Sidse Babett Knudsen, in her first TV series, plays coalition Prime Minister Birgitte Nyborg.

This is just to add to a chorus of praise for Borgen (Denmark 2010), the BBC4 political-thriller series set within Danish coalition politics. It’s produced by the same company that did The Killing 1 and 2, though the virtuoso combination of both a focused (one killing) and a spiralling set of plot lines over 20 episodes is not repeated here. Borgen is Danish for ‘parliament’. See the UK trailer on BBC website.

There’s lots of plot buzz about it, especially in blogs (see The Guardian’s) and they are understandably focused on the convincingness of plot lines, which caused controversy for The Killing 1 and 2. What Borgen does well is to mix a ‘glossy’ often thriller-ish narrative form and look with what feels like a properly complicated account of coalition politics involving a woman Prime Minister.

Also involved are journalism, ‘spin’, and familiar gendered issues around the work involved in bringing up a family, work outside the family, and sexism for many modern working women. It has been casually brilliant in its restrained construction of sexual relationships and their aftermath, or the trauma of abortion for the woman who has to take the decision. And its treatment of sexism at the highest levels of negotiation, which a woman in such a post would enter, is likewise restrained: the muttered ‘Mummy’ behind her back as she leaves a discussion with military top brass, for example.

Casting for a kind of glamour in its leads, it plays questions of appearance, for both men but especially women, superbly well. See discussion of Laura Mulvey and others in Representations chapter of MSB5. In particular it keeps complicating our sense of how scenes and imagery of women will go. I loved the high angle shots of a de-glamourised Katrine, tousled rather than infantilised-by-tousle, getting out of bed to answer the (dangerous) call at her door. The jokes, as well as the difficulties, in the sex life of a married, powerful woman with children are done with a light touch. Maybe decades of experience of Scandinavian social-democrat education and equality debates is sedimented here? And the treatment of small-nation dependency, with the hard political questions that raises, as well as the brute force of certain kinds of US power—all this has wide resonance and was superbly constructed in episode 4.

Enough! Glad to hear in this Independent article that a 2nd series has just been shown in Denmark, and a third is due. And a US version, involving the BBC, and aimed to be a kind of successor to The West Wing, is in development.

See also http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2012/jan/14/borgen-danish-tv-thrillers for an account of ‘the thriller factory’ within Danish public service broadcasting, from which such series emerge. The rules: ‘Commissioners insist on original drama dealing with issues in contemporary society: no remakes, no adaptations.’ I’ve also heard the cold winter evenings in Denmark make the 8pm slot popular.

And finally, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Kinnock for some real world British connections to the first Danish woman Prime Minister—said to have enjoyed the series, broadcast a year before her election victory.

Judy Garland in ‘Meet Me in St Louis’ was ‘back’ in selected UK cinemas over Christmas 2011

In earlier editions of MSB we noted two important ways in which archives have been utilised by media industries. In the 1980s Hollywood studios (and other controllers of large film libraries like StudioCanal) realised that the value still wrapped up in library titles could be exploited by the new technologies that introduced multi-channel television and its insatiable demand for product. Hollywood had always re-released major films like Gone With the Wind at regular intervals but the value of all film libraries certainly increased when the opportunities to exploit them multiplied.

Music recordings were slightly different before the 1980s since many consumers already owned significant collections of shellac and vinyl discs. Clever marketing then helped to persuade them to buy some of the same recordings again on new formats, first on cassette and then CD. The new formats promised better quality and greater convenience – and perhaps less chance of accidental damage. However, when the move to digital came the music industry found that the next new format, digital MP3 files, allowed easy copying and instead of boosting sales through re-selling popular recordings, the loss of revenue threatened the industry’s long term future.

Now, it appears, the music majors are looking more seriously at their archives of unreleased material – alternate takes, aborted sessions etc. As it becomes more expensive to develop and promote new music acts which don’t necessarily sell recordings commensurate with the popularity of their music, why not turn to material by established stars that has already been paid for?

Kate Bush borrows an idea from cinema

As the market ages – remember the “£50 bloke” of a few years ago? – releases of “never heard before” material from Pink Floyd are due to join Kate Bush’s explorations and re-interpretations of her back catalogue on the ‘Director’s Cut’ Album. These releases although probably ‘copiable’ in digital format do offer something different, something ‘extra’ as suggested by the ‘generatives’ proposed by Kevin Kelly (see MSB5 p254). Collectors may be willing to buy a box set of alternate versions of well-known Pink Floyd songs, especially when packaged with material that can’t be copied so easily. The packages are known as ‘Immersion’ releases.

Jean Vigo's 'L'Atalante' on re-release from 20th January 2012

Digital cinema has seen another twist on the use of archives that is the product of the economics of digital distribution. Cinema re-releases of classic or cult films has again had a long history. Even so it required careful judgement of the market to make it work financially. A 35mm film print costs around £1,000 to produce. So it was often only possible to put out a single print that toured cinemas and which without the benefit of promotion and marketing could only attract small audiences. Now a 2K digital print on a hard drive costs a few hundred pounds to master and duplicate so that a digital copy of an archive film can be stored on the ‘theatre systems’ of several cinemas at the same time.  Perhaps you saw Meet Me in St. Louis or It’s a Wonderful Life over the Christmas period? Perhaps I can interest you in the restored version of Les Enfants du Paradis as well? In truth this is a development that hasn’t been fully exploited yet – it needs to reach the multiplex in areas where there isn’t an established independent arthouse cinema. But if you’ve never seen a classic black and white film on a big screen in a brand new digital print, I’d urge you to take the plunge. There’s nothing like it! In the next few weeks one of the three completed films by the cinema’s first great youth rebels, Jean Vigo, goes on release. Read about L’Atalante here and discover some of the first screening dates.

Here’s a clip from YouTube:

The box office returns so far suggest that the mass audience has not been attracted to the film so we can’t really tell whether the 3D is proving a draw. In the UK, a 3D film in the multiplex sees £2-3 being added to the usual ticket price which means a significant hike in the cost of taking the family to the pictures. Hugo, like many other 3D films, is also being shown in 2D on many screens.

As of last weekend, Hugo had just reached $50 million in North America after 6 weeks and is now falling down the chart. In the UK the Christmas fortnight figures aren’t released in full until Thursday but Hugo has already shown signs of faltering – by Week 2 its screen average had already dropped below $2,000, a sure sign of weak box office. The children’s film in the UK during December has been Arthur Christmas by a considerable margin over the rest of the field.

High critical praise in the US may help Hugo into the Oscar race and eventually the film might find the audience it deserves but at the moment it would seem that 3D isn’t quite the winner it has been proclaimed to be.

Simple counting of representations like this is a traditional form of enquiry in media studies (see Chapter 1 Case Study on Visual and Aural Signs in MSB5, p39). It may be dismissed as basic by some but it demonstrates the advantages of quite simple ideas:

- easy to carry out

- provides empirical evidence

- the actual process might change some attitudes/make researchers more aware of the range (or similarity) of programming and writing

- the results are certainly likely to make some people think again about their own and others ‘ assumptions and rather loose anecdotal observations.

Do you ever ask yourself about how they select panels for quiz shows or discussion programmes? Are you aware of any disparities? Whatever our personal responses to a finding that 84% of reporters and guests on BBC Radio 4′s Today programme are male, Cochrane’s piece has stirred up a debate. The Letters page in the next day’s Guardian carried several responses. Lis Howell from City University reported on her own research into women booked to appear on The Today programme and on 5 Live Breakfast:

“Female contributors were then subdivided into two categories – “victims/case studies” and “experts/endorsers”. We found the Today programme had by far the fewest of either category on air, and 5 Live the most. But “victims” on 5 Live outnumbered “experts”, whereas the (very) few women who appeared on Today at least were given “expert” status. The full findings will be published soon in Broadcast magazine, but male experts generally outnumbered women experts five to one.”

Howell also refers to reports from female ‘bookers’ on these programmes, suggesting that they are charged with finding more women, but even though female experts are often available, many of them decline offers to appear. This observation was followed up again by Suzanne Moore today in a piece entitled “Why women don’t like appearing on TV” with an intro of “Many women – including me – are afraid of seeming unlovable and ignorant, even though men ooze such qualities in serious discussions.”

Predictably perhaps, Moore’s article has prompted many online comments, some silly, but others  quite perceptive. But will this interest in the issue help to change the situation? What does the research – and whatever other data exists out there say about broadcasting as an institution? (i.e. why is it so much worse in terms of gender balance than the press – which isn’t that great either?)

Martin Scorsese "directs Hugo"

We’re sorry that this blog has been quiet for most of 2011, especially given the momentous events in the media environment here in the UK and worldwide. Murdoch’s bloody nose, with the closing of the News of the World and the hounding of tabloid phone hackers, and the potential for more open media following the ‘Arab Spring’ are just two of the stories we would like to have covered.

But now we are back and we’ll try to keep the blog alive. First off we want to focus on how a well-known Hollywood name allows a possible different perspective on two current issues.

Martin Scorsese is arguably the most revered Hollywood film director, feted by cinephiles but also known to more mainstream cinemagoers and even an Oscar-winner for The Departed in 2007. That film was a ‘remake’ of stories from the Hong Kong trilogy of Infernal Affairs films and its Oscar and box office success seemed to give a legitimacy to the Hollywood practice of remaking foreign language films. We’ve covered this in MSB in relation to horror films like The Ring series and in MSB5 we noted the remake of Let the Right One In which emerged in 2010 as Let Me In. In many cases the remakes are quite serviceable but the debate goes on – why remake? Why not release the foreign language original properly? I’m not looking forward to David Fincher’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo remake due out in a few weeks. Fincher, like Scorsese, trades on his reputation as a ‘name’ filmmaker. But in this case the Swedish film (directed by Danish director Niels Arden Oplev) is already an American-style thriller and without Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth Salander, the Fincher version seems hard to justify.

But why link this to Martin Scorsese now? Simply because a report a couple of weeks ago announced that Scorsese is to adapt the work of the best-selling Norwegian writer Jo Nesbø. Nesbø is in some ways the heir to Stieg Larsson’s popularity with the Millennium Trilogy featuring Lisbeth Salander, although Nesbø’s Inspector Harry Hole has been around for several years in a succession of crime thrillers. Scorsese’s choice is The Snowman which was an international bestseller earlier this year. This isn’t a re-make since Nesbø has been very careful about allowing his work to be adapted – the first adaptation (not a Harry Hole story) was only released in Norway this year. And Nesbø loves Scorsese. He tells us that the poster for Taxi Driver was on his wall when he first began to write and that he doesn’t mind if Scorsese moves the setting of the film. In the midst of the international rush to put ‘Nordic Noir’ on screens in English (e.g. the US TV remake of the Danish series The Killing), Scorsese might well find acceptance with some fans (Nordic film companies are only to happy to co-operate).

The other Scorsese story is the opening of his film Hugo – a children’s film, a fantasy, a narrative about cinema? The film has already won an award from the National Board of Review in the US and it seems set to be an international hit. It is also the first film by a director of Scorsese’s standing to be made in 3D. Mark Kermode, perhaps the most popular film critic in the UK and famously extremely ‘anti’ towards 3D once said that he wouldn’t take it seriously unless Scorsese made a film in the format. Last Friday on his radio show on BBC Radio 5 Live Kermode grudgingly accepted that used by Scorsese, 3D could be interesting.

3D is now central to the release of ‘tentpole movies’ in mainstream cinema. In the UK, the biggest multiplex chain, Odeon, is now completely digital and able to offer 3D in many of its screens. But recently box office for 3D releases has been disappointing with audiences not willing to pay the extra cost for the 3D versions of films like Harry Potter. It will be interesting to see if Hugo will buck this trend. Scorsese fans will be interested to see how he presents the history of special effects in the cinema (which is an integral part of the plot of the film). But will this fascination with early cinema tricks attract the family audience? We’ll let you know. Also to come over Christmas is the latest Bollywood blockbuster, Don 2 starring Sharukh Khan and scheduled as a 3D release.

Part of the power of the film came from his willingness to play the role, which of course made it much easier to market, with an Oscar nominee’s presence on board. An innovative ‘green’ premiere of the film was designed– green carpet, celebs arriving by bike or low power vehicles, solar powered projector etc. Ed Miliband (then the Labour government’s Climate Change Secretary) invited himself to it.  On hearing this Pete Postlethwaite devised the brilliant gesture of writing and signing a pledge which included threatening to give back his OBE to the Queen if Miliband gave the green light to a new coal power station at Kingsnorth. As Franny Armstrong, the director, wrote in her tribute to Postlethwaite in The Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/jan/03/pete-postlethwaite-age-stupid). ‘The look on Miliband’s face was priceless (click the link for images of this pledge making). ‘But a month later he announced no new coal-fired power station would get government consent unless it could capture and bury 25% of the emissions it produces immediately – and 100% by 2025.’ And she continued

‘Pete was gutted to be unable to attend the UN climate summit in Copenhagen in December 2009, but he dragged himself out of bed to be interviewed on Skype. He told me nothing cheered him up more than people stopping him in the street to explain how they were cutting their carbon.’ He was an inspirational figure both in his acting achievements and in the way he connected them, partly by his choice of roles, to his other attempts to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.

(See http://www.spannerfilms.net/node/49591 for a further illustrated tribute from Franny Armstrong after BBC2 broadcast a tribute programme (January 15th).

The UK publisher Intellect Books is extremely prolific with new book titles and a vast array of academic journals appearing on a regular basis. The latest journal to launch focuses on Scandinavian Cinema. Intellect’s policy is to offer free samples of each of its journals to entice new readers and Issue 1 of the journal can be downloaded here.

The great success of Let the Right One In internationally has prompted several academics to start work on the film and in this journal there are two useful resources that complement and extend the work on the film in MSB5. ‘Old fangs into new viewers: the American poster to Let the Right One In‘ by Anders Marklund is a short piece that offers a textual analysis of the poster.

‘Vampire in the Stockholm suburbs: Let the Right One In and genre hybridity’ by Rochelle Wright is an interesting analysis of how the film has been received in Sweden, the US and the UK. Wright suggests that the genre hybridity of the film has possibly been more easily appreciated in the American and British markets. As a scholar specialising in Swedish Cinema, Wright provides very useful background on Let the Right One In‘s release in the context of Swedish indigenous cinema.   For instance, vampires are not that common in Swedish film and literature so there is the possibility of a kind of double response to the film – in its international context (i.e. the recent cycles in UK and US horror) and in its Swedish context. Swedish audiences react differently to the ‘social comment’ aspects of the film. For them, the setting is mundane, but for US/UK audiences it is exotic. Wright supplies a very detailed analysis of the film in terms of genre, narrative and representation, so this is essential reading for anyone considering working on the film.

The forest from 'Green The Film'

Went to the excellent Wildscreen Festival of wildlife documentary and environmental films last week (Oct 10th to 14th) at Watershed, Bristol. Lots of industry buzz and fascinating insights from an international range of ‘wild life’ documentary makers and commissioners, including discussions and demonstrations of 3D technology.

Despite the assertions of some speakers that “3D is definitely coming this time—all the big money (Sky and Sony, and a 3D iPad is on the way) . . . is being bet on it”, I learnt that apparently a significant percentage of the population (estimates vary but apparently 12% have problems with binocular vision) are not even able to view 3D. In fact a speaker from the Japanese industry at one session said they were still conducting careful medical research before committing (though a deep recession, given the cost of both makers’ equipment and sets at present may also drive such decisions, in Japan and elsewhere). At present lens changes can take up to an hour, so filming is very slow and expensive, but of course the industry is predicting that costs will soon go down.

In these sessions the excitement of film makers, and the omni-presence of the big money position together made it impossible to point to the tsunami of often toxic waste that will be produced by the necessary changeover to 3D viewing and making equipment. This will probably end up in waste dumps in Indonesia, for example, where kids will pick it over for valuable minerals (see MSB5 Globalisation chapter, and the ‘Ideologies and discourses’ case study on the eco-film The Age of Stupid).

Yet after all this blockbuster technology talk the most astonishing film I saw at the festival was not a ‘blue chip’ documentary – a term used across the festival to refer to very expensive, ‘high quality’ wild life programmes, which arguably rule out much questioning of what is happening to what we call the natural world since the emphasis is understandably on an immaculate kind of spectacle and expertise which will sell globally. The film was not in 3D, nor would it have gained much from being in 3D. I saw it in a tiny screening, almost by mistake. Imagine the pleasure of seeing it then get the Gold Award, as well as an Environmental award at the final ‘Panda’ Awards ceremony, and to learn it has had other prizes.
I don’t want to pre-empt your viewing with my own analysis of how it works its power. It focuses on the fate of one creature in Indonesia. Because it has no major distributor the maker (it was mostly made by one man, with some help on the very restrained soundtrack) has provided it free to download at www.greenthefilm.com . There he writes: ‘My name is Patrick, I am an ordinary citizen dedicated to preventing the destruction of the remaining tropical rainforest on Earth. I do so by making heartfelt films on the forest and the industries destroying it.’ At the final screening he spoke of how he himself does not like to be told what to do, and this maybe accounts for the credit which the viewer is given for intelligence, and for putting images and conclusions together in this film with no narration. This makes for a moving, gentle, very powerful story with the kind of end credits which not many of us have seen before. If you have 48 minutes to spare, sit down and attend to this film, and see if you don’t want to tell others about it.

On the set of Joe Maddison's War with Robson Green in a scene on the bowling green. (Click on the image to go to an interesting blog by a freelance cameraman who took this still.)

September has been a month of commemoration and nostalgia in the UK marking the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain. There have been the usual high profile celebrations and focus on the important leaders, but it has been good to see some excellent TV coverage of the stories of ‘ordinary people’ and how they coped in 1940. As might be predicted, the best material was mostly on BBC Radio 4 and BBC4/2. More surprising was the appearance of a ‘popular drama’ on ITV1 on Sunday night starring two of the most familiar faces amongst the channel’s ‘contracted stars’, Kevin Whately and Robson Green.

This was a story based on Tyneside and it was no surprise that it was so good because it was written by Alan Plater (1935-2010), one of the best TV writers of the last 40 years, returning to the Newcastle of his (early) childhood. This was presumably the last script that Plater wrote and it included many of his trademarks. Robson Green plays Harry, a chippy shipyard worker who is also a crooner in a band and Kevin Whately plays the titular hero, Joe, who is a welder. Both men had been in the infantry in the Great War in 1917 but this time they are in ‘a reserved occupation’ as shipyard workers and so they are persuaded to join the LDV (later to become the ‘Home Guard’).

At the beginning of the film, Joe sees his daughter married and his son off to flying school. Soon after, however, his wife leaves – partly we assume because the passion has gone out of the marriage. Joe seems troubled by both his memories of the Western Front and the oppression he feels from his wife’s Catholicism. (The local priest isn’t much help.)

Kevin Whately is perhaps typecast as a rather passive character and this is used in the film to contrast with Robson Green’s aggression – because he feels similarly about his wartime experience. What follows is a ‘home front’ story that picks up on several of the real social issues of the war years, many of them detailed for the first time for a popular readership in Angus Calder’s The People’s War in 1969. Calder was a socialist who exposed some of the propaganda myths of the wartime years. Plater’s script, though seen as ‘rosily nostalgic’ by some critics, includes an incident in which the shipyard workers in the LDV go on ‘strike’ because Harry has been charged by the squad’s officer – the local chemist, whose commission was in a non-combatant service in 1914-18, something he has concealed which angers Harry. This is effectively a mutiny, but it is quietly forgotten and Joe becomes an NCO. Strikes and military incidents of this time were not uncommon in wartime and the great social changes of 1945 didn’t come about without resistance from the establishment.

But Joe changes in other ways and becomes more assertive in his personal life. The film covers the whole wartime period and in 1945, Joe admits that he has had a ‘good war’ and that he feels that Britain is a better place. That wasn’t to last of course, but it’s important to recognise what working people achieved in wartime, both on the frontline and at home. The scene in the film when Harry and Joe are placing a wreath on the local cenotaph on Armistice Day 1944 was more moving for me than all those Whitehall ceremonies involving the Royals and senior politicians.

. . . tricky times in the United States for Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News as its swivel-eyed commentators heap abuse and scorn on everyone involved with the so-called Ground Zero mosque – which, for all the furore, is not really a mosque and won’t be built on the site of Ground Zero. Directly in their sights is Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the public face of the scheme. He’s got some dodgy friends, says Fox’s slanderer-in-chief and Tea Party favourite Glenn Beck. All hotly denied and very unedifying.But it’s true to say that Rauf does have friends. One such apparently is Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia, who is reported to have donated large sums in the past towards good works performed by Rauf’s social and cultural organisations. Bloggers in the US also point out that Prince Alwaleed is the second biggest shareholder in News Corporation after Rupert Murdoch. So the Fox types aren’t just angry, after all. They are also commendably fearless.

A 'wallpaper' from Waterloo Road, series 5

Elsewhere in the Guardian‘s financial pages we learn that UK independent Shed Media has increased profits by 22%. They make popular BBC programmes such as Who Do You Think You Are? and soapy drama Waterloo Road as well as programmes for US television. Earlier this month, Time Warner took a controlling stake in the company, so it isn’t really ‘independent’ at all.

With Murdoch’s bid to increase his stake in BSkyB to a majority share and Richard Desmond’s purchase of Five, the UK TV ‘ecology’ (as Alan Yentob just described it on Radio 4′s Media Programme) is due for more shake-ups as the final stages of the digital switchover approach. Watch the skies!