One of the clear highlights of the Norwegian cinema series for me was Liv Ullmann’s personal appearance for the introduction of her film debut as lead actress in what would prove to be the final film by Norway’s first female director, Edith Carlmar, The Wayward Girl. Admitting that she initially found it odd that program […]
The first film on tap for A Luminous Century: Celebrating Norwegian Cinema was Rune Denstag and Sivge Endresen’s Too Much Norway, a film that, as a Norwegian American audience member appropriately pointed out, was a film “made for Norwegians, not for export.” Indeed, there are no indications of a National Geographic travelogue at work in […]
In the early 1910s, a hardworking and ambitious textile traveling salesman of Polish Jew ancestry named Moritz Rabinowitz arrived at the insular, Norwegian herring export town of Haugesund and, touched by the townspeople’s humble existence and diligent work ethic, decided to settle in the community. Establishing a clothing company near the town port (where sailors […]
In the review for Sara Johnsen’s understated and intelligently realized debut feature Kissed by Winter, Mode Steinkjer writes, “The last part of the film’s key moments are accompanied by Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah sung by Jeff Buckley in his version that is both beautiful and atmospheric. For me the song works to elevate the drama because […]
Although annotated with a running time of 98 minutes, the print for Uwe Jens Krafft’s Raid on the Bergen Express that was screened for the program turned out to be a British cut of the film that clocked in at slightly less than one hour. With that reservation noted, it is difficult to assess the […]
Favorably recalling the experimental narrative strategies of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Erik Lochen’s remarkably light and agile, yet ingeniously constructed and elegantly realized film, The Hunt similarly plays on the author’s recurring themes of memory, atemporality, and psychological reality. Prefiguring Alain Resnais’ collaborative film with Robbe-Grillet, Last Year at Marienbad (the film was made in the same […]