13.09.2000
In a piece on the
new Danish cinema, Nigel Andrews in Financial Times asks whether Denmarks
film boom is the forerunner of a new world culture:
"Danish cinema is
becoming the west's most compelling cultural voice. Works like 'Festen',
'Breaking The Waves' and 'Dancer in the Dark' (...) have won enough prizes
to sink a ship. More significantly they shatter old styles and themes to
create new ones: the immediacy of handheld video; the crumbling of social
protocols and taboo topics (both 'Festen' and 'The Idiots' are about human
gatherings that go gruesomely wrong, both also venture a new sexual
explicitness); the openness to new lands and languages. 'Waves' and
'Dancer' were both scripted in English, one set in a fanciful Scotland,
the other in an even more fanciful 1960's America."
And the piece
continues: "Is that the secret, the centrality of the artist? Are we
entering an age when the only two root-systems that will matter in culture
or cinema, in Europe at least, are the world, at largest, and the artist,
at smallest and finest? And language itself - will its hindrances, of
whatever kind, simply start to be overridden?"
Andrews concludes:
"Maybe the old dream of cinema as a united and uniting popular language -
a dream that was ended, we thought, by the coming of sound and speech - is
back again. By forgetting nationalism we can forget division."
The whole piece is
available on FT.com: http://news.ft.com/...