Chow, PS; (2016) ‘A Symptom of Something Real’: The Øresund Region on Film and Television, 1999–2014. Doctoral thesis , UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

The Øresund is a transnational metropolitan region comprising Greater Copenhagen (Denmark) and Skåne (Southern Sweden), joined by the Øresund Bridge built over the strait separating the two nations. Historically a site of cultural encounter between Denmark and Sweden, the region took shape as a political-economic entity during the 1990s against a wider backdrop of European Union initiatives to encourage cross-border cooperation. One aim of the Øresund development strategy is to foster regional culture and identity; the production and distribution of audiovisual media supported by the respective national film policies and industries are key here. I explore how the Øresund region has been imagined and critiqued in popular film and televisual texts since the 1990s and provide new readings of a largely un-researched body of material related to the development of this transnational region. Drawing on a small-nation approach to cinema, I study the emergence and development of screen culture in the region and how audiovisual texts construct the sense of an ‘Øresund identity’, a cultural and geopolitical identity that is still being forged and negotiated by various actors. In particular, I investigate how the region’s spatial identity is mediated to local and international audiences through representations of postindustrial urban change and intercultural encounters. I begin with an analysis of the film-political landscape, followed by close readings of the audiovisual texts against the socio-political context of the genesis of the region and the architectural and cultural policies emerging from the larger region-building project. I argue that the texts imaginatively negotiate, and, to an extent, shape the economic, social, and material development of the region during this period of intense region-building and branding. This thesis is a contribution to scholarship in the areas of small nation cinema, Nordic screen studies, and culture and identity.

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