Nobody champions world cinema like Cinema Paradiso. Every now and then, we turn the spotlight on to a particular country to introduce its filmic heritage. Previously, we have visited the Czech Republic, South Korea and Poland, as well as the various nations of Latin America. On this occasion, we shall focus on Norway.
It's quite a momentous time for Norwegian cinema. The Glasgow Film Festival has just devoted a retrospective strand to pioneering female film-maker Edith Carlmar, while next month sees BFI Southbank pay tribute to the peerless actress-director, Liv Ullmann, who has just been presented with an Honorary Academy Award. Moreover, Joachim Trier's The Worst Person in the World (2021) is in the running for Best International Film, as Norway seeks to win its first Academy Award for seven decades.
So, come with us to discover the Nordic treats in store in Cinema Paradiso's unrivalled home entertainment collection.
Mists of Time
No one quite know when the first film was made in Norway. The country had only gained independence from Sweden in 1905, so nobody jotted down whether Hugo Hermansen's long-lost Dangers of a Fisherman's Life was made in 1906 or 1908. There's no such mystery about Roald Amundsen's South Pole Journey (1910-1912) , however, as the explorer made sure his name was up front and centre in this priceless record of a race across the frozen wastes that was also recounted from the losing perspective in Charles Frend's Scott of the Antarctic (1948).
Although a clutch of silent pictures rose above the norm, including Ottar Gladtvet's The Daughter of the Revolution (1918), Gunnar Sommerfeld's Growth of the Soil (1921) and Rasmus Breisten's The Bridal Procession in Hardanger (1926), the majority of Norwegian films were modest affairs. Indeed, one of the legacies of this cottage industry period is that films are still produced on a regional basis rather than being centralised at the Filmparken studios in Oslo.
Sound came with Tancred Ibsen's The Great Christening (1931), but Norwegian film-makers were largely silenced during the Second World War, apart from the pro-Axis Leif Sinding, who eventually resumed his career after serving a prison term for collaborating with the enemy.
National Heroes
Cinema Paradiso users may already be familir with Anthony Mann's The Heroes of Telemark (1965), which chronicled a 1942 raid on a Nazi heavy water plant. But Norway has produced a number war-related films of its own, including Per-Olav Sørensen's The Saboteurs (2015), which also centres on Adolf Hitler's efforts to develop an atom bomb on Norwegian soil.
Set in 1940, Erik Poppe's The King's Choice (2016) examines the dilemma about whether to remain or in Oslo or flee facing King Haakon at the start of the occupation, while Harald Zwart's The 12th Man (2017) revisits one of Norway's most beloved films, Arne Skouen's Nine Lives (1957), to celebrate the fortitude, ingenuity and courage of resistance fighter Jan Baalsrud, who survived 27 days in sub-zero temperatures after leading a sabotage mission. The Holocaust also impacted upon Norway, as is revealed in Jens Jonsson's The Spy (2019), Ross Clarke's The Birdwatcher (2019), Erik Svensson's Betrayed (2020) and Johanne Helgeland's The Crossing (2021).
When peace returned, Norway made headlines thanks to the exploits of adventurer and ethnographer, Thor Heyerdahl. He recorded his 1947 nautical expedition from Peru to French Polynesia on a balsa wood raft and promptly won the Oscar for Best Documentary with Kon-Tiki (1950). Heyerdahl can also be seen in Harald Reinl's fascinating film version of Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods (1970), while he was played by Pål Sverre Hagen in Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg's imposing 2012 biopic, Kon-Tiki.
Norwegian film-makers have often filmed the lives of national heroes. Sandberg and Hagen, for example, went on to reunite on Amundsen (2019), while documentarist Benjamin Ree's Magnus (2016) profiles chess prodigy, Magnus Carlsen, who remains world champion and has topped the global rankings for 11 years. While better known for ground-breaking actualities like Culloden (1964) and The War Game (1965), as well as such challenging fictional features as Privilege (1967) and Punishment Park (1971), British director Peter Watkins also traced the career of Norway's most famous painter in Edvard Munch (1974).
Sadly, it's not possible to see Thomas Olofsson's documentary, Edvard Grieg: What Price Immortality? (1999). But Cinema Paradiso members can learn about the life of Norway's finest composer in Andrew L. Stone's Song of Norway (1970), while also hearing some of his music on Grieg: Folk and Dance Melodies/Scenes From Norway (2000) and Morecambe & Wise: Christmas Specials (2007). You know, with André Preview!
No one has yet made a biopic of Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen (whose grandson directed the country's first talkie). However, a number of his works are available to rent from Cinema Paradiso, including Ghosts (1987) - which can be found on the BBC's six-disc Judi Dench Collection (2007) - Jonathan Demme's A Master Builder (2013) and Simon Stone's The Daughter (2015), which was inspired by Ibsen's The Wild Duck.
Live and Let Liv
Buoyed by its Oscar success, Norwegian cinema entered what many consider to be its golden age. The Norwegian Film Institute was founded in 1955, while the first inklings of Nordic noir were felt in such thrillers as Edith Carlmar's Death Is a Caress (1949) and Kore Bergstrom's Lake of the Dead (1958). Known as 'Norway's Ida Lupino' (the London-born actress-director whose career is amply covered by Cinema Paradiso), Carlmar was a stage actress who set up her own production company with her screenwriter husband. In addition to making the beloved comedy, Fools in the Mountains (1957), she also directed The Wayward Girl (1959), which showcased the young Liv Ullmann.
Having started on the stage, Ullmann became an international star through her collaboration with Ingmar Bergman. Cinema Paradiso users can learn more about the Swedish auteur from 21 Reasons to Love Ingmar Bergman, but his connection with Ullmann is worthy of a little more attention. She first worked with him on Persona (1966), in which she plays a stage actress who has suddenly stopped speaking and is placed in the care of a nurse (Bibi Andersson). This was a landmark title in Bergman's evolution as an artist, as it saw him incorporate ideas from the nouvelle vague.
He also paired Ullmann with Max von Sydow in Hour of the Wolf, Shame (both 1968) and The Passion of Anna (1969), which respectively centre on a wife struggling to cope with her husband's dangerous delusions, a couple on a remote island being dragged into a conflict, and a divorcé and a widow who are overwhelmed by secrets from their pasts.
The actors would reunite in Laslo Benedek's gripping escape saga, The Night Visitor (1971), which Ullmann made the year after she had co-starred with Charles Bronson and James Mason in Terence Young's tense kidnap and smuggling thriller, Cold Sweat (1970). She returned to the Bergman fold with Ingrid Thulin and Harriet Andersson for Cries and Whispers (1972), a sobering study of sisterhood and grief that will return to cinemas in April to mark its 50th anniversary. However, Cinema Paradiso users can see it without leaving home, simply by clicking Add on the film link.
Erland Josephson and Ullmann would play opposite each other again in Scenes From a Marriage (1973), which has lost none of its insight into relationships over five decades. Following a brief appearance in Bergman's take on Mozart's The Magic Flute (1976), Ullmann played a Dutch woman resisting the Nazis in Richard Attenborough's A Bridge Too Far (1977). She also excelled as a widow coming to terms with the fact that her late husband had a mistress (Amanda Redman) in Anthony Harvey's Richard's Things (1982).
But Ullmann remained synonymous with Ingmar Bergman. In The Serpent's Egg (1977), she plays a cabaret singer in 1920s Berlin who joins brother-in-law David Carradine in trying to discover why her husband committed suicide. However, she's in even more august company in Autumn Sonata (1978), as she plays the daughter of concert pianist and distant mother Ingrid Bergman in a powerful chamber drama.
Clearly, Ullmann made an impression on the three-time Oscar winner, as she features in Stig Björkman's documentary, Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words (2015). She also appears in Jane Magnusson's Bergman: A Year in a Life (2018), which is how it should be, as she not only starred with Erland Josephson in Bergman's final feature, Saraband (2003), but she had also directed Josephson and Lena Endre in Faithless (2001), which Bergman had scripted from an incident in his own life.
Interestingly, Ullmann turned down a number of projects that might have connected her to even bigger audiences, including Brian De Palma's Dressed to Kill (1980), Bergman's Fanny and Alexander (1982) and Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's 12 (2004). She also declined a role in three episodes of Sex and the City (1998-2004).
An Emerging Force
Norwegian cinema went through a political phase during the mid-1970s, with Oddvar Bull Tuhus's Strike! (1974), Anja Breien's Wives (1975) and Svend Wam's The Silent Majority (1977) all making an impact. But the biggest hit of this period was Ivo Caprino's stop-motion puppet masterpiece, The Pinchcliffe Grand Prix (1975), which deserves to be much better known and is certainly worth a UK disc release!
Yet Norwegian cinema remained in the doldrums, as the small domestic audience made feature production seem like a risky financial investment. The Nordic Film and Television Fund was introduced in 1990 to encourage co-productions between Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland, which resulted in Jan Troell's Hamsun (1996), in which Max von Sydow played Knut Hamsun, the Norwegian author who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920 before going on to support Adolf Hitler.
Eventually, the government stepped in and founded the Norwegian Film School in 1994, while the Norwegian Film Fund was launched in 2001 to boost annual production. This initiative coincided with Peter Naess's comedy, Elling (2001), being nominated for an Oscar, while Even Benestad's All About My Father (2002) won the Teddy Award at the Berlin Film Festival for its profile of the director's trans parent.
Pål Øie's Dark Woods (2003) established the Norwegian horror tradition, while Arild Andresen's The Liverpool Goalie (2010) and Jannicke Systad Jacobsen's Turn Me On, Dammit! (2011) confirmed a reputation for kidpix and teenpix that remains strong to this day. Moreover, Norway finally produced a domestic blockbuster with the resistance epic, Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg's Max Manus: Man of War (2008), which stars Aksel Hennie as the volunteer who survived the Winter War against the Soviet Union to resist the Nazi occupation under Vidkun Quisling. Poppe is currently making a film about the man whose name has become synonymous with treachery, but it's unlikely to challenge Max Manus's domestic box-office record of 98 million kroner.
The Big Hitters
In the vanguard of the new wave of Norwegian directors was Nils Gaup, who made history with Pathfinder (1987), an Oscar-nominated adventure set in Finnmark in 1000 AD, which was the first feature made exclusively in the Northern Sami language. He has continued to explore the past with films like Shipwrecked (1990), a Disney-financed variation on Robinson Crusoe that is set in the 1850s, and The Last King (2016), which recalls the 13th-century civil war between the ruling Birkebeiner clan and their rivals for the throne, the Baglers.
Gaup has had his brushes with Hollywood, as his much-admired drama, Head Above Water (1993) - which won the Amanda Award, Norway's equivalent of the Oscar - was remade two years later by Jim Wilson, with Harvey Keitel and Cameron Diaz. He was also in line to direct Kevin Costner in Waterworld (1995) before he quit over rising costs. However, he has since proved his versatility and bankability with Journey to the Christmas Star (2012), which was adapted from a beloved 1920s play by Sverre Brandt.
Equally prominent was Hans Petter Moland, who followed success with the 1920s fur trapping saga, Zero Kelvin (1995), with a reunion with Swedish star Stellan Skarsgård on the family drama, Aberdeen (2000). Such was Moland's growing reputation that Nick Nolte and Tim Roth starred in The Beautiful Country (2004), which was set in Vietnam and drew on a story that Terrence Malick had written under the pseudonym, Lingard Jervey.
Sadly, it's not possible to see either A Somewhat Gentle Man (2010) or Out Stealing Horses (2019). But Cinema Paradiso users can discover Moland's talent for locating characters within evocative landscapes in the chilling revenge thriller, In Order of Disappearance (2014), and its English-language remake, Cold Pursuit (2019), which respectively star Stellan Skarsgård and Liam Neeson. Moland, who also ventured into Nordic Noir territory with the Section Q mystery, A Conspiracy of Faith (2016), is married to fellow director Maria Sødahl, who followed the well-received Limbo (2010) with Hope (2019), in which Skarsgård nurses a wife diagnosed with brain cancer.
Skarsgård also took the lead in Erik Skjoldbjaerg's Insomnia (1997), as a Swedish cop who tries to cover up the accidental shooting of his partner while investigating a case above the Arctic Circle. Al Pacino essayed the role in Christopher Nolan's 2002 remake. Having directed Christina Ricci in an adaptation of Elizabeth Wurtzel's Prozac Nation (2001), Skjoldbjaerg scored another hit with Pioneer (2013), which sees diver Aksel Hennie seeking to expose the cover-up of an accident that occurred during the laying of an underwater oil pipeline in the 1980s.
The petroleum industry is also at the heart of the acclaimed TV series, Occupied (2015-19), which imagines a Russian invasion to secure fuel supplies after an eco-conscious government halts drilling. Skjoldbjaerg is one of many renowned directors to have worked on the show, as is Pål Sletaune, whose Junk Mail (1997) won a raft of domestic awards in revealing how snooping postman Robert Skjærstad protects laundry assistant Eli Anne Linnestad from a vicious gangster.
Sletaune became only the fifth director in Norwegian screen history to receive an over-18 certificate for Next Door (2005), which sees a man being lured into a dangerous relationship with two sisters who seem to know everything about him. Kristoffer Joner also teamed with Noomi Rapace for Babycall (2011), in which a single mother forges an attachment to an over-protected son.
Lightening the mood somewhat was Bent Hamer, who followed his impressive debut, Eggs (1995), with Kitchen Stories (2003), which amusingly chronicles the encounter between a 1950s Norwegian farmer and a functionary from Sweden's Home Research Institute. More serious was Factotum (2005), which was based on a novel by Charles Bukowski and starred Matt Dillon as an aspiring writer who winds up becoming a barfly after ill-starred relationships with fellow alcoholics, Lili Taylor and Marisa Tomei.
Hamer returned to comedy with O'Horten (2007), which features a wonderfully deadpan performance by Bård Owe, as a change-averse train driver who has to rethink the habits of a lifetime after retiring. Thirtysomething drug addict Anders (Anders Danielsen Lie) is also pessimistic about turning his life around in Joachim Trier's Oslo, August 31st (2011), a loose reworking of Pierre Drieu La Rochelle's novel, Will O' the Wisp, which earned Trier the Amanda for Best Director.
This is the central strand in a trilogy located in the capital that also includes Reprise (2006) and The Worst Person in the World (2021). The former teams Anders Danielsen Lie and Espen Klouman Høiner as a pair of aspiring Oslovian novelists whose paths diverge when the latter gets a book published and the former tries to commit suicide. Danielsen Lie also appears as a comic-book artist in the last part of the triptych, although the film belongs to Renate Reinsve, whose performance as an ambitious photographer earned her the Best Actress prize at Cannes.
In addition to the nomination for Best International Film, Trier is also up for Best Original Screenplay with regular writing partner, Eskil Vogt, who impressed as a director with Blind (2014), in which Ellen Dorrit Petersen excels as a writer whose failing sight makes her fear she is being watched by her husband.
Trier made his English-language bow with Louder Than Bombs (2015), which centres on the secrets that Gabriel Byrne tries to keep while curating an exhibition of pictures by his long-dead war photographer wife (Isabelle Huppert). Curiously, this theme bears echo with compatriot Erik Poppe's A Thousand Times Good Night (2014), in which Juliette Binoche also plays a combat correspondent who grows distant from her son.
Poppe further impressed with Utøya: July 22, which fictionalised the events of the sickening 2011 massacre perpetrated by Anders Breivik, which is presented in more factual form by Paul Greengrass in 22 July (both 2018). Reuniting with Vogt, Trier earned further critical acclaim for Thelma (2017), an unsettling thriller in which a sheltered teenager discovers she has telekinetic powers when she falls in love with a female classmate.
A number of Norwegian film-makers have left their homeland to pursue their careers in Hollywood. Among them is Harald Zwart, the Dutch-born, but Norwegian- raised director of One Night At McCool's (2001), Agent Cody Banks (2003), The Pink Panther 2 (2008), The Karate Kid (2010) and The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones (2013), which are all available to rent from Cinema Paradiso. As are the Oscar winner, The Imitation Game (2014), Passengers (2016) and the TV series Jack Ryan (2018-19), which have been made by Morten Tyldum following his domestic success with Headhunters (2011), which stars Aksel Hennie as a corporate wheeler-dealer with a double life as an art thief.
Even before he had co-directed Max Manus: Man of War (2008) and Kon-Tiki (2012), Joachim Rønning had paired Penélope Cruz and Salma Hayek in the Mexican Western, Bandidas (2006). Since when, he has collaborated with Johnny Depp on Pirates of the Caribbean: Salazar's Revenge (2017), which also features a cameo by Paul McCartney, and with Angelina Jolie on Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (2019).
NFS graduate Roar Uthaug has also done very nicely for himself since debuting with Cold Prey (2006), in which a group of snowboarders come to regret sheltering in an remote chalet. He focussed on an historical pursuit in Escape (2012), which is set against the 14th-century Black Death and follows the efforts of an orphan girl to keep her brother out of the clutches of a female bandit.
There's peril of a geological nature in The Wave (2015), as an avalanche causes a tsunami in a fjord and, such was the success of this disaster movie, that Kristoffer Joner and Ane Dahl Torp reunited in John Andreas Andersen's sequel, The Quake (2018). Uthaug has since found himself in Hollywood, where he directed Swedish actress Alicia Vikander in the remake of Tomb Raider (2018).
Following his achievement with Elling, Petter Naess directed Josh Hartnett and Radha Mitchell in the comedy drama, Mozart and the Whale (2005), which was written by Ron Bass, who had won an Academy Award for his screenplay for Barry Levinson's Rain Man (1988). Naess also starred Rupert Grint in Cross of Honour (2012), which is also known as Into the White, and draws on actual events for its tale of Luftwaffe and RAF airmen sharing a crashed plane in order to survive a Norwegian winter. Also based on a true story, Häkon Gundersen's Betrayal (2009) turns on the relationship between an Oslo club owner happy to profit from the conflict (Fridtjov Såheim) and a singer who is a British double agent (Lene Nystrøm).
While we're on the subject of the war, we should mention Reinert Kiil's The Winter Siege (aka The House, 2016), a variation on Michael Mann's The Keep (1983) that pitches two Nazi soldiers and their Norwegian prisoner into a haunted house. Eric Bress's Ghosts of War (2020) examines similar themes, but excess matters more than conscience in the Tommy Wirkola duo, Dead Snow (2009) and Dead Snow 2: Red vs Dead (2014), in which a unit of zombie Nazis respectively defend a horde of gold and fend off some undead Soviet prisoners.
Wirkola has since made his way to Hollywood to put Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton through their paces in Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013), while fellow horror specialist André Øvredal has benefited from the cult success of Troll Hunter (2010) by landing such Hollywood gigs as The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016), Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019) and Mortal (2020). The latter draws on Norse mythology, as do Mikkel Brænne Sandemose's Ragnarok: The Viking Apocalypse (2013) and Marvel's Chris Hemsworth vehicles, Thor (Kenneth Branagh, 2011), Avengers Assemble (Joss Weedon, 2012), Thor: The Dark World (Alan Taylor, 2013), Avengers: Age of Ultron (Weedon, 2015), Thor: Ragnarok (Taika Waititi, 2017), Avengers: Infinity War (Anthony and Jay Russo, 2018), Avengers: Endgame (Russo, 2019) and Thor: Love and Thunder (Waititi, 2022).
Watch These - Norwegians Would
Jens Lien's witty satire on conformity, The Bothersome Man (2006), is a fine place to kick off our round-off of the remaining Norwegian titles in the Cinema Paradiso catalogue. By contrast, a would-be rebel is forced to rethink his priorities after developing a gay crush on a classmate in Stian Kristiansen's romcom, The Man Who Loved Yngve (2008).
A neglected wife is drawn towards a hunky, but equally married neighbour in Anne Sewitsky's Happy, Happy (2010). But reunited childhood friends Marie Bonnevie and Kristoffer Joner realise that the latter's brother is always going to jeopardise their happiness in Sara Johnsen's drama, All That Matters Is Past (2012). Bonnevie also impresses as the bipolar mother whose mood swings leave teenage daughter Ylva Bjørkaas Thedin to hold the family together in Camilla Strøm-Henriksen's poignant debut, Phoenix (2018).
A mother's death draws father and son closer together in Matias Armand Jordal's Sammen (2009), another example of Norwegian cinema's ability to treat the issues facing children and young adults with insight and maturity. However, the country also has a reputation for keeping tinier viewers entertained with escapist fare, whether it's live-action romps like Arild Fröhlich's Doctor Proctor's Fart Powder and John Andreas Andersen and Lisa Marie Gamlem's Captain Sabertooth and the Treasure of Lama Rama (both 2014) or such animations as Rasmus A. Sivertsen's Louis and Luca: The Big Cheese Race (2015) and Louis and Luca and the Snow Machine (2018), Lise I. Osvall's Cattle Hill, Árni Ásgeirsson's Flying the Nest (both 2018), and Atle Solberg Blakseth Ella Bella Bingo (2020).
Older teenagers will appreciate Marius Holst's King of Devil's Island (2010), which reconstructs the 1915 mutiny at the notorious juvenile prison colony of Bastøy. Holst was also responsible for the tense thriller, Dragonflies (2001), which places Kim Bodnia and Maria Bonnevie in danger when he is tracked down by his onetime partner in crime, Mikael Persbrandt.
We've already encountered two very different films adapted from the writings of Norway's king of ScandiCrime in Headhunters and Doctor Proctor's Fart Powder. But fans of Jo Nesbø can also rely on Cinema Paradiso to deliver them Magnus Martens's Jackpot (2011) and Tomas Alfredson's The Snowman (2017), in which pools winner Kyrre Hellum and cop Michael Fassbender are respectively suspected of a serial killing and forced to investigate one.
A stranger than fiction tale involving Nato and the royal family unfolds in Thomas Cappelen Malling's adventure caper, Norwegian Ninja (2010). This is set in 1984, but we have to go back a decade earlier for Patrik Syversen's sinister blood sport chiller, Manhunt (2008), which takes a turn for the menacing when four friends pull over to pick up a female hitcher. Two more motorists come to regret stopping in the forest in Severin Eskeland's Detour (2009) and further dark deeds take place in the woods when a mythical creature goes on the loose in Aleksander Nordaas's Thale (2012). Before you start thinking every Norwegian horror is set in woodland, Henrik Martin Dahlsbakken reveals the perils awaiting in the dank depths of a remote mountain range in Cave (2016).
Having pointed you in the direction of such popular Norwegian TV shows as Dag (2010-15), Mammon, Eyewitness (both 2014), Nobel (2016) and Valkyrien (2017), we shall conclude with a clutch of documentaries. These include Knut Erik Jensen's Cool and Crazy (2001), which follows the celebrated Berlevåg Male Choir on a tour the United States in the autumn of 2001, in the aftermath of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Also worth seeking out are Kenneth Elvebakk's Ballet Boys, Tonje Hessen Schei's Drone and Cathedrals of Culture (all 2014), which contains segments directed by Robert Redford, Wim Wenders, Karim Aïnouz, Michael Madsen and Michael Glawogger, as well as Norway's Margreth Olin.
