An Authoring Discourse of Sorts: Effects of public film support on a national cinema (invited paper presentation)

In the cinemas of small nations, infrastructural support systems aimed at endorsing and strengthening audiovisual production, tend to play an increasingly pivotal role. Since additional systems have been added, with the intent to, for instance, encourage co-production or to attract filming and post-production work to assorted places – and always coming with various provisions attached – one may speak of the support systems as an authoring discourse of sorts. Consequently, factors such as language, locations, genre, the nationality of the crew and the actors, and even where the individual crew members are registered as living, are frequently prescribed by provisions attached to the support. The present paper will use examples from Scandinavia and will attempt to chart some of the ways in which the various public aids have played an important part in rendering, transform and ‘author’ what can be called the contemporary national cinema