Lectures
Jean Sibelius: A Composer’s Life and the Awakening of Finland
Lecture by Dr. Glenda Goss
Tuesday, February 23, 6:30 pm
$10 ($8 ASF Members; FREE to students with a valid ID)
Composer Jean Sibelius (1865–1957) came to prominence during Finland’s golden age of the arts. The timing was no coincidence, for Sibelius helped to shape that golden era while in turn being shaped by it. In her talk, Dr. Glenda Dawn Goss, Professor of Musicology at the University of Georgia and 1996 Visiting Professor at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, will present this national creative tide in the context of Nordic cultural currents and will discuss the vital importance of the wider Nordic world for the creation of that display. The events of Finland’s golden age were fueled by wider geo-political forces in the course of which Finland came under Russian control after centuries of being a part of Sweden. The push and pull of east and west spurred Sibelius and his contemporaries to create a dazzling outpouring of music, art, drama, and literature that endowed Finns with a sense of pride, awakened them to their unique heritage, and defined what it meant to be Finnish.
Chronic Heart Failure: A Comparison Between Sweden & the United States
Lecture by Jan Mårtensson
Tuesday, March 2, 6:30 pm
FREE, no tickets or reservations required; seating is first-come first-served
Jan Mårtensson, visiting ASF scholar and Associate Professor of Nursing from the School of Health Sciences and Supervisor at the Primary Care Research and Development Unit in Jönköping, Sweden, compares follow-up care for heart disease patients in Sweden and the United States. Mårtensson also highlights the most important reforms that must be accomplished in heart disease and health care in the near future. Despite a continuing favorable trend in the occurrence of most cardiovascular diseases, heart failure is a significant and growing public health problem. More than 95% of admissions and days of hospitalization involve persons over 65 years of age. In Sweden this group of patients accounts for approximately 20% of all medical care events and 30% of all days of care due to heart disease. In the U.S. patients with heart failure account for about one-tenth of the Medicare population but over one-third of all Medicare spending, presenting an unsustainable burden as the population ages and the demand for in-hospital care increases.
The American Girl
Reading & book talk with Monika Fagerholm
Tuesday, March 9, 6:30 pm
FREE, no tickets or reservations required; seating is first-come first-served
In 1969, a young American girl named Eddie de Wire travels from Coney Island to the swampy coast of Finland and drowns in a marsh while wearing a red plastic raincoat, her premature death becoming part of local folklore. As her mythology builds, two imaginative and ferociously devoted young friends—Sandra and Doris, each with their own troubled history—search for hidden meaning and answers to Eddie’s demise. The girls construct their own world, their own language, and their own rules. But playing adult games has adult consequences, and what begins as two girls striking matches leads to an inferno that threatens to consume them and tear their worlds apart.
Gyrating from the swinging 60s to the mod early 70s, this complex narrative is kept on track by Fagerholm’s gifts as a storyteller. Part mysterious gothic saga, part chronicle of an era, and part a portrait of youth on the cusp of sexual awakening, The American Girl is a bewitching glimpse into the human psyche.
Already an international phenomenon, The American Girl from Scandinavian novelist Monika Fagerholm is simply unforgettable. A number one bestseller in Sweden and Finland, it has sold more than 200,000 copies to date, and has been sold in 13 countries. It is the recipient of the premier literary award in Sweden—The August Prize, as well as The Aniara Prize and The Gothenburg Post Award, and has been short-listed for The International IMPAC Literary Award.
Monika Fagerholm, one of Scandinavia’s most renowned authors, was born in Helsinki, Finland in 1961 and belongs to the Swedish-speaking community in Finland. Her much praised first novel, Wonderful Women by the Sea (New Press, 1997), won numerous awards, was short-listed for both the August Prize and the Finlandia Prize, and was made into a motion picture. With the publication of Diva in 1998, Fagerholm stirred up a cult-like following across Scandinavia and was awarded The Swedish Literature Society Award and Nyland’s Art Award.
Fashion & Films
Thursday, March 11 & Thursday, March 18, both @ 6:30 pm
$9 ($6 ASF Members)
The moving image has represented and (re)interpreted fashion as a concept, an industry and as a cultural form since its inception. Subtly but strongly, fashion exists in the interstices of film aesthetics, possessing the ability to not only enhance a character’s persona and the drama of life, but also the capability to encourage critical response with regard to a film’s content, position in society, and relation to the human experience.
Scandinavia House presents a miniseries of screenings and lectures that closely examine fashion’s role in two Swedish films – Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night/Sommarnattens leende (1955) and Arne Mattsson’s Mannequin in Red/Mannekäng i rött (1958).
Smiles of a Summer Night/Sommarnattens leende
Film screening with lecture by Astrid Söderbergh Widding
Thursday, March 11, 6:30 pm
Directed by Ingmar Bergman (1955). The 1956 prize-winning comedy Smiles of a Summer Night ushered in an international audience for director Ingmar Bergman. Set in turn-of-the-century Sweden, four women and four men attempt to juggle the laws of attraction amidst their daily bourgeois life. When a weekend in the country brings them all face to face, the women ally to force the men’s hands in their matters of the heart, exposing their pretensions and insecurities along the way. Chock full of flirtatious propositions and sharp-witted wisdom, Smiles of a Summer Night is one of film history’s great tragicomedies, a bittersweet view of the transience of human carnality. 108 min.
Swedish costume designer and culture personality MAGO (Max Goldstein) designed the film’s costumes, firmly establishing an example of centralized cooperation between the two artists that lasted throughout the years and spanned many films. Whereas Bergman preferred his old leather jacket and beret, MAGO was a true elegant. However, they could unite their artistic vision for absolute quality. Their two artistic temperaments are as fascinating as they may seem out of date in an age rather dominated by effects and quantity.
Professor Astrid Söderbergh Widding is in the Cinema Studies Department and Associate Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at Stockholm University, Chair of the Ingmar Bergman Foundation, and on the board of The Swedish Film Institute and The Swedish Fulbright Commission.
Mannequin in Red/Mannekäng i rött
Film screening with lecture by Louise Wallenberg
Thursday, March 18, 6:30 pm
Directed by Arne Mattsson (1958). A private detective doubling up as a fashion mannequin, a head designer with lesbian inclinations and a mean, wheelchair-based fashion house matron ominously accompanied by a white cat…welcome to the strange world of the couture salon “La Femme,” where the elegant surface soon starts to peel, revealing what’s hidden and repressed underneath. 108 min.
The combination of uncanny murders, romantic love and traditional comedy make this film one of a kind, thanks in part to director Arne Mattsson, dubbed the “Swedish Hitchcock” due to his daring framing and calculated use of color. What adds to its uniqueness are the costumes made by designer MAGO, who in the making of this film must have had the time of his life, designing effeminate fashion without – it seems – any limitation to his creativity and fantasy.
Dr. Louise Wallenberg will focus on the specific Mattssonian crime genre and its relation to the Italian giallo and to the crime genre as developed in Swedish cinema and literature. She will also focus on the meaning of the many costumes and on the implicit narrative that deals with women’s desire.
Wallenberg is the acting director of the Centre for Fashion Studies and holds a PhD in Cinema Studies (2002) from Stockholm University.
The Viking in the Wheatfield: A Scientist’s Struggle to Preserve the World’s Harvest
Lecture & reading with Susan Dworkin
Tuesday, March 16, 6:30 pm
FREE, no tickets or reservations required; seating is first-come first-served
New York City author and journalist Susan Dworkin’s newest book takes the reader into the world of Bent Skovmand (1945-2007), a brilliant Danish plant scientist who fought to preserve and expand the world’s wheat supply. For 35 years Skovmand collected, multiplied, and documented the world’s wheat varieties, helping to protect the harvest against mutant plagues and revolutionary climate change. Before his untimely death in 2007, he worked to develop the so-called “Doomsday Vault” on Norway’s Arctic border where nations store their crop seeds under tons of ice and rock as insurance against catastrophe.
In an era when multinational corporations and governments often jealously guard breeding patents and information, Skovmand fought to keep his seed bank a center for free, open scientific exchange, as a service to breeders and farmers everywhere. When nations locked up their seeds, he fought to keep germplasm an internationally available public good. The Viking in the Wheatfield goes to the heart of the struggle to save the harvest, one seed at a time. Skovmand’s life casts a bright and welcome light on an agricultural sector – the international seed banks – upon which we are all crucially dependent and about which most of us know far too little. As Bent Skovmand often told visitors to his collection, “If the seeds disappear, so could your food. So could you.”
Dworkin has written several biographies, including The Nazi Officer’s Wife, and her articles have appeared in Ms., Ladies’ Home Journal, Cosmopolitan, and numerous other magazines. Her fascination with agriculture dates from early stints at the United States Department of Agriculture and as a journalist covering aid programs in the Middle East. She lives in New York City and the Berkshires.
A Blaze in the Northern Sky:
Norwegian Black Metal & the Culture that Spawned it
Thursday, April 29, 7 pm
$10 ($8 ASF Members)
In the last two decades, a bizarre, intense, and violent musical subculture called Black Metal has emerged in Norway, and has subsequently become a worldwide phenomenon. In a unique seminar-meets-radio show format moderated by Patrizia Mazzuoccolo, the lecture will explore and promote the genre and its country through audio clips of bands, interviews with musicians and guests, and an audience Q & A session.
Black Metal is a distinctive mix of Satanism, Nordic mythology, and extreme heavy metal. It is the basis of a Norwegian subculture that aggressively forsakes Christianity and mainstream society in favor of Norse mythology, epic Scandinavian nature, and self-inflicted isolation. This violent subculture attracted international attention in the early 1990s with a string of murders, suicides, grave desecrations, and the arson of over 20 Christian churches.
Mazzuoccolo has worked as a music journalist for over 10 years contributing to magazines like Metal Hammer (U.K.), Terrorizer (U.K.), Rock Sound (U.K.), and Metal Maniacs (U.S.), and still writes for Rhythm where in 2002-2003 she had her own metal column. She worked as a Promotions Producer for the Sky Television network in London from 1998 – 2002, did screen work on MTV2's The Riot (2002), and freelanced for The Rock Show on BBC Radio One in connection with the Norwegian black metal special (2006). She lived in London for 14 years, in Oslo for 6 and currently resides in New York where she is writing a book on the subject of Norwegian metal and culture.
During her time in Oslo, Mazzuoccolo worked as a Marketing and Promotion officer for Moonfog Productions, label manager for Tabu Recordings, acted as consultant and co-organizer of the sold-out Scandinavian metal night at SXSW (2008) and was the co-creator, roving reporter and producer of hot metal show Tinitus on Norwegian national radio NRK P3 from 2005 until early 2009 (www.nrk.no/tinitus).
The Sixth Annual PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature
Friday, April 30, Schedule & Times TBA
FREE, no tickets or reservations required; seating is first-come first-served
The 2010 PEN World Voices Festival will be held from April 26 to May 2 at venues throughout New York City and will focus on the freedom of expression and the international fellowship of writers. This annual showcase of writers from all over the world consists of several days of public panels, literary conversations, readings, and tributes. By convening international writers to discuss their relationships to their public and private selves, PEN World Voices aims to expand the dialogue on essential aspects of the human experience that promises to play a crucial role in the interactions of nations, peoples, and individuals for the foreseeable future.
Scandinavia House joins the festival as a co-sponsor and will host a series of programs. Please visit www.pen.org for schedule and more details.