Description: For three decades, state-sponsored short filmmaking educated Danish citizens, promoted Denmark to the world, and shaped the careers of renowned directors like Carl Th. Dreyer. The first book-length study in English of a national corpus of state-sponsored informational film, this book traces how Danish shorts on topics including social welfare, industry, art and architecture were commissioned, funded, produced and reviewed from the inter-war period to the 1960s. Examining the life cycle of a representative selection of films, and discussing their preservation and mediation in the digital age, this book presents a detailed case study of how informational cinema is shaped by, and indeed shapes, its cultural, political and technological contexts.
Brief description: Dr C. Claire Thomson is Professor of Cinema History at University College London (UCL), where she is the Director of Film Studies and teaches Nordic cinema and cultural history, as well as translation from the Scandinavian languages. Her previous publications include the monographs Thomas Vinterberg's Festen (U Washington P, 2013) and Short Films from a Small Nation: Danish Informational Cinema 1935-1965 (EUP 2018), the edited volume Northern Constellations: New Readings in Nordic Cinema (Norvik, 2006), and numerous articles on short films, film and public health, multisensory cinema and the work of Carl Th. Dreyer and Thomas Vinterberg. She is an editor of the journals Scandinavica and Kosmorama.