Melodrama, Identity, and Community in Forbrydelsen

The Danish television series Forbrydelsen is representative of the successful intertwining of local narratives with transnational media within the scenario of contemporary Nordic Noir. This paper considers the series’ stylistic and production values to show how a “medium-concept” narrative, with its hybridization of genres, portrays highly debated social issues and raises a nationwide public discourse on them. The mingling of genres (melodrama and noir, sensational and crime fiction, and so on) produces a complex narrative that revolves around the wounded body and psyche of the female detective. The melodramatic mode of representation generates a dystopic vision of the contemporary world, visually depicting violent clashes between the individual and the agents of power, and the morally ambiguous compromises such clashes create for the nation

Gendered spaces for survival: Citizens and aliens in contemporary European cinema

The contemporary urban space is dominated by neo-liberism, and represented in European cinema as a hostile environment for the disadvantaged or illegal citizens inhabiting it. The ‘aliens’ penetrating Fortress Europe are forced to find original and secluded routes in the stratified city map, or to blur the borders of their confinement with incursion in the outside world, which can be physical or virtual, however illegal. The aim of this article is to depict the complex relations represented by contemporary European cinema between the policies of globalization, neo-liberist economies and migration flows, as they all clash one against the other within the cityscape. European metropolizes are represented as layered interfaces actively producing the hegemonic narratives, where each subject has to negotiate an impossible position between presence and absence, visibility and invisibility, public and private. In such a scenario, both citizen and human rights are deprived of any value, and the same happens to the idea of political representation. The main activity organized by the institutions is border patrolling, as many films represent surveillance policies and actual raids through the city to detect the ‘aliens’ and remove them from the national territory. In most European films addressing issues of gendered and illegal citizenship, the urban space actively produces the narrative in a symbiotic relation among ethics, politics, the cities and their inhabitants. Access to different and multiple public spaces, and the visual representation of characters and settings, propose a discourse about agency and subalternity, communities and the excess. The fragmented tissue of streets and buildings generate a condition of difficulty or impossibility for the subject to be involved in intimate relations. Even the existing families are taken in the net of the economy of exploitation and consent. In order to survive, the individual has to be part of an original human network, enabling a counterhegemonic pattern for affective, emotional and cultural relations. The subject’s experience depends hence upon her or his abilities to escape or recreate the geometries of vision, gendered gaze and possessive desire usually shaping European cinema

Reading Contemporary Serial Television Universes: A Narrative Ecosystem Framework

Reading Contemporary Serial Television Universes provides a new framework – the metaphor of the narrative ecosystem – for the analysis of serial television narratives. Contributors use this metaphor to address the ever-expanding and evolving structure of narratives far beyond their usual spatial and temporal borders, in general and in reference to specific series. Other scholarly approaches consider each narrative as composed of modular elements, which combine to create a bigger picture. The narrative ecosystem approach, on the other hand, argues that each portion of the narrative world contains all of the main elements that characterize the world as a whole, such as narrative tensions, production structures, creative dynamics and functions. The volume details the implications of the narrative ecosystem for narrative theory and the study of seriality, audiences and fandoms, production, and the analysis of the products themselves