Lost in Adaptation”. The Verge. 20/7 2017. https://slate.com/culture/2017/06/sofia-coppolas-whitewashed-new-movie-the-beguiled.html

Dyer, Richard. White: Essays on Race and Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1997.

Shohat, Robert and Ella Stam. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge, 2014.

Girlhood

Creating Spaces of Agency Through the Reimagination of Black Female Identity in Girlhood

In this essay, I aim to locate the film Girlhood (Bande de Filles, 2014) within a tradition of European postcolonial cinema and to look at the ways in which it challenges notions of black female identity through conceptualisations of the gaze and the oppositional gaze. I argue that the film creates exciting new spaces of agency through the use of music, framing and camera movement, and challenges both gender and racial stereotypes.

According to an article published in The Guardian, there are more than 12 million first- and second-generation immigrants in France, many of them from former French colonies. Yet, people of colour remain fairly absent from French cinema. When Céline Sciamma’s film Girlhood hit cinemas five years ago, the all-black female cast stirred a debate on representation in French film, in it being one of a few of its kind. So how do we categorise Sciamma’s film? Sciamma herself is a white, French woman, wherefore the film does not count as immigrant cinema according to the distinction made by Sandra Ponzanesi and Verena Berger. The characters of the film are supposedly second-generation immigrants – they appear to be well integrated in their community, with no signs of other languages spoken at home. The film does however position itself as postcolonial European cinema. Ponzanesi and Berger argue that the broad concept encompasses notions of identity and socio-political formations in former colonial powers and looks at the ways in which the colonial legacy is reproduced. Through the uplifting of alternative or marginalised narratives, postcolonial European cinema reshapes the way that we think about contemporary Europe.

The French-Tunisian thinker and essayist Albert Memmi coined the term “mark of the plural” in mapping out the dynamics between the coloniser and the colonised; a term descriptive of a dehumanising approach to the colonised subject that deprives him or her of individuality. As Ella Shohat and Robert Stam elaborate on, this approach makes any form of representation of said group an object of generalisation. Though assumedly not in explicit dialogue with Memmi, it seems that Girlhood deconstructs such an approach through the nuanced portraits of Marieme and her friends in the film. The film centers around a group of four, but in the second half of the film the group has grown to include over a dozen girls. In one scene the camera simply lingers on every individual for a while before moving on to the next: a compelling tracking shot reclaiming the right to individuality.

One exciting way in which the film reimagines notions of black female identity is in its play with the gaze. Through her experience as a black female spectator, bell hooks toys around with the concept and locates the black (cinematic) gaze within a history of oppressed gazes, tracing it to the slave/owner relation where slaves were forbidden to look their owners in the eyes. There is a scene in Girlhood mirroring this notion where the pimp Abou is enraged with Marieme and orders her direct her gaze to the floor. Elaborating on this power dynamics, hooks sees the development of the television – a viewing context in which the black community was allowed to gaze at white people all they wanted – as liberating in a sense. Even though television culture reproduced a white hegemonic worldview, it formed a passage to a critical gaze, or what hooks calls the oppositional gaze. The oppositional gaze enables spaces of agency. With Laura Mulvey’s famous text about the male gaze in mind, hooks brings an interesting perspective to the debate, namely turning what Mulvey sees as an oppressing male gaze into an enabling black gaze.

Black, yes – but male nonetheless. In the words of Anne Friedberg: “Identification can only be made through recognition, and all recognition is itself an implicit confirmation of the ideology of the status quo”. Since cinema reproduces a western, white, male perspective, a black female perspective is often missing (hooks writes her text in 1992, and I believe her argument to be relevant still although a lot has changed over the past 27 years). While the repressed gaze had been liberated in one sense by cinema and television culture, hooks returns to Mulvey’s line of reason when problematising the objects of the gaze and the identification or lack of identification it causes. In her famous formulation, the male becomes the bearer of the look and the female the object of desire. Recognising the power of the gaze, hooks suggests that without any subjects to identify with on screen, the black female spectator is often forced to resist identification and look the other way or to “not look too deep”, ignoring racism and sexism. hooks stresses that shaping an oppositional gaze is still possible for a black, female audience, however – and necessary – as a force of resistance. This oppositional gaze will pave way for a new cinema.

hooks ends her article with a description of a scene from the film Passion of Remembrance (Isaac Julien, Maureen Blackwood, 1986) which offers new points of recognition for a black female audience. Two female characters, Louise and Maggie, dress up to go dancing and are portrayed in a non-voyeuristic way that emphasises their subjectivity as black women. There are striking similarities between this scene and one of the pivotal scenes in Girlhood. The girls have rented a hotel room and filled it with booze, snacks and shoplifted dresses. They laugh, take bubble baths, smoke, dress up, drink, dance and fall asleep in a pile. The last part of the scene is built up like a music video to the diegetic beats of Rihanna’s song “Diamonds”: the girls look straight in the camera, mime and dance. But more than resembling an actual music video, what the scene mostly resembles is teenage girls’ attempts at resembling music videos aesthetics, something I believe many spectators recognise from their own youth. In contrast to a music video that aims at selling, this scene captures the pure joy of dancing for no one’s sake but your own.

The dancing scene has become famous for a reason; I believe it illustrates the transformation of the black female spectator to that from an outsider to that of an insider. Marieme initially sits on the bed, looking at the other three dancing. Her eyes glitter – it is as if she as spectator finally identifies with what she is looking at, paving the way for an oppositional gaze. Recognising in that moment herself through looking at others, the identification enables her to crawl up from the bed and join the dance. On a narrative level, this identification tells us about the self-discovery of a teenage girl, and on a symbolic level, it tells us about the long sought-after self-discovery of a black, female audience. Just as Marieme is invited to join the dancing, a black female audience is invited to recognise themselves and to rejoice in the celebration of black female sisterhood, emphasised by Marieme’s gaze straight into the camera.

Narrative conventions suggest that the building up of this scene would have it ending with some sort of involvement with boys, but it does not. The girls do not even leave the hotel room. The dancing and dressing up is done for the sole purpose of their own enjoyment. This refusal to adapt to an oppressing gaze is emphasised in the mise-en-scène (the hotel room as an enclosed environment), in the dialogue (Lady forcing Marieme to say: “I do what I want”), and in the lyrics of the song (“We’re beautiful like diamonds in the sky”, “I chose to be happy”). The naive notion of choosing happiness has an empowering quality in this specific context, not least since it contrasts to the harsh reality in which it is not as simple as choosing happiness. Marieme is weighed down by domestic responsibilities; taking care of her younger sisters under the harsh rule of her older brother, having to compromise with her own space, getting punished for not answering her phone when she gets back home.

Though she is never portrayed as a victim, Marieme’s life is shaped by patriarchal and racist structures and it is fair to assume that her story reflects many people’s realities in modern-day France. If the city of Paris symbolises white hegemony, it is foreign land to Marieme who lives in the suburb. The white shop assistant looks suspiciously at her when she enters a Parisian store and the only time we get a panoramic shot of the glittering city is from a high rise that Marieme helps her mother clean. The distance from the city is illustrated in the hilarious mini golf scene where one of the courses are shaped as the Eiffel tower. In my reading, this scene suggests that the girls form a new (city) center, a world evolving around them, inviting the audience to a new subjectivity and new notions of black femininity. It effectively emphasises the marginal perspective that characterises European postcolonial cinema: replacing the real Eiffel tower that has historically been the focal point of French cinema to an alternative one.

”Girlhood: The Film that Busts the Myth of Conventional French Femininity”. The Guardian. 4/5 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/may/04/girlhood-film-busts-myth-of-french-femininity.

hooks, bell. Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992.

Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Boston: Beacon Press, 1965.

Mulvey, Laura. ”Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. In Critical Vision in Film Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings, edited by Timothy Corrigan, Patricia White, Meta Mazaj. Boston and New York: Bedford/St Martin’s, 2011: 713-725.

Ponzanesi, Sandra and Verena Berger. “Introduction: Genres and Tropes in Postcolonial Cinema(s) in Europe”. Transnational Cinemas. Vol. 7, No. 2 (2016): 111-117.

Shohat, Robert and Ella Stam. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge, 2014.

Gräns

Post-national film and the Scandinavian Other – the deconstruction of borders in Border (Gräns, Ali Abbasi, 2018)

Winner of the Swedish award Guldbaggen for best motion picture, winner of Un certain regard in Cannes, Sweden’s Oscar nominee, Oscar nominated for best make-up… Ali Abbasi’s debut feature film Border (Gräns, 2018) must be considered one of last year’s biggest Swedish success. Based on a short story by John Ajvide Lindqvist, the film tells the tale of border police Tina who has the special ability of smelling out fear and guilt. Tina has a rather odd look (one might say ugly) with rough features, scrappy hair and a strange scar above her buttocks. When she meets the similarly rough Vore she learns the truth about her heritage – that she’s a troll.

The word border connotes a separation, a distinction of what or who belongs to either side of a drawn line. There are borders between countries, separating geographical regions, and borders that seek to separate one set of beings from another; man from animal, man from woman. In this essay, I argue that Border calls out the construction of these borders, on both a narrative and a structural level. Equal parts folklore fantasy and social realism, the film offers commentary on the historically rooted idea of the Scandinavian Other, toying with post-colonial concepts of normalcy and assimilation. On a narrative level, I read the film as echoing a Swedish history of oppressing minorities, and on a structural level I make the case that the film challenges the notion of national cinema, tying into a historical debate and actualising the term post-national.

Others in a Swedish context have historically been Sámi, Tornedalians, Jews, Romani people, and during the last decades, a wider range of immigrants. Let me be clear: I in no way intend to compare minorities in Sweden to trolls. Abbasi has made an entirely unique, artistic saga of alienation and belonging that however lends itself to thematical comparisons.

Sweden has a dark history of oppressing minorities. In her chapter of the anthology Whiteness and Postcolonialism in the Nordic Region, Anne Heith discusses the treatment of Sámi and Tornedalian people. Both minority groups have lived in Scandinavia for hundreds of years, predating the so-called ethnic Swedes. Tornedalen is a region that stretches between Sweden and Finland, and its people were brutally separated across the border between the countries as Finland gained independence from Sweden in 1917. The group have a language of their own, Meänkieli, but were forced by the state on both sides of the border to assimilate to either Sweden or Finland through education and language. The Sámi people live in the northern parts of Sweden, Norway, Finland and Russia and also have several different languages of their own. In Sweden, they have been forced to partly assimilate through language in a similar fashion. Both groups have been seen as inferior to the ethnic Swede and therefore mistreated in various ways. The notion of inferiority was fuelled by, and fuelled, the establishing of the world’s first institution of race biology in Uppsala 1922, that set up to divided humans into a hierarchy of races. A particularly chilling scene from Amanda Kernell’s recent film Sámi Blood (2016) illustrate how scientists from Uppsala came to Sámi communities to conduct studies on the Sámi. A couple of years after the establishment of the institute, in 1928, prime minister Per Albin Hansson coined the term Folkhemmet (“the people’s home”), a metaphor that came to inform the development of the Swedish welfare state in the following decades. The people’s home promised to provide its citizens with basic safety and equality.

The term has an ambiguousness to it, however. It visualises a border, namely the threshold to the house. In that it works as a compelling image of the patriarchal “assimilate or get excluded”-scheme that minorities were forced under. The establishing of a house is conditioned on an outside, just like ideas of Normalcy is conditioned on ideas of Otherness.

In Border, Tina articulates a feeling of alienation to society in the scene where she explains to her “father” how she’s been considered ugly and different all her life. When she learns the truth from Vore, confirmed by her father, she seems as distressed as relieved. Her real parents – trolls, also – were taken into a mental hospital and experimented on, her tail was cut off, and the truth was kept from Tina all her life. The cutting of the tail lends itself to comparisons to the forced sterilisations that were conducted in Sweden up to the 1970s on people who were seen as deviant. Up to the point when Tina meets Vore, she’s somewhat assimilated in the Swedish society: she has a job, some sort of platonic relationship with a man living in her house, she drives a car and eats regular food, albeit with a strong sense of alienation. Vore, on the other hand, refuses to assimilate. He’s a rebel of sorts, staying true to his nature and his needs, with a strong sense of injustice from dominant society which he sets out to take revenge on. By refusing to assimilate, Vore refuses to submit to the ideal of normalcy and to the division between human and animal, but also to the division between man and woman, as indicated in a highly original sex scene. Dominant society tries to – but cannot any longer – force Tina and Vore into categories of normalcy, despite the fact that they are neither human, animal, man or woman in the traditional sense, but something altogether different. The end scene, where Tina holds a baby troll, suggests that she (together with Vore, perhaps) will be forced to exclusion from society since nothing in the film hints at the possibility of living outspoken as a troll in dominant Swedish society.

Trolls are a recurrent mythological figure not only in Swedish folklore but all over Scandinavia. Trolls were understood as a threat, deceitful, ugly and greedy. Vore is a troll form Finland. Or at least, he has a Finnish accent and seems to be based in Finland but travels around. However ironic the fact that Tina works as a police woman maintaining the Swedish border to its neighbouring countries, Vore is not bothered by borders – his troll community stretches over (at least) two nations (Sweden and Finland). The construction of geographical borders seems to be yet another way to force the trolls in the film into categorisations that are not relevant to them. I do make the case that the film echoes a Swedish history of oppressing minorities, but part of that oppressive history involves forcing people into constructed geographical regions. If anything, Scandinavia as a region seems more apt to discuss than Sweden as a nation in relation both to minorities like the Tornedalians, the Sámi, and the trolls in the film.

This blurring of national borders also reflects in the production. Is Border a Swedish film? It is certainly understood so; the pivotal example being that it was Sweden’s Oscar nominee. Ali Abbasi is Swedish with Iranian decent. The actors are Swedish and Finnish. The film is recorded in Sweden with funds from the Swedish film institute and the Council of Europe (to mention some). Both Sweden and Denmark are noted as production countries. More relevant yet: both Abbasi and co-writer Isabella Eklöf studied at the film school in Copenhagen. In a widely read article in the film magazine FLM, Eklöf (in connection to the release of her controversial debut feature Holiday (2018)) claimed that Sweden has large issues with self-censorship and moralism that Denmark doesn’t. Both Border and Holiday have been hailed as artistic and unusually bold debut features, and the text invites to a debate about and an examination of what passes through Swedish film schools and what doesn’t. This opens to another dimension in the discussion about national film: can a film be considered national if its creative and artistic freedom derives from another country? Are ideas bound by national borders?

In the silent film era, Swedish film was often seen as soulful as compared to other national cinemas. Films like A Man There Was (Terje vigen, Victor Sjöström 1917), The Outlaw and His Wife (Berg-Ejvind och hans hustru, Victor Sjöström 1918) and The Saga of Gösta Berling (Gösta Berlings saga, Mauritz Stiller 1924) were staged in nature in innovative ways. This was initially praised by an international audience, but with Hollywood gaining dominance of the film market in the 1920s, perceived as provincial and old fashioned. As a response to the expansionism of Hollywood, or Film America as it was called then, Film Europa was formed – a pan-European collaborative effort to stand up against Film America’s market hegemony through shaping an equivalent European film industry. Film America was seen as culturally colonising Europe. This not only referred to the large import of American films, but of American production in Europe and more important yet: in the established film language. It was argued that European spectators became “temporary American citizens” through American film. The historical discussion that Andrew Higson and Richard Maltby account for in their text echoes a still ongoing debate about culture imperialism and cultural diversity and is interesting in the way that it conceptualises ideas of national and transnational cinema. In the effort to create a Film Europa, the idea was to recognise the culturally specific to different nations, but at the same time recognising that borders are malleable in the ambition to transform these ideas into a pan-European corporate strategy.

In his text “The Limiting Imagination of National Cinema”, Higson continues to explore the concept of national cinema and asks whether the concept is useful. He points out several problems with the definition, initially by calling out the definition of a nation and national identity. Is national identity fixed? He points out a bit of a paradox in the idea of national film. On the one hand, national film is expected to reflect on a common identity and a cultural heritage within a fixed nation, but on the other hand, it has to look outwards in order to define the nationally specific in relation to the international. The outspoken goal of state funded national film has since Film Europa often been to produce counter-narratives, cinema that distances itself from dominant film culture in the search for more local forms of expression. Historically, there has been an ambition to counter Hollywood. Higson goes on to argue, however, that state funding does not guarantee independent film, state policies merely have a “cosmetic” effect. He makes the case that national cinema has often been confused with counter cinema or critical cinema, but that it is something different than state funded national cinema. Rather, as the case of Film Europa shows, national film has a tendency to adjust to a conventional film language in its ambition to reach an international audience.

Higson argues that there are two ways in which films can be understood as transnational products. The first in its production. In the global capitalist economy of today, there is often some sort of exchange between countries in production, involving everything from actors and personnel, shooting locations, production companies and funding. The other way that films are transnational are in the distribution and reception. In the market of flows films travel and find markets outside of the national. New audiences bring new meaning into the films they see. Higson concludes that the concept is in many ways irrelevant, but that is opens for other relevant discussions and would be unwise to ignore since it has taken part in shaping the way we understand different cinema cultures. Elsaesser agrees that national cinema has lost its defining character and is in fact a weak determining factor of the outcome of a film. He prefers to speak of hybridity and uses the term post-national.

Abbasi plays with national stereotypes, not least in the depiction of Tina and Vore as free spirited and close to nature, which echoes the national stereotype that Olsson derives from Swedish silent cinema. By working with folklore, Abbasi does this somewhat ironically, or at least self-consciously. Border fits well into Higson’s concept of transnational cinema. As elaborated on earlier, the production stretches beyond the scope of Sweden. The film has also found an international audience and been critically acclaimed. Peter Bradshaw writes in his review in The Guardian that: “in all its freakiness, Ali Abbasi’s film Border is something between a superhero origin myth, a cop procedural and a body-horror romance”. Howard Fishman writes in The New Yorker that “Border may be the strangest, most beguiling film that I have ever seen” and critics at Variety and New York Times agree that the film is unlike anything they’ve seen, that it is strange and bizarre. The Swedish critic Jacob Lundström notes that the film has an international quality, not least in its horror elements, a genre not typical for Sweden. This goes to show that Border plays well with an audience outside of Sweden, while also standing out in its strangeness. The post-colonial notion of Otherness can therefore be applied to the reception of the film itself: it being a strange cousin to mainstream cinema, but in this case, neither excluded or forced to assimilate. A good example of counter-cinema, one might argue. Its strangeness is indicative of the fact that the film was not produced by dominant Hollywood, where profit is secured by “playing it safe”. So though not a “national film”, at least it was made possible with the ideas behind national cinema.

With this essay, I have tried to show the various ways in which the film Border deconstructs the notion of borders by tying the film into a historical debate of national film as well as a post-colonial understanding of Otherness. On a narrative level, this involves the depiction of Tina and Vore as beings that cannot be forced into categorisations of gender and species. Society’s denial of their true nature and their forced assimilation reflects a Swedish history of forcing the racialised Other to adjust to ideas of Normalcy. Moreover, the film doesn’t play into a certain genre. Rather, it is a mashup of horror, social realism, fantasy and crime. On a structural level, the film is understood to be Swedish, and does reflect on both Swedish cultural heritage and history. However, the influx of ideas, funding, actors, story-telling modes and address in the production and resulting film testify to a reality where national identity is not fixed but negotiable. In fact, to add on to Higson’s definition of the transnational film, I would like to make the case that immaterial factors such as the flow of ideas, inspiration and meaning-making when it comes to production makes the most compelling argument against the claim that film can be defined in national terms. Ideas are not defined by borders. More suitable yet, I would like to use the term post-national rather than transnational to describe Border. It is not so much an exchange between different countries as a hybrid; a hypnotising, daring blurring of borders.

Bradshaw, Peter. ”Border review: into the woods for a body-horror romance”. The Guardian 7/3/2019. Controlled 22/3/2019. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/mar/07/border-review-ali-abbasi.

Böjesen, Björn. ”Troll spred rädsla i Norden”. Illustrerad vetenskap historia 5/2/2018. Controlled 22/3/2019. https://varldenshistoria.se/samhalle/mytologi/troll-spred-radsla-i-norden.

Eklöf, Isabella. ”Isabella Eklöf: Sverige har ett reellt problem med självcensur”. FLM 25/10/2018. Controlled 22/3/2019. http://flm.nu/2018/10/isabella-eklof-sverige-har-ett-reellt-problem-med-sjalvcensur/.

Fishman, Howard. ”I accidentally walked into ‘Border’, and it kind of changed my life”. The New Yorker 28/12/2018. Controlled 22/3/2019. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/i-accidentally-walked-into-border-and-it-kind-of-changed-my-life.

Hansson, Sven Ove. ”Rashygien i Sverige”. Vetenskap och folkbildning. Controlled 22/3/2019. https://www.vof.se/folkvett/ar-1992/nr-1/rashygienen-i-sverige/.

Kenny, Glenn. “Review: sniffing out guilt in strangely engaging ‘Border’”. New York Times 25/10/2018. Controlled 22/3/2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/movies/border-review.html.

Lundström, Jacob. ”Ali Abbasi och den svenska filmens internationella makeover”. FLM 10/5/2018. Controlled 22/2/2019. http://flm.nu/2018/05/ali-abbasis-grans-och-den-svenska-filmens-internationella-makeover/.

Simon, Alissa. ”Film Review: ’Border’”. Variety 11/5/2018. Controlled 22/3/2019. https://variety.com/2018/film/reviews/border-review-grans-1202807503/.

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Heith, Anne. “Aesthetics and Ethnicity: The Role of Boundaries in Sámi and Tornedalian Art”. In Whiteness and Postcolonialism in the Nordic Region. Edited by Kristín Loftsdóttir and Lars Jensen. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2012, 159-173.

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