Norway and the Second World War: The King’s Choice (2016), Number 24 (2024); Quisling: The Final Days (2024); and The Battle of Oslo (2025)

Kevin Brianton, Adjunct Senior Research Fellow, La Trobe University

The Second World War continues to provide a rich source of material for filmmakers, and Norway has recently produced some outstanding films about the conflict. About a decade ago, the Norwegian film The King’s Choice (2016), titled Kongens nei (or the “King’s No”) in Norway, depicted the dilemma facing the Norwegian King during the German invasion. It covered three dramatic days in April 1940, when Nazi Germany invaded Norway. King Haakon VII, his son Crown Prince Olav, and the Norwegian government were forced to flee the capital, Oslo, while being hunted by German troops and planes. The German envoy pressured the King to surrender and accept a puppet government led by Vidkun Quisling. The King refused to capitulate and stated he would abdicate if the government surrendered, choosing a government in exile to save his country’s honor. It proved to be the top box-office film in Norway and, a decade later, it has laid the groundwork for a trio of films about the invasion and its aftermath.

The King’s Choice features the sinking of the German heavy cruiser Blücher, and this is covered in far more detail in The Battle of Oslo (2025), titled Blücher in Norway. In The King’s Choice, it is presented as the heroic action of a determined Norwegian military leader. An entirely different picture is revealed in The Battle of Oslo. The film looks closely at the decisions taken by the Fortress Commander Colonel Birger Eriksen, played by Bjørn Sundquist, in opening fire on the German fleet, which delayed the invasion and allowed time for the King and government to flee.

*The Basttle of Oslo* is the most recent film in a series where Norwegian filmmakers deal with the Second World War

The Blücher spearheaded a fleet steaming up the Oslofjord to try to capture Oslo and to capture King Haakon VII and the Norwegian government. Colonel Eriksen, the 64-year-old commander of the undermanned, aging Oscarsborg Fortress, spotted the warships heading toward Oslo. With no clear orders from high command or the government and vital minutes ticking away, he ordered his garrison to open fire. The fortress’s coastal guns and a hidden torpedo battery struck the flagship Blücher at close range, causing devastating explosions that capsized and sank the vessel. The sinking caused the other ships in the fleet to retreat and delayed the German advance. These vital hours gave the King, the royal family, and the government, along with the nation’s gold reserve, enough time to safely escape the capital. The fort was then subject to naval and aerial bombardment before Eriksen surrendered.

Directed by Daniel Fahre, the film cleverly weaves two timelines together: the gripping 1940 battle at the fortress and the lesser-known 1946 post-war military trials where Eriksen had to fight for his honour. Initially, Eriksen was decorated for his actions. Despite his heroics in saving the government, he later faced a harsh military commission of inquiry after the war to defend his subsequent surrender of the ruined fortress after enduring 10 hours of heavy Luftwaffe and naval bombardment. The commission is depicted as a political farce determined to shift blame from the government to a commander forced to make impossible decisions. In the film, Eriksen points out he was understaffed with antiquated equipment and resorted to using cooks and anyone available to operate and fire the guns. He was given no direction from the high command or the government at any point. The film delivers a vicious statement on the vagaries of heroism, and it is strongly condemnatory of the Norwegian government – before and after the war.

Number 24 celebrates the calculated heroism of saboteur Gunnar Sønsteby

Another film sheds light on the dark side of heroism. Number 24 (2024) – Nr. 24 in Norwegian, directed by John Andreas Andersen. The film looks at a universally celebrated Norwegian hero of the Second World War. Based on the real-life story of World War II resistance fighter Gunnar Sønsteby, Number 24 celebrates the calculated heroism of the saboteur, who is played by Sjur Vatne Brean. Before the war, Sønsteby is an unremarkable figure who works as an accountant. Yet, challenged by the occupation, Sønsteby reveals himself as clear-headed, cold-hearted, and ruthlessly efficient. His meticulous planning and extraordinary personal self-control make him an ideal conduit for the English to provide money, weapons, and targets to the resistance.

Like The Battle of Oslo, the film also looks back on his heroism from the perspective of the post-war period. Andersen structures his resistance drama around an elderly Sønsteby, played by Erik Hivju, who recounts his wartime experiences to students. This framing device heightens the tension between past heroics and present trauma as the aging saboteur visibly struggles with what he calls “the fifth drawer in his mind,” where bitter memories are locked away. The narrative shifts between past and present, alternating between exciting sabotage scenes and painful reflections on the morality of resistance violence. Sønsteby’s strict self-control is an essential survival tactic, but even his remarkable resilience is tested when a young student confronts him about wartime executions of Norwegian collaborators. This is the moral centre of the film. It begins with friends skiing before the war, while debating the current issue of book burning. It ends with a letter, now in a museum, from one of the friends condemning the other to the German authorities.

It has many links to Melville’s Army of Shadows (1969), as both films strip resistance movements of Hollywood heroism, revealing the psychological toll of clandestine warfare. Melville filmed the resistance in a gangster-noir vein: shadowy safe houses, trench coats, and agonizing silences. Andersen, by contrast, cuts between Sønsteby’s sabotage missions and his elderly self’s post-traumatic stress disorder. Both films grapple with the problematic issue of executing traitors within the resistance. A student challenges Sønsteby’s assassinations, proposing nonviolent alternatives. His response is “Gandhi didn’t face the Nazis,” but the framing device prompts the audience to question that answer, even though the student’s question seems almost naively simple. Andersen’s Sønsteby is not condemned like Eriksen, but is celebrated as a national hero, yet the film lingers on his trauma, his “fifth drawer” of long-suppressed memories, suggesting that heroism and suffering are inseparable. The film opens with the statement: “I have five drawers in my mind. The three top drawers, I open all the time. The fourth, less often. I closed the bottom drawer 8 May 1945 and haven’t opened it since.”

Number 24 wrestles with dealing with traitors, but Quisling: The Final Days (2024), titled Quislingens siste dager in Norway, deals with high-level treason. Directed by Erik Poppe, it provides a psychological study of Nazi collaborator Vidkun Quisling’s final days and execution. Poppe’s film adopts an uncompromising approach to historical drama, confining itself almost entirely to Quisling’s prison cell during his 1945 trial and execution. The director uses many visual metaphors of confinement, such as bars, shadows, and tight compositions. His claustrophobic character study of Vidkun Quisling examines the psychological collapse of the infamous collaborator, whose surname is now a byword for traitor. Quisling’s psychological intensity comes from psychosis, which we see through his pastor, Peder Olsen, who is played by the understated Anders Danielsen Lei.

Quisling has one central predecessor in *Downfall* (2004). Image courtesy of eMovieposter.com.

The film has one central predecessor in Downfall (2004), famous for its mesmerising central performance of Bruno Ganz as Adolf Hitler as the Third Reich begins to disintegrate. In Downfall and Quisling: The Final Days, directors Oliver Hirschbiegel and Erik Poppe explore the psychology of fascist collaborators in their final moments. Both films employ claustrophobic storytelling to explore how authoritarian figures confront impending defeat, not with remorse, but with escalating denial.

In the German film, the physical structure of Hitler’s world is under assault from Russian artillery as he disintegrates. Downfall depicts Hitler’s last days in the Führerbunker, and throughout the film, Bruno Ganz’s portrayal reveals a tyrant oscillating between rage and delusion. Downfall shows the Nazi regime’s apocalyptic end through multiple perspectives, while Quisling sets apart its subject, making his isolation a metaphor for moral bankruptcy. Similarly, Quisling traps its protagonist in a prison cell. We see Quisling only through the eyes of his reluctant pastor, Peder Olsen. Yet the differences between the films are revealing. In a similar mold to Ganz, Gard B. Eidsvold portrays a serpentine Quisling convinced of his noble actions, despite all evidence to the contrary. He is even escorted to the graves of those the Nazi regime slaughtered and remains unmoved. Eidsvold’s performance reveals a deeply deluded bureaucrat clinging to his self-image as Norway’s misunderstood saviour. The film’s power does not grant Quisling either redemption or even a dramatic breakdown – he meets his fate still mired in denial. “I am innocent,” he shouts to his executioners. Quisling almost personifies Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil.” A mediocre and limited man at best, entirely out of his depth.

As a result, both films illuminate fascism’s twin pathologies of megalomania and bureaucratic cowardice. The films illustrate how corrupting systems can influence individuals – and how those individuals, when cornered, often choose self-delusion over reckoning. Both films reject redemption arcs, instead showing how ideology distorts reality until death. Stylistically, the films share a commitment to psychological realism over spectacle. Downfall’s bunker and Quisling’s prison cell become microcosms of collapsing worlds, with tight framing emphasizing entrapment.

These films offer some of Norwegian cinema’s most nuanced reckonings about the Second World War in years. The Battle of Oslo shows how heroism can be twisted and discarded by government bureaucracies for their own purposes. Quisling forces viewers to sit with a collaborator’s uncomfortable humanity, while Number 24 complicates noble resistance heroism with psychological scars.

As Europe faces new threats to democracy, these Norwegian films provide a crucial perspective on collaboration, resistance, and their enduring personal costs. Norway is still wrestling with the aftermath of the attack by the right wing extremist Anders Breivik that killed 77 people in 2011. Their contrasting approaches address current concerns about moral compromise during times of crisis. All these films ultimately suggest that war’s moral questions are complex, whether examining perpetrators or heroes. These films are examples of powerful historical cinema that engage viewers and challenge them to confront the complexities of the past, rather than providing simple lessons. They form a compelling depiction of Norwegian wartime and post-war morality.

Poppe’s film, which had the Norwegian title of Quislings Siste Dager, adopts an uncompromising approach to historical drama, confining itself almost entirely to Quisling’s prison cell during his 1945 trial and execution. The director uses many visual metaphors of confinement, such as bars, shadows, and tight compositions. His claustrophobic character study of Quisling examines the psychological collapse of infamous collaborator Vidkun Quisling, whose surname is now a byword for traitor. Quisling’s psychological intensity comes from psychosis, which we see through his pastor, Peder Olsen, who is played by the understated Anders Danielsen Lei.

The film has one central predecessor in Downfall (2004), famous for its mesmerising central performance of Bruno Ganz as Adolf Hitler as the Third Reich begins to disintegrate. In both Downfall and Quisling: The Final Days, directors Oliver Hirschbiegel and Erik Poppe explore the psychology of fascist collaborators in their final moments. Both films employ claustrophobic storytelling to explore how authoritarian figures confront impending defeat, not with remorse, but with escalating denial.

In the German film, the physical structure of Hitler’s world is under assault from Russian artillery as he disintegrates. Downfall depicts Hitler’s last days in the Führerbunker, and during the film, Bruno Ganz’s portrayal reveals a tyrant oscillating between rage and delusion. Downfall shows the Nazi regime’s apocalyptic end through multiple perspectives, while Quisling sets apart its subject, making his isolation a metaphor for moral bankruptcy. Similarly, Quisling traps its protagonist in a prison cell. We, basically, only see Quisling through the eyes of his reluctant pastor, Peder Olsen. Yet the differences between the films are revealing. In a similar mould to Ganz, Gard B. Eidsvold produces a serpentine Quisling convinced of his noble actions, despite all evidence to the contrary. He is even escorted to the graves of those whom the Nazi regime slaughtered and remains unmoved. Eidsvold’s performance reveals a deeply deluded bureaucrat clinging to his self-image as Norway’s misunderstood saviour. The film’s power does not grant Quisling either redemption or even a dramatic breakdown – he meets his fate still mired in denial. “I am innocent,” he shouts to his executioners. Quisling almost personifies Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil.” A mediocre and limited man at best, entirely out of his depth.

As a result, they illuminate fascism’s twin pathologies of megalomania and bureaucratic cowardice. The films illustrate how corrupting systems can influence individuals – and how those individuals, when cornered, often choose self-delusion over reckoning. Both films reject redemption arcs, instead showing how ideology distorts reality until death. Stylistically, the films share a commitment to psychological realism over spectacle. Downfall’s bunker and Quisling’s prison cell become microcosms of collapsing worlds, with tight framing emphasizing entrapment.

In sharp contrast, Andersen’s resistance drama Number 24 celebrates the calculated heroism of saboteur Gunnar Sønsteby, who is played by Sjur Vatne Brean. The young Sønsteby is clear-headed, cold-hearted, and ruthlessly efficient. His meticulous planning and extraordinary personal self-control make him an ideal conduit for the English to provide money, weapons, and targets to the resistance.

Andersen structures his resistance drama around an elderly Sønsteby, played by Erik Hivju, who recounts his wartime experiences to students. This framing device creates increasing tension between past heroics and present trauma, as the aging saboteur visibly struggles with what he calls “the fifth drawer in his mind,” where memories are locked away. The dynamic shifts between past and present, alternating between exciting sabotage scenes and painful current reflections on the morality of resistance violence.

Sønsteby’s strict self-control is an essential survival tactic, but even his remarkable resilience is tested when a young student confronts him about wartime executions of Norwegian collaborators. The film begins with friends skiing and debating book burning. It ends by focusing on a letter, which is now in a museum, to the German authorities by one of the friends denouncing the other. The letter leads to the writer’s execution.

Number 24 has many links to Melville’s Army of Shadows (1969). Image courtesy of eMovieposter.com.

It has many links to Melville’s Army of Shadows (1969), as both films strip resistance movements of Hollywood heroism, revealing the psychological toll of clandestine warfare. Melville filmed the resistance in a similar vein to gangster noir: with shadowy safe houses, trench coats, and agonizing silences. Andersen, by contrast, cuts between Sønsteby’s sabotage missions and his elderly self’s post-traumatic stress disorder. Both films explore the problematic issue of executing traitors within the resistance. In both films, executing a traitor is portrayed as a necessary action, even if the person is a friend or someone admired. Number 24 questions this approach when students challenge Sønsteby’s assassinations with alternatives such as non-violent approaches. His response was “Gandhi didn’t face the Nazis,” but the framing device makes the audience question his answer, even though the student’s question seems almost naively simple.

Both films critique national myths: Melville’s Army of Shadows is a chain of betrayals, and its “heroes” are all doomed by the war’s end. Andersen’s Sønsteby is not doomed and is celebrated as a national hero, but the film lingers on his trauma—his “fifth drawer” of memories suggesting heroism and suffering are inseparable. Quisling and Number 24 arrive in an era eager to interrogate historical narratives. Together, they prove that the truest war films aren’t about glory—they’re about what it costs to survive. Melville’s film is a eulogy for the resistance, while Andersen’s is a dialogue between past and present, but both refuse to romanticize war.

Released at the Nordic Film Festival in Australia in 2025 and 2026, these films offer Norwegian cinema’s most nuanced reckoning about the Second World War in years. Quisling forces viewers to sit with a collaborator’s uncomfortable humanity, while Number 24 complicates noble resistance heroism with psychological scars. Where Poppe shows evil as mundane, Andersen reveals heroism as traumatic.

As Europe faces new threats to democracy, these Norwegian films provide a crucial perspective on collaboration, resistance, and their enduring personal costs. Their contrasting approaches address current concerns about moral compromise during times of crisis. Quisling warns how easily ordinary men justify atrocity, while Number 24 questions what violence freedom requires – and who bears its enduring wounds. Both films ultimately suggest that war’s moral questions are complex, whether examining perpetrators or heroes. These films are examples of powerful historical cinema that engage viewers and challenge them to confront the complexities of the past, rather than providing simple lessons. Both these films form a compelling depiction of Norwegian wartime morality – one exploring the banality of evil through a collaborator’s final days, the other interrogating the costs of righteous violence through a freedom fighter’s memories.

Images provided by the Nordic Film Festival

“Being Bo Widerberg” brings Swedish director back into the light

By Kevin Brianton, Adjunct Senior Research Fellow, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia.

The documentary Being Bo Widerberg (2025) (I huvudet på Bo), currently being shown at the 2026 Nordic Film Festival, aims to bring an important Swedish director, Bo Widerberg (1930-1997), out of the shadow of the Swedish colossus Ingmar Bergman and into the light. It presents a portrait of a chaotic, charismatic, deeply flawed, and massively talented individual. Directed by Jon Asp and Mattias Nohrborg, the documentary charts Widerberg’s career from his early days as a fierce, working-class novelist and film critic in Malmö to his international triumphs at Cannes. After writing some novels and collections of short stories, Widerberg published a collection of critical essays, The Vision of Swedish Film (1962), (Visionen i svensk film). As a film critic, Widerberg was scathingly critical of Scandinavian cinema at the time, particularly of Bergman, whose work focused on deep metaphysical, existential, and psychological themes. Films such as The Seventh Seal (1957) were then seen as the high point of Swedish cinema. Because both were Swedish, Widerberg was often compared to the more famous director. Based on interviews in the documentary and his terse, monosyllabic answers, he did not enjoy the comparison.

Long after the critical dust of this dispute had settled, the Swedish film magazine FLM in 2012 surveyed 50 critics and film experts to name the greatest Swedish films of all time. The top-ranked film was the 1921 silent classic The Phantom Carriage (Körkarlen). Widerberg came in second with Raven’s End (1963). He may have been happy to know that Bergman’s films were below him, but he managed two in the top ten, with Fanny and Alexander (1982) ranked fifth and Persona (1966) ranked sixth. However, in 2022, FLM ran a new poll with 72 participants, and Raven’s End slipped to fourth, with Persona taking third, while Fanny and Alexander dropped to ninth. Widerberg is still a rival of Bergman, but he is certainly a lesser known director.

While he rejected Bergman’s approach, Widerberg was deeply influenced and excited by the French New Wave, particularly Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959). Widerberg wanted to make films along these lines, featuring people with jobs who lived in the real world. He put these ideas to the test with his feature film debut, The Baby Carriage (1963). In the same year, he directed Raven’s End, in which the central character tries to become a writer while grappling with poverty and an alcoholic father. Widerberg painted a portrait of a youthful spirit grappling with working-class despair. It is certainly his most autobiographical work. What is immediately apparent from these two films is that Widerberg was willing to take chances, and often people living or wandering near the film set would become part of the film. This approach closely aligns with the view of the acclaimed Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci, who reportedly argued: “You always have to be ready to accept what real life presents you with.”

Widerberg’s first films were well received, and he found himself a regular feature in Cannes among the cinematic glitterati. Having succeeded on this critical front, he shifted direction and moved a world away from the French New Wave. His film Elvira Madigan (1967) received widespread international attention. It was a radical departure from his austere black-and-white films, featuring glorious colour cinematography accompanied by a stunning Mozart piano concerto. It is a staggeringly beautiful film, yet it tells the darkest of stories. A couple run away together in a highly romantic fashion, only to watch their lives disintegrate, ending in death.

Swedish poster for Elvira Madigan. Image courtesy of eMovieposter.

Following the success of Elvira Madigan, his cinematic career took a highly political turn with Ådalen 31 (1969). The film focuses on the shootings, in which Swedish military forces opened fire on labor demonstrators in the Swedish sawmill district of Ådalen, killing five people, including a young girl. These shootings led to the rewriting of Swedish labor law. The documentary shows that Widerberg used footage from the time’s protests to present the clash, giving an historical film a topical feel.

Swedish poster for *The Man on the Roof*. Image courtesy of eMovieposter.

Regarding his later cinema, the documentary focuses heavily on The Man on the Roof (1976), a pioneering Swedish crime film known for a helicopter crash in central Stockholm. It examines the crash in detail, including Widerberg filming the stunt from a highly dangerous position directly beneath the crashing helicopter – it was a real helicopter, and there was no CGI here – and the camera operators refused to do it. The film proved to be a massive box-office hit in Sweden.

While some time is devoted to this film, the documentary could have explored Widerberg’s influence on broader cinematic culture. Every major modern Nordic noir owes part of its formula to it. The film combines a grim procedural with deep societal critique. The director cast comedian Carl-Gustaf Lindstedt as Inspector Martin Beck. Rather than a slick Hollywood detective, Lindstedt portrayed Beck as an ordinary, world-weary, physically exhausted civil servant. This formula established the flawed detective image that defines modern characters such as Swedish police inspector Kurt Wallander, Danish police inspector Carl Mørck, or the Norwegian detective Harry Hole.

Equally, Elvira Madigan contains elements of cinematic beauty and outright horror that would reemerge in the United States-Swedish co-production Midsommar (2019). Both films share a striking visual irony: they mask devastating, fatal tragedies with the lush, sun-drenched beauty of the Scandinavian countryside. The documentary could have explored these and other aspects of Widerberg’s legacy more fully.

In the final section of his career, Widerberg made only four films over 16 years. But he did not follow the traditional arc of a director whose powers decline and whose films grow poorer. He continued to reinvent himself. His last film, All Things Fair (1995), was about a teacher’s affair with a student, played by his son Johan. The film received some critical acclaim at various European festivals and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

Being Bo Widerberg offers some glimpses into the director’s private life, including his long string of extramarital affairs. It even suggests that the themes of Elvira Madigan were influenced by issues stemming from his marriage breakdown, but this intriguing line of thought is left hanging. Throughout the film, people who knew him offer insights into his character, yet no clear picture emerges. We see footage of him clearly enjoying his children. Yet it is said that Widerberg appeared uncomfortable with family life and created a family from his film crews and actors – the same was said of John Ford. A few sources faintly suggest that he was a manic depressive, but the idea is not properly explored or explained. The film is always interesting, but at times it jumps too abruptly from the personal to his cinema and back again, before moving quickly on to the next topic.

Regarding his cinema, Widerberg is presented as a director who constantly reinvented himself. He appears to be a man of immense creative energy, yet also self-destructive in his personal sphere. Despite his chaotic private life, his filmography is impressive and broad. From the French New Wave to beautiful pastoral settings with romantic drama to political films to family films to proto-Nordic noir, Widerberg emerges as a brilliant director who was willing to try anything. Being Bo Widerberg offers a compelling glimpse into the work of a neglected Swedish filmmaker and, hopefully, will encourage people to look again at his work.

Being Bo Widerberg (I huvudet på Bo) is currently screening at the 2026 Nordic Film Festival, along with a retrospective of Widerberg’s films featuring Raven’s End (1963), Elvira Madigan (1967), and Ådalen 31 (1969). Bergman’s Persona (1966) is also being shown.

Paradis (The Last Resort)

Kevin Brianton, Senior Adjunct Research Fellow, La Trobe University Melbourne

The idea of a holiday resort is that you and your family go away and let go of all the stresses and concerns of everyday life. Food, drink, and sun are the keys to enjoying life. Located off the Northwest coast of Africa, the Canary Islands offer many resorts that offer carefree living. It is also a major frontline for migrants and refugees crossing the Atlantic from West Africa to Europe, with tens of thousands arriving every year. It is the perfect location to explore the battleground between these issues.

These two worlds collide in a film directed by Maria Sødahl, and it has already won the most prestigious prize in Nordic cinema, the Dragon Award for Best Nordic Film at the 2026 Göteborg Film Festival. Sødahl also co-wrote the screenplay with SoEske Troelstrup, and Therese Hasman. Aside from this work, she is a director and writer, known for Hope (2019) and Limbo (2010). The Oscar-nominated Hope deals with a couple as they respond to a cancer diagnosis.

In this film, she now turns to broader social issues, casting an idyllic, all-inclusive family vacation as a profound political and moral trap. Paradis offers a tense drama that examines Western privilege amid a staggering international crisis. It begins simply enough with a family ushered into a palatial room in a lovely resort. A comfortably well-off Danish couple, Mikkel, played by Espen Smed, and Louise, played by Danica Ćurčić, arrive on the Canary Islands with their two young daughters for a week of holiday fun. They are looking to escape the drab pressures of everyday life within the safe, curated bubble of a luxury resort.

That bubble doesn’t pop, but it slowly deflates as the film progresses. Even in the safe confines of the resort, boats carrying desperate refugees are washing up along the shore. After an idyllic day out at the beach, the couple accidentally hits a refugee with their car. They take him to a hospital, give him some money, and that appears to be the end of the matter. When the injured man tracks them down later and pleads for help, the family’s liberal values are put to a harsh test. What starts as an impulse of basic human decency slowly spirals into paranoia as his requests grow, forcing the family to reckon with how much of their own safety they are genuinely willing to risk.

What makes The Last Resort so deeply uncomfortable is Sødahl’s refusal to turn this into a standard Hollywood thriller. Even a member of the local fascist group dedicated to beating up refugees is a kind and polite waiter – there are no easy outs. The resort owner is desperately trying to maintain a respectable façade while people arrive and die on the beach. Even the injured refugee Ahmed, played by Aziz Çapkurt, could be a little dishonest in his requests for money.

Smed and Ćurčić depict a liberal couple watching their self-image disintegrate. They move from empathy to fear to hostility and back again. Throughout the film, you constantly ask yourself: What would I do if this happened to me? The answers are often personally confronting.

Sødahl’s Paradis sits comfortably within a modern wave of ‘middle-class guilt’ cinema. It can be traced back to several clear cinematic predecessors, most notably Sweden’s Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness (2022), which covers similar terrain, but what sets this film apart is that Östlund is clearly making a cinematic exercise. Paradis is highly realistic, and you can see yourself going down the same or a similar path. You can relate to the actions of all characters. There are no good choices, and there is an inevitable tragic resolution.

The film is being shown at the Nordic Film Festival in Melbourne as The Last Resort.

The Herculean links between Wuthering Heights and The Searchers

Ethan Edwards returns with Debbie. (photo courtesy of emovieposter.)

Kevin Brianton, Senior Adjunct Research Fellow, La Trobe University

Vulture film critic Bilge Ebiri argued that The Searchers.[1] The film is based on the novel Wuthering Heights (1847), which is a novel about passionate, destructive love, and The Searchers (1956) is a Western about obsessive, racist hatred. Aside from the scenic elements, the book and film share many similarities.

Both works focus on a brooding central male figure. In Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff is an outsider. He was a foundling of unknown origin. He is consumed with love for Catherine Earnshaw, who grows up with him, and they run wild across the Moors. They are inseparable, but she chooses to marry Edgar Linton, a local gentleman, and Heathcliff grows cold with anger. His obsession turns into a campaign of revenge against all concerned.

In contrast, Ethan Edwards in The Searchers is a bitter United States Civil War veteran who refused to surrender and appears to be the one wanted for various unsolved crimes. At the start of the film, he returns to his brother’s farm in Texas after a long and unexplained absence. Shortly after his arrival, he joins a posse of men who are hunting Indians involved in the theft of cattle. While distracted with the pursuit, the Comanche attack his brother’s farm and his niece Debbie is abducted, while the rest of his family is slaughtered. In response to the atrocity, Edwards embarks on a long quest to find his niece. His motivation becomes a complex and dark mix of familial duty and a racist desire to ‘kill’ or ‘save’ her from being taken into the culture he hates.

They are different stories, but both are about Herculean characters capable of great feats of strength, yet who can also be destructive to their families. The core conflict in both stories revolves around a woman who is lost, not just physically but culturally. Heathcliff sees Catherine Earnshaw as being ‘stolen’ from him by Edgar Linton and the trappings of civilized society.

In The Searchers, the central question for Ethan is whether Debbie Edwards can be ‘saved’ after being absorbed into Native American life. She is, to Ethan, stolen by a culture that he hates. Apart from the two worlds, both stories use the passage of significant time as a key structural element, showing the protagonist’s obsession hardening over the years. In Wuthering Heights, the plot unfolds over the course of decades. After Catherine’s death, Heathcliff’s quest for revenge continues for decades. In The Searchers, the quest that spans seven years.

A key part of both stories hinges on a moment where the central character finally confronts the woman. Catherine and Heathcliff have their final, devastating confrontation shortly before her death. Catherine does not return to Heathcliff in a romantic sense; their reunion on her deathbed defines their bond. In contrast, after seven years, Ethan finally finds Debbie. In one of the most famous shots of the film, he chases her and, in a moment of extreme tension, lifts her in his arms and says, ‘Let’s go home, Debbie.’ In the original script of the film, Edwards says: ‘You sure take after your mother.’ It is faintly suggested that Debbie’s mother and Edwards had an affair, and Debbie may well even be his daughter. At the very least, there is an attraction. Heathcliff also sees something of Catherine in her daughter Cathy: “…perhaps you have never remarked that their eyes are precisely similar, and they are those of Catherine Earnshaw.”

Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights was always meant to be a “Herculean” figure, not in the sense of a virtuous hero,an anti-hero possessing superhuman willpower, immense physical presence, and the ability to both endure and inflict extreme suffering. At one point, Heathcliff exclaims, “It is a poor conclusion, is it not?.. An absurd termination to my violent exertions? I get levers and mattocks to demolish the two houses and train myself to be capable of working like Hercules, and when everything is ready and in my power, I find the will to lift a slate off either roof has vanished!” Hercules was capable of great feats but also caused great suffering, particularly those close to him. After seeing Cathy’s eyes, Heathcliff loses the will to live and dies a broken man, his obsessive project complete but ultimately hollow. He is buried next to Catherine, “where they have unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.” They are also separated from the peaceful union of the next generation with Cathy and Hareton,

This structural similarity is not a coincidence. The Searchers is an important work of the Western genre, which has frequently adapted and repurposed archetypal stories. The film’s screenwriter, Frank S. Nugent, and its director, John Ford, were deeply literate men. No evidence exists that either the writer or director consciously used Wuthering Heights as a blueprint. However, the novel’s powerful template of an obsessed outsider is a classic literary structure with roots in Greek mythology. It is absolutely certain that both writers drew on the Herculean myth, as many writers throughout the century had done. Eugene M. Wraith in his book The Herculean Hero in Marlowe, Chapman, Shakespeare and Dryden has shown how frequently this motif has been repeated throughout Western literature down through the centuries. At the end of The Searchers, after bringing Debbie home, the other characters enter the homestead. Ethan is left standing outside. In the final celebrated scene, Edwards turns away from the community he has reunited and walks away into the wilderness. The shot is framed in the doorway as the door closes on him. He chooses not to enter the home, and he is forever the wanderer. Both characters end their journeys alone, unable to integrate or return to the domestic, civilized world.

[1] Bilge Ebiri, Sorry, But These Wuthering Heights Trailers Rule, https://www.vulture.com/article/sorry-but-these-wuthering-heights-trailers-rule.html

Laurent Bouzereau, Becoming Hitchcock: The Legacy of Blackmail, TCM

Kevin Brianton

Senior Adjunct Research Fellow, La Trobe University, Melbourne

Becoming Hitchcock: The Legacy of Blackmail (2022) holds a unique and important place within Hitchcock scholarship. The feature-length documentary examines Blackmail (1929), Hitchcock’s first sound film. This movie is now seen as a key work of British cinema. However, as the title suggests, Bouzereau’s project argues that many of Alfred Hitchcock’s signature directing techniques were developed with this film.

The most obvious criticism of the documentary is that Blackmail was not his first Hitchcockian film. In the 1920s, Hitchcock worked on many different types of films, but the origin of the title “Master of Suspense” is often associated with The Lodger (1926). Hitchcock himself considered it his first film in the genre that would define his career. Many agree with him. The film historian Henry K. Miller has championed The Lodger as his starting point, most recently in the book of essays Re-Viewing Hitchcock (2025), describing it as “Hitchcock’s First True Movie.” The essay is based on his book, The First True Hitchcock: The Making of a Filmmaker, (2022). In this essay, Miller outlines numerous critics over the decades who argued along similar lines. For example, Paul Rotha, in the influential The Film Till Now (1930), saw the pair of films as key stepping stones in Hitchcock’s development. In sharp contrast to these views, Bouzereau offers a compelling counterpoint through this documentary.

The film’s plot centres on Alice White, played by Anny Ondra, the daughter of a London shopkeeper, who quarrels with her police detective boyfriend, Frank Webber, played by John Longden. In a rebellious mood, she goes out with a charming artist, Mr. Crewe, played by Cyril Ritchard, who takes her to his studio. When he tries to rape her, Alice kills him in self-defense with a bread knife. The next day, the body is discovered, and Frank is assigned to investigate the murder. He finds Alice’s glove at the scene and realizes she is the killer. He secretly covers up that evidence. However, a petty criminal named Tracy, played by Donald Calthrop, witnesses Alice with the artist and gets the other glove as proof. He tries to blackmail both Alice and Frank. When Tracy’s scheme falls apart, he is suspected of the murder. A dramatic chase happens through the British Museum. The film ends with Tracy’s accidental death and an uneasy resolution: Alice feels she must confess to the authorities, but she is stopped at the last moment. Frank and Alice must face the consequences of their obstruction of justice, leaving their future uncertain.

Hitchcock’s early work is explored through this documentary, revealing various aspects of his emerging cinematic talent. The first part focuses on the transition from silent to sound cinema. Blackmail was released in both versions since it was made right at this pivotal moment in 1929. Hitchcock’s impressive ability to adapt to new technology is clear in the film’s most famous scene, where Alice hears a neighbour’s gossip that gradually becomes a distorted chorus repeating the word “knife.” Despite the challenges of this awkward new technology, Hitchcock showed he could be innovative. Others faced even greater difficulties. The female lead, Anny Ondra, had a strong Czech accent, so she had to be dubbed for the sound version. Ultimately, she moved to Germany to continue her acting career.

The documentary then shifts to other recurring themes in Hitchcock’s films that would dominate his cinema for the next 40 years. The first theme was that of an accused, but innocent person. The documentary shows that, starting with this work, themes of personal guilt emerge and are projected onto others. Alice’s guilt is indirectly transferred when her boyfriend, a Scotland Yard detective, frames the blackmailer for the murder. A blurred line then exists between justice and vigilante action. In Blackmail, the “hero” breaks the law, complicating the moral landscape. In his later work, Hitchcock repeatedly questions the nature of crime and punishment. In Dial M for Murder (1954), the husband plans the “perfect crime,” and almost defeats the legal system. In Strangers on a Train (1951), Bruno acts on Guy’s suppressed desire. In Psycho (1960), Norman Bates disposes of a body to protect his ‘mother.’

Alice becomes caught in a web of shame and fear while another innocent person is hunted. This theme is arguably central to Hitchcock’s work. From The 39 Steps (1935) through to North by Northwest (1959), Hitchcock enjoyed placing an ordinary individual in extraordinary, dangerous situations where they are wrongly accused or implicated. The documentary shows that these ideas re-emerge in I Confess (1953), where a priest bears guilt for a murder. In Vertigo (1958), another police detective, Scottie, falsely feels guilt over Madeleine’s death while being manipulated by others.

Two final points support the idea that it is Hitchcock’s first true film. Alice is almost certainly the prototype of the “Hitchcock Blonde.” She is attractive, takes a risk by entering the artist’s studio, and her actions drive the entire story. Alice is a more vulnerable, morally complex character caught in a web of her own making. The documentary examines the famous scene where Alice is assaulted by the artist, which, for the time, nearly crossed the boundaries of sexual violence. It marks the beginning of the glamorous, elegant, often cold or mysterious blonde, a figure central to the film’s themes of danger and desire: Madeleine/Judy in Vertigo, Eve Kendall in North by Northwest, and Melanie in The Birds. They are both objects of fascination and threats.

The first use of landmarks in a climactic chase occurred in this film, a technique that would become a staple of his cinema. In Blackmail, it takes place on the dome of the British Museum, a public landmark, which is transformed into a tense, surreal arena for a chase and a death. His fellow director, Michael Powell, claims some credit for suggesting the idea. Hitchcock would go on to famously use iconic locations to heighten suspense: Mount Rushmore and the United Nations building in North by Northwest, and the Statue of Liberty in Saboteur (1942).

In the documentary, Blackmail serves as a blueprint for the Hitchcock universe. It focuses on one of his central obsessions. This is the fragility of ordinary life and how quickly a simple decision can turn a person into a nightmare of guilt, accusation, and moral confusion. it is all conveyed through a masterful, subjective visual style. Overall, the film emphasizes the idea of an auteur’s work. The title Becoming Hitchcock is straightforward, implying a destined path for the British director. This perspective overlooks the more chaotic, chance-driven nature of artistic growth. Opportunities appeared, and Hitchcock seized them fully. The influence of writers, actors, and camera operators is downplayed in the collaborative nature of filmmaking. His wife Alma Reville, who reviewed scripts in mentioned.The documentary’s narrative focuses on Hitchcock’s individual genius overcoming all obstacles. For film students, it offers an engaging introduction to the foundational elements of Hitchcock’s cinema. Bouzereau’s Becoming Hitchcock: The Legacy of Blackmail is a well-crafted piece of popular film history that succeeds in its primary goal: establishing Blackmail as the foundational text of Hitchcock’s career and demonstrating, with compelling visual evidence, the development of his signature style.

A note on availability: Blackmail was restored in 2024, building on earlier preservation work. Bouzereau’s documentary is featured on DVD sets of Hitchcock’s silent films, and on various streaming platforms. It has been broadcast on channels like TCM. It was screened at the British Film Festival at Palace Cinemas in Australia.

New book reviews

Kevin Brianton

Adjunct Senior Adjunct Research Fellow and Book Review Editor for Film and History

Mty reviews for the Winter 2025 edition

Policing Show Business: J. Edgar Hoover, the Hollywood Blacklist, and Cold War Movies by Francis MacDonnell

K Brianton – Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2025

Francis MacDonnell begins a careful analysis of Cold War cinema.

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976847

Hollywood Unions ed. by Kate Fortmueller and Luci Marzola

K Brianton – Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2025

Kate Fortmueller and Luci Marzola have an ambitious approach to Hollywood
Unions. They have compiled a set of essays that examine the full range of Hollywood
industrial organizations from the silent era to the present day.

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976848

John Ford at Work: Production Histories 1927–1939 by Lea Jacobs

K Brianton – Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2025

Lea Jacobs looks at the great auteur through the lens of his production histories.

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976849

Rethinking the Cinematic Cold War: The Struggle for Hearts and Minds Goes Global ed. by Stefano Pisu, Francesco Pitassio and Maurizio Zinni

K Brianton – Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2025

When film historians write about the cinematic Cold War, their focus has largely been
on blacklisting in the American film industry or on Hollywood films that depict
communism in one way or another. Three Italian academics think otherwise.

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976850

Second Victims

Kevin Brianton, Senior Adjunct Research Fellow, La Trobe University

Det andet offer was released in Denmark in 2025, and the film is now showing at the Scandinavian Film Festival in Australia under the English title: Second Victims. The title of the film, Second Victims, refers to the condition that care workers suffer when patients are hurt or injured by their actions.

The film opens with a series of targets positioned next to the central character, Alexandra, played by Özlem Saglanmak, as if to suggest she is on a firing range. The image is perfectly apt, as the film is set in an understaffed stroke unit, where there is unrelenting pressure, a lack of resources, and near-exhausted staff. In this environment, Alexandra, who portrays a highly skilled and self-assured neurologist, appears to have unwavering confidence. She seems to be juggling a massive number of patients with complex conditions, all demanding immediate attention, while also dealing with the hospital’s financial problems, along with personal pressures that combined would turn any normal person into a frazzled wreck. She initially deals with one desperately sick patient in a highly efficient manner. Racing between patients, she examines and releases another young patient who appears fine. This calm facade is shattered when a second and apparently minor case spirals into tragedy due to her critical misjudgment.

Director Zinnini Elkington follows Alexandra around the ward with a hand-held camera employing long takes, which gives the film a cinema verité or documentary edge. This hospital world appears to be out of kilter, but she somehow manages to maintain control. She must then deal with junior doctors, whose advice she spurned, panicky surgeons, nurses, hospital administrators who want everything resolved immediately, and even police investigating an assault.

Alexandra faces the horror of professional disgrace and personal disintegration as she deals with the grief of a patient’s relatives and her own. Özlem Saglanmak delivers a strong performance as Alexandra, as she moves through the various stages of guilt, denial, and eventual acceptance. The sterile and cold hues of the hospital are punctuated by deliberate splashes of red in scenes where Alexandra faces her most unstable moments, effectively mirroring her internal turmoil.

The supporting cast, including Trine Dyrholm as the grieving mother, provides some astonishing emotional depth. One scene where an organ donor form is given to the parents, minutes after their son’s death, has an awful ring of authenticity to it. The system demands that forms be filled out, regardless of the emotional consequences.

^{Robert Donat appears as a revered doctor in The Citadel (1938). Image courtesy of Emovieposter.}

The film represents a departure from the traditional notion of a doctor possessing almost superhuman ethics, knowledge and ability. In The Citadel (1938), a young doctor, played by Robert Donat, struggles between wealth and serving a poor mining community. He ends as a noble and heroic figure serving the people of the community. Also released in the 1930s, the Dr. Kildare series was a popular collection of films that morphed into a highly successful TV show, centered around an idealistic young doctor, Dr. James Kildare, and his mentor, the gruff but wise Dr. Leonard Gillespie. Doctors represented a fixture of certainty in the community. Their skills are never really questioned. Many shows have followed this trend.

Second Victims goes beyond these traditional medical dramas to create a story about accountability, compassion, and the shared vulnerability of humanity. As one character says, “The only thing we don’t have control over is death. Not even doctors can help us with that.” Director and writer Zinnini Elkington uses Second Victims to examine a system under immense pressure, studying the individuals caught within it with great sympathy. A quote near the end of Second Victims is that every doctor has a “graveyard.” It is a reminder of the pressure medical staff face on a daily basis.

Second Victims examines a health system and the individuals caught within it. There is no readily identifiable villain; it is a blur of accountability, including our impossibly high expectations of the health system. We are asking doctors to be gods, and we set out to destroy them when they are just fallible human beings.

Second Victims is currently being shown at the 2025 Scandinavian Film Festival. Kevin Brianton was a guest at the premiere of this film.

Nick Davis, Competing with idiots: Herman and Joe Mankiewicz, a dual portrait

Alfred A. Knopf, 2021

By Kevin Brianton, Adjunct Senior Research Fellow, La Trobe University

The unspoken presence in Nick Davis’s dual biography of Herman and Joseph Mankiewicz is a similar book by Sydney Stern, who published an extensive and well-received dual biography in 2019. Writing a book that covers the same ground only two years after such an impressive work is crazy brave. However, Nick Davis has some grounds to revisit the area. He is writer Herman Mankiewicz’s grandson and great-nephew to the director Joseph Mankiewicz. He is part of their story. Davis conducted many original interviews with people close to the family over 18 years, beginning in the 1970s, so there is a clear promise of different and exciting insights. It seems readily apparent that the two writers worked separately and arrived at their conclusions independently. In any event, Stern is not mentioned in the select bibliography. This approach represents a lost opportunity, as it would have been good to see how Davis responded to Stern’s various claims. What was true, what was false, what was overemphasized, and what had been missed? No biography is definitive. Instead, Davis appears to have consciously decided to avoid commenting on Stern’s work.

This lapse is disappointing, but his efforts as a historian are more concerning. The flaws in his approach can be seen in the coverage of one of the critical incidents in Joseph Mankiewicz’s life. His dispute with Cecil B. DeMille over mandatory loyalty oaths during the Red Scare period is the stuff of Hollywood legends. It resulted in a highly publicized meeting where directors eventually voted to dismiss the board. John Ford said that he made westerns at the meeting. Among a host of stinging accusations, Mankiewicz accused DeMille of making anti-Semitic slurs during his speech to the meeting.

For such a momentous meeting, his account contains a lot of errors. Some are minor and should have been picked up by any self-respecting copy editor. Davis writes that a committee meeting was held on 11 October 1951 (233), just before the climactic meeting of 22 October 1950, (234). Getting a date wrong is a minor error in a long book, but it does not augur well for the rest of the account. Davis mainly quotes secondary sources and dated ones at that. He bases his chapter on the meeting on Kenneth Geist’s biography of Mankiewicz, People Will Talk, published in 1978. Davis goes so far as to describe it as one of the pillars of the entire work. He also looks at a newspaper article written in 1998 by Greg Mitchell, summarising a section in his 1991 book. It also includes a piece by James Ulmer for the Directors Guild of America. Ulmer’s commentary has appeared in various versions on the Directors Guild of America website over the years. These accounts accuse DeMille of a host of offenses.

In researching the meeting, Davis did not access the Joseph Mankiewicz papers, which have been publicly available since 2014. He could have examined the meeting’s stenographic transcript at the Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles, which directly refutes many of these accusations. After reading the transcript, the acclaimed film historian Kevin Brownlow updated his documentary on DeMille because he could see that Mankiewicz had made dubious claims. Even then, he could have looked at Scott Eyman’s biography of Cecil B. DeMille, written in 2010, which debates and dismisses many of these claims. He could have looked at my specialist study released in 2016. To add to matters, Davis did not even deal with Geist’s criticisms of Mankiewicz for his actions at the meeting. He concludes Joe Mankiewicz is simply a ‘good man.’

The director, George Stevens, was also heavily involved with the meeting. Another recent family account of George Stevens, written by his son George Stevens Jr., repeated these accusations. At least, he also admitted that historians raised some doubts. Stevens Jr. eventually acknowledged he was ‘printing the legend’. Davis has no such qualms. The story Davis tells is basically that developed by Joseph Mankiewicz in the late 1970s and early 1980s when memories were blurred with bitterness. It became a Hollywood legend, but it is now discredited.

The flaws in this section underpin a problem with the research throughout the book. Davis says that most of the interviews were conducted from the early 1970s for a period of about 18 years, meaning he must have completed the oral history section before the year 2000. His select bibliography appears impressive, with close to 100 works cited. Yet, Davis references only three books that were released after 2010. One is a memoir by his relative Tom Mankiewicz in 2012; the second is Ben Urwand’s The Collaboration, released in 2013; the third Richard Sandomir’s book on creating the Pride of the Yankees, published in 2017. The secondary research seems to have ground to a halt more than a decade before the book’s publication, and recent discoveries are just not mentioned. It is not just Stern that has been ignored but also many other important writers. The book represents a lost opportunity to fuse his valuable interviews with contemporary research.

Putting aside these concerns about his research, Davis is far stronger at family dynamics. His interviews have yielded a lot of valuable information. We gain an insight into the private lives of these two men as they dealt with their issues and the machinations of Hollywood. His recollections and family interviews explain these key figures in Hollywood. Even so, his flawed approach to research has resulted in a highly uneven book of doubtful quality.

“The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers” (University Press of Kentucky, 2008) by Mark T. Conard

Dimitris Passas

Standing in the intersection between philosophical reasoning and popular culture, the series of books that have been published under the general title “The Philosophy of Popular Culture” delves into the deep waters of linking abstract thought with cultural theory and the result is a sequence of scholastic inquiries on a multitude of subjects, always remaining within the field of the ever-growing pop culture phenomenon. In addition to volumes devoted to the work of eminent artists such as Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, and David Cronenberg, there are also studies on the neo-noir movement in cinema, the legendary TV show X Files, and even on the relation between philosophical inquiry and sports such as tennis and football. Due to my particular fondness for the work of Joel and Ethan Coen, two true auteurs whose films left their distinct stamp on modern cinema, I chose to begin my first book in the series, that is The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers. It consists of a collection of 16 essays, divided into four parts each focusing on a more specified subject matter, and it is edited by Mark T. Conard who also authors the brief introduction in which we learn some general information regarding each section. Regarding the purpose of this collection, Conard writes: “This work investigates the philosophical themes and underpinnings of the films of these master filmmakers and uses the movies as a vehicle for exploring and explicating traditional philosophical ideas”.

Conard stresses that despite the presentation of several hard-to-grasp in their entirety philosophical concepts, the book is accessible to everyone and no former knowledge of the history of Western thought is required in order to comprehend the essays. Nevertheless, many readers, as I realized by reading some online reviews about the book, seem to think that there are some parts where the scholarly aspect is overtly heavy-handed and that was the reason why their ratings were mediocre. I was fortunate enough to be familiar with the majority of philosophers mentioned in the essays as my post-graduate studies were on philosophy, so I am not the most fitting individual to judge whether or not The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers is a widely accessible collection. Throughout the pages, one comes across the ideas and concepts conceived by some of the most renowned intellectuals that marked philosophical thought such as Aristotle, Plato, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Søren Kierkegaard, and the proponents of Existentialism, and numerous others whose influence on the discipline of philosophy is colossal and unanimously acknowledged. The authors of each essay are prudent enough to present their arguments simply and concisely and even obscure notions such as the Heideggerian “Dasein” are treated in such a way that a layman can understand their use in the specific context.

The Coen brothers’ oeuvre consists of more than 25 films and in the majority of them they are also screenwriters. Their debut took place in 1984 with the release of the iconic neo-noir Blood Simple, a film that adopted some of the most recognizable classic noir tropes combined with a touch of irony and dark humor that made it easier to stand apart from its predecessors. From then on, the duo has written and directed films of any genre and in their filmography, we come across gangster films, comedies, modern westerns, and most importantly some of the most shining examples of the neo-noir movement that helped to define and evolve the, relatively new, genre. The majority of essays featured in this collection analyze the Coens’ work from the perspective of the distinction between the two types of noir (classic and neo) and the reader obtains a comprehensive idea regarding the nuances between them. In the second essay of the first part, titled “The Human Comedy Perpetuates Itself: Nihilism and Comedy in Coen Neo-Noir”, Thomas S. Hibbs examines the effects of nihilism and pessimism in Coens’ films, employing Friedrich Nietzsche’s views on the subject in order to make clear his point that the fictional characters living and acting in imaginary settings in the brothers’ movies essentially inhabit an absurd universe, that is a world “divested of value, a world without hierarchies of meaning, a world of stark individual freedom”. The lack of any inherent purpose in the world had been one of the fundamental teachings of the Existentialists, a school of thought that underlined the desperation of a man who has lost any fixed point that would allow him to view life from a brighter perspective. Camus defines the absurd as “the divorce between the mind that desires and the world that disappoints, my nostalgia for unity, this fragmented universe and the contradiction that binds them together”.

While Nietzsche agrees with the Existentialists concerning the essential meaninglessness of the world, he is not advocating hopelessness and he doesn’t lament this fact as he sees it as an opportunity for the spirit to become empowered and for the man to acquire his own identity through the sheer power of his will. If we backtrack for a while, and re-examine the noir pictures of the 1940s and 1950s, we will realize that they embrace a pessimistic worldview as the characters, and especially the protagonist/hero, are bound to submit to the universal truths that will eventually crush him as an individual. In neo-noirs though, there is hope for the new type of hero who will implement his will, through the use of wits or force, to disengage himself from a dire predicament. Thus, he becomes an “active nihilist”, the type of new man who will be at the forefront of what Nietzsche calls the “transvaluation of values” and will construct his identity all by himself in a process that is personal as well as aesthetic. Hibbs summarizes the development of noir in time and the emergence of significant differences as follows: “Neo-noir’s greatest departure from classic noir consists in a turn to aristocratic nihilism. The most resourceful of these characters are in control of the noir plot, using their cunning and artistry to ensnare others”. The new human identity is aesthetically assembled through the endorsement of style.

Style is another aspect that differentiates the two types of noir and refers both to that conerning the characters of the stories and the actual form that the film obtains under the guidance of the director(s). All neo-noir films share the inclination to be too self-conscious in terms of their visual style in a way that prompts the audience to discern a comical side even in the grimmest of stories. Hibbs writes that “in neo-noir, the accentuation of hopelessness and the overtly self-conscious deployment of the artistic technique make the turn to dark comedy nearly inevitable”. Style becomes the actual subject of the film and the audience is invited to the artifice, to get in on the “joke”. Furthermore, as far as the characters are concerned, the acquisition of a personal style is something as essential as breathing to form a coherent sense of identity. In his article, “What Kind of Man Are You? The Coen Brothers and Existentialist Role Playing”, Richard Gaughran writes that “many Coen characters adopt a style, an aggregate of gestures, principally in order to define themselves, to create an identity”. There are more than a few examples of Coens’ protagonists to clarify that theory: “The Dude” Lebowski, Jerry Lundegaard, Everett McGill, the characters in Miller’s Crossing, and even more. Whether it is about the use of the correct hat in Miller’s Crossing, a hat which is inextricably linked with power within the story’s universe, Everett McGill’s obsession with his hair and a specific pomade, or Lebowski’s bohemian exterior, the endorsement of such peculiarities is more than crucial for these characters. In Paul Schrader’s words, it is within the confines of the absurd universe that “the style becomes paramount; it is all that separates one from meaninglessness”. If pre-fixed values are non-existent as nihilism claims, then it is the duty of the individual to build his own style and identity.

The Coens are also famous for their use of setting, and the choice of the right terrain for a modern noir to take place. They avoid big cities and as a rule, they go for small towns in the American countryside, with a clear preference for Texas, and they usually opt for a Western-like wilderness which reflects the cruelty of the stories. Gaughran underscores: “The setting becomes a character at least as important as any of the human characters”, while Paul Schrader, the acclaimed American screenwriter of films such as Taxi Driver and the man who adapted Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel The Last Temptation of Christ into a screenplay, argues, in his essay on film noir that the prominence of setting leads to a fatalistic, hopeless mood as the individual is always subject to its whims and caprices, rendering him a kind of a pawn in a game which he doesn’t understand: “Characters act freely, but they do so within an uncaring, hostile environment, that is, within the realm of the absurd”. The tyranny of the environment that surrounds the character amplifies his existential angst and often leads him to fateful decisions. Take, for example, the Fargo locale. It is a canvas of pure whiteness, so much that some define this movie as “film blanc” (“white movie”), that swallows the protagonist, the meek swindler Jerry Lundegaard who sees his life unravel after he decides to kidnap his own wife in order to get the bulky ransom from his father-in-law. Minnesota and North Dakota offered the best of backdrops for the Coens’ bleak story, one of the best neo-noirs of all time.

But there are also examples of movies such as No Country for Old Men, a film in which the brothers omitted the irony and the dashes of dark humor in favor of a more “serious” approach to the story, that merges the Western setting with the noir plotting. This movie lacks what is termed as “meta-irony”, one of the chief characteristics of the brothers’ earlier movies that refers to the “level of detachment, a sense that their movies were meant to be taken as just stories, that you should not take them too seriously”. “It was the first film created by the Coens that is based on a novel, one of Cormac McCarthy’s most popular works, and “it is and is not a classic western”. In one of the last essays of the collection, Richard Gilmore’s “No Country for Old Men: The Coens’ Tragic Western”, the author, in an attempt to correct an impression acquired by few regarding the importance of the character of Anton Chigurh, argues that this film, and the novel, revives the motifs that were first introduced in the Ancient Greek Tragedy. Chigurh is the embodiment of evil, “a walking abbatoir (…) he is like a modern version of the traditional figure of Death with his scythe”. Nevertheless, the focus is elsewhere. He supports this statement by writing that “what is of interest to McCarthy and the Coens is rather what happens when a good, but flawed, man encounters this force of nature in human guise”. This type of character arc is truly reminiscent of several tragedies where the tragic hero falls victim to his own hubris and gets punished despite, or exactly because, of his flaws and virtues. Llewelyn Moss is the modern tragic hero, a taciturn westerner who stumbles upon the scene of a massive shooting, the result of a drug deal gone wrong, and collects the bag of money that lies there.

By doing this, Llewelyn sets off a mechanism that will propel the plot of the story forward and seal his fate, as an experienced contract serial killer, Chigurh is charged with the task of retrieving the money. Llewelyn commits hubris as he oversteps his personal limits, paying no heed to the ancient Greek commandment “Know thyself”, and what follows is a journey of pain that concludes with his murder at the end of the movie. As Gilmore summarizes “his experience is a Greek tragedy in miniature”. Apart from that, there is something else that binds No Country for Old Men with tragedy and that is the element of fatalism, which is the belief that “you are what you do and that what you have done cannot be undone (…) that what you do, what you have decided, will have its natural consequences in the world, and there is no avoiding or evading these consequences”. In the Coens’ fictional universe, each action we take leads inevitably to a certain result and this is a reality that man has to face and accept in order to develop and grow. The voiceovers, where Sheriff Ed Tom Bell ponders on the human condition, further emphasize the above point and it is after the finale of the movie that we witness the inescapable progress of a predetermined story. The movie was a huge critical as well as commercial success, but perhaps Gilmore is right in stressing the misinterpretation, which partially stems from Javier Bardem’s stellar performance, that wants the character of Chigurh to be at the epicenter of the story.

Despite their embracement of a nihilistic worldview, the Coen brothers can be rightfully labeled as comic filmmakers mainly because of the levity by which they treat their characters: “Many of the absurd characters are entertaining and likable and even some of the Coens’ nihilistic destroyers are attractive for their defiant energy”. As it happens in several more recent productions, the villain, or the “evil antihero”, is portrayed as more interesting and alluring than the “good guys”, thus subverting the audiences’ expectations as “they mock properly human longing for justice, truth, and love”. Other characters, such as the “Dude” Lebowski choose to shrug off the seriousness and gravity of the existential void by living lightly and taking it easy, offering many instances of heartfelt laughter to the viewer: “His way of life affirms the equal significance or insignificance of all human endeavors”. “The Dude” is a hilarious protagonist and Big Lebowski is one of the most entertaining Coen brothers picture. In this review, I tried to present some of the most important points in my favorite essays, and the choice is strictly subjective. There are more mentally challenging essays involving prominent thinkers such as Heidegger Kierkegaard and others. The collection apparently covers all tastes. If you are into Coens’ cinema and also have a flair for the work of grand philosophers, then The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers is a must-read. I would also advise checking out the totality of the “Philosophy of Popular Culture” series as you will surely find some subjects that will entice you to promptly begin reading. This was one of the most informative and enlightening reads that I’ve had in a long time and I strongly recommend it.

The Dark Interval: Film noir, Iconography and Affect (review)

PADRAIC KILLEEN, 2022, New York, Bloomsbury, pp. 271, $162.00 (cloth)

Adjunct Senior Research Fellow Kevin Brianton, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia

Film noir is characterized by its dark and pessimistic atmosphere, typically depicting crime, corruption, and moral ambiguity. In The Dark Interval: Film Noir, Iconography and Affect,Padraic Killeen begins his book by arguing against a strict definition for film noir and for a passion towards the genre. It is a promising start. Killeen argues that ‘noir cinema has produced some of our culture’s most riveting images of the human in strange intervals of stillness, detachment and suspended time.’ Killeen hopes to draw these ideas out further by employing the work of various philosophers, critics, and thinkers across a wide range of disciplines. Killeen is careful to separate, “The protagonists of noir are people who lapse into crime, collapse into love, fall from grace, lose their way, lose their minds.” He wants to focus, however, on a ‘temporal lapse, [or] a lapse into a time that seems outside of time’. (p.8)

For full review see

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01439685.2023.2232151