Dagur Kari S Noi The Albino

Dagur Kari’s Noi the Albino (Noi albinoi, 2003) succeeded on the international festival circuit as a film that was both distinctively Icelandic and appealingly universal. Noi the Albino taps into perennial themes of escapism and existential angst, while its setting in the Westfjords of Iceland provided an almost surreal backdrop whose particularities of place are uniquely Icelandic. Bjorn Nordfjord’s examination of the film integrates the broad context and history of Icelandic cinema into a close reading of Noi the Albino’s themes, visual style, and key scenes. The book also includes an interview with director Dagur Kari. Noi the Albino’s successful negotiation of the tensions between the local and the global contribute to the film’s status as a contemporary classic. Its place within the history of Icelandic cinema highlights the specific problems this small nation faces as it pursues its filmmaking ambitions, allowing us to appreciate the remarkable success of Kari’s film in relation to the challenges of transnational filmmaking.

The Nordic countries, a group of countries spanning a large area of northern Europe and the North Atlantic, present unique natural and cultural environments in which popular music has come to play a significant role. Research on the region's music has largely followed national narratives and ignored more complex geographies and transcultural issues. This first handbook of music in the Nordic countries explores the significance of popular music in the history of the region, with implications for broader debates about the region's uniqueness and its future. The chapters highlight music's place in media and tourism industries, in sustaining exotic images of the North, but also in more serious issues such as racism and environmentalism.

"Split into four sections, the book reviews the soundtracks and summarises the films that spawned them. The first part covers the breadth of pop and rock musical feature films: from Rock Around the Clock through to The Pick of Destiny. Section two concentrates on documentary and performance films, from the classic summer of love sounds of Woodstock to the contemporary inter-band rivalry of Dig!" "The third part explores the soundtracks of the great cult films of recent memory, where pop culture and pulp fiction meet, such as Trainspotting, Easy Rider and Reservoir Dogs. The final section will look at rock star scores, the rock and pop film scores and the pop luminaries behind them, such as Peter Gabriel, Nick Cave and Ry Cooder."--BOOK JACKET.

This book provides an analysis of the global working class on film and considers the ways in which working-class experience is represented in film around the world. The book argues that representation is important because it shapes the way people understand working-class experience and can either reinforce or challenge stereotypical depictions. Film can shape and shift discussions of class, and this book provides an interdisciplinary study of the ways in which working-class experience is portrayed through this medium. It analyses the impact of contemporary films such as Sorry To Bother You, This is England and Le Harve that focus on working class life. Attfield demonstrates that the global working class are characterised by diversity of race, ethnicity, gender, religion and sexuality but that there are commonalities of experience despite geographical distance and cultural difference. The book is structured around themes such as work, culture, diasporas, gender and sexuality, and race.

European cinema not only occupies a dominant place in film history, it is also a field that has been raising more interest with the expanding work on the transnational. Euro-Visions asks what idea of Europe emerges, is represented and constructed by contemporary European film. Adopting a broad and wide-ranging approach, Euro-Visions mixes political sources, historical documents and filmic texts and offers an integration of policy and economic contexts with textual analysis. Mariana Liz examines costume dramas, biopics and war films, mainstream co-productions and tales of 'Fortress Europe' by renowned auteurs, showing how films from different European nations depict and contribute to the formation of the idea of Europe. Case studies include Girl with a Pearl Earring, La Vie en Rose, Black Book, Good Bye Lenin!, Match Point and The Silence of Lorna.