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Nordic exposures :Scandinavian whiteness and ethnic assimilation in classical Hollywood cinema

Record Type:	Electronic resources : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	Nordic exposures :
Reminder of title:	Scandinavian whiteness and ethnic assimilation in classical Hollywood cinema
Author:	Lunde, Arne Olav.
Description:	165 p.
Notes:	Chair: Mark Sandberg.
Notes:	Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 65-02, Section: A, page: 0324.
Contained By:	Dissertation Abstracts International65-02A.
Subject:	Cinema.
Online resource:	http://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=3121588
ISBN:	0496689398

Nordic exposures :Scandinavian whiteness and ethnic assimilation in classical Hollywood cinema
Lunde, Arne Olav.

Nordic exposures :Scandinavian whiteness and ethnic assimilation in classical Hollywood cinema [electronic resource] - 165 p.

Chair: Mark Sandberg.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Berkeley, 2003.

This dissertation explores how Scandinavian whiteness and ethnicity functioned in classical Hollywood cinema during the period between and during the two World Wars. Cultural critic Richard Dyer has famously called for "making whiteness strange." My project historicizes and theorizes particular problems at the vexed borders between racial whiteness and white ethnicity. I examine complex cases of ambiguous and hybrid identities that counter received notions of the Scandinavian in America. Scandinavianness in Hollywood can be hyperwhite, off-white, not white enough, or not even white at all. Chapter One examines the concept of the Nordic race in 1920s America and its ideological attraction for Hollywood in Technicolor's 1928 epic, The Viking---a Columbus story in Norse drag. The second chapter interprets Swedish emigre director Victor Sjostrom's He Who Gets Slapped (1924) as an allegorical silent-era film about Scandinavian white ethnicity and white-on-white racial masquerade in America. Using Greta Garbo's first talkie Anna Christie (1930) as its overarching subject, Chapter Three charts cultural constructions of "Scandinavian voice" in the wake of the talkie revolution and the ensuing crisis of foreign voice and accent. The fourth chapter explores how Swedish immigrant Warner Oland (born Johan Varner Olund) became American cinema's definitive Chinese detective, Charlie Chan, during the 1930s. Finally, I investigate how Hollywood and Third Reich cinema respectively deployed marketing strategies for defining and assimilating the Nordic film goddess (Garbo, Sonja Henie, Ingrid Bergman, Kristina Soderbaum, and Zarah Leander) before and during the Second World War. The cases here emerge as both racial and ethnic, creating a dialectical crossroads full of intriguing paradoxes and tensions. I am interested in how the Scandinavian can seem so mutable and constructed at moments (allowing for voice impersonations and cross-racial and white-on-white masquerades) and then be deployed as an essential, biological, and natural category at other times. As it plays out in Hollywood classical cinema, the Nordic racial/Scandinavian ethnic dialectic always requires supplementing or displacing, bleaching or darkening, vocal imitation or effacement. My project therefore attempts to make whiteness even stranger by exposing some of the last bastions and final reserves of its cultural essentialism and myth.

ISBN: 0496689398Subjects--Topical Terms:

212426
Cinema.

Nordic exposures :Scandinavian whiteness and ethnic assimilation in classical Hollywood cinema
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520 # $a This dissertation explores how Scandinavian whiteness and ethnicity functioned in classical Hollywood cinema during the period between and during the two World Wars. Cultural critic Richard Dyer has famously called for "making whiteness strange." My project historicizes and theorizes particular problems at the vexed borders between racial whiteness and white ethnicity. I examine complex cases of ambiguous and hybrid identities that counter received notions of the Scandinavian in America. Scandinavianness in Hollywood can be hyperwhite, off-white, not white enough, or not even white at all. Chapter One examines the concept of the Nordic race in 1920s America and its ideological attraction for Hollywood in Technicolor's 1928 epic, The Viking---a Columbus story in Norse drag. The second chapter interprets Swedish emigre director Victor Sjostrom's He Who Gets Slapped (1924) as an allegorical silent-era film about Scandinavian white ethnicity and white-on-white racial masquerade in America. Using Greta Garbo's first talkie Anna Christie (1930) as its overarching subject, Chapter Three charts cultural constructions of "Scandinavian voice" in the wake of the talkie revolution and the ensuing crisis of foreign voice and accent. The fourth chapter explores how Swedish immigrant Warner Oland (born Johan Varner Olund) became American cinema's definitive Chinese detective, Charlie Chan, during the 1930s. Finally, I investigate how Hollywood and Third Reich cinema respectively deployed marketing strategies for defining and assimilating the Nordic film goddess (Garbo, Sonja Henie, Ingrid Bergman, Kristina Soderbaum, and Zarah Leander) before and during the Second World War. The cases here emerge as both racial and ethnic, creating a dialectical crossroads full of intriguing paradoxes and tensions. I am interested in how the Scandinavian can seem so mutable and constructed at moments (allowing for voice impersonations and cross-racial and white-on-white masquerades) and then be deployed as an essential, biological, and natural category at other times. As it plays out in Hollywood classical cinema, the Nordic racial/Scandinavian ethnic dialectic always requires supplementing or displacing, bleaching or darkening, vocal imitation or effacement. My project therefore attempts to make whiteness even stranger by exposing some of the last bastions and final reserves of its cultural essentialism and myth.
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