Reception, Circulation, Desire: Liv Ullmann and the Transnational Journeys of a Scandinavian Actress

Abstract

Transnational issues in cinema cover a wide spectrum, ranging from the regional to the global. Besides a host of multicultural concerns, e.g. so-called “accented” cinemas there are the ever more diversified production-, distribution- and consumption-cultures to consider. Current examples abound­—for example, when David Fincher took the unusual decision to shoot, at an inordinate cost, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in Stockholm, and with international James Bond star Daniel Craig in the lead as Stieg Larsson’s literary hero Mikael Blomkvist. But transnationality in cinema is old news. For instance, ever since directors of Swedish silent cinema and actors like Greta Garbo and Ingrid Bergman, Nordic and/or Swedish stars have made cross-Atlantic journeys. One of the most prominent, yet least noticed in a transnational context, is Liv Ullmann (b 1939). Already well established on stage and film in Norway, it was her acting in films by Ingmar Bergman that launched her international career. She enjoyed a phenomenal popularity, particularly in the US where she won New York Film Critics’ Award for Best Actress twice, for Scenes from a Marriage in 1974 and Face to Face in 1976, while also starring on Broadway, in Anna Christie in 1977. In a transnational context, it is also of interest that her activities range well beyond film into other fields, as internationally bestselling author (e.g. Changing, 1977), UN-ambassador, and film and stage director with an international outreach. But what makes Ullmann a particularly intriguing case is that she can be regarded as an auteur-star, whose function in many ways parallels the function of stars in American mainstream film. For if the underlying commercial reasons for why current American film is more than ever filled with international actors is that Hollywood is adjusting itself to an increasingly globalized film industry, in which most of the revenues do not come from the US any more, Ullmann in her time very much served a similar function for the auteur-fueled European film culture of the day. There are simply good reasons to assume that art house auteurs such as Bergman were no less commercial than their commercial counterparts, e.g. in being supported by the international film trade. My aim, then, is to show how a “high-brow” star may serve as an index to the contemporary transnational media scape, and the degree to which she in this case also conflated notions abroad of the “Swedish” with the “Nordic”—what may called an early version of Nordic noir, albeit with an existential rather than crime novel twist.

Keywords

• transnational
• american studies
• sweden
• liv ullmann