• Offers a comprehensive, transnational and regional account of Nordic cinema from its origins to the present day
• Features original contributions from more than two dozen international film scholars based in the Nordic countries, the United States, Canada, Scotland, and Hong Kong
• Covers a wide range of topics on the distinctive evolution of Nordic cinema including the silent Golden Age, Nordic...

Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson's celebrated and enigmatic film Songs from the Second Floor, his first feature film in twenty-five years, won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2000. The "songs" of the film's title refer to Andersson's artistic ruminations on the state of mankind from his office on the second floor of Studio 24 in Stockholm. The film presents a series of forty-six tableaux--long, deep-focus shots with a still camera, mostly in studio settings, using older visual tricks such as trompe l'oeil. The tableaux showcase seemingly trivial tragicomic...

Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson's celebrated and enigmatic film Songs from the Second Floor, his first feature film in twenty-five years, won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2000. The "songs" of the film's title refer to Andersson's artistic ruminations on the state of mankind from his office on the second floor of Studio 24 in Stockholm. The film presents a series of forty-six tableaux--long, deep-focus shots with a still camera, mostly in studio settings, using older visual tricks such as trompe l'oeil. The tableaux showcase seemingly trivial tragicomic...