A reportage of #DETECt2021 Conference. Written by Nicola Pimpinella and Lavinia Sansone, Students of the Dams Degree Course (Link Campus University).

The final day of the DETECt Conference at Link Campus University started with parallel sessions taking place in rooms A, B and C, followed by a plenary session.

 

PARALLEL SESSION 7

 

Panel A7: The Foreigner in Crime Fiction

Through the analysis of Deon Meyer’s post-apartheid, African noir “The Last Hunt” (2018), this panel reflected on the historical and contemporary relationship between Africa and Europe in relation to crime fiction: the panel focused on the complex interconnections between the two continents in terms of time, space, crimes and characters. In such sense, “The Last Hunt” comes across as “a hybrid literary product” that brings the local dimension into the global one, constantly moving from the national to the transnational level: by mentioning the central character’s exile in Bordeaux, the panel went on to stress the theme of mobility, while also complicating the socio-political landscape. Moreover, “the detective figure straddles the fine line between hero and villain”, which is typical in noir and therefore proves the osmotic relationship between fiction traditions that are only geographically distant.

 

Panel B7: The Geography of TV Crime Dramas: Local / Global

Starting with “The Break” (2016-2018), this panel wondered whether detective fiction is a “glocal” genre, as it exports local situations abroad and imports global ones: “crime fiction is a travelling structure, applicable and thereby a world literature par excellence” (Hedberg). Moving onto the topic of peripheral locations, the panel went on to list the “many reasons for choosing a tight-knit community as a setting to our dastardly plots” (Kiernan). In the case of Arctic and Greenlandic noir, the panel analysed “Thin Ice” (2020-present) to discuss opportunities and challenges of remote locations from a production perspective: so, it is inevitable that, for instance, the pitfalls shape both narrative and aesthetics, which can, however, benefit from it; in fact, “Iceland has become the centre of Arctic film and TV production, also concerning crime narratives”.

 

Panel C7: The Contribution of Digital Humanities to Cultural Studies Research 

Commenting on the digital infrastructure built by DETECt Project, this panel reflected on diversified resources, integrated tools and services supporting research, teaching and learning activities. Mentioning the MOOC on “Euro-Noir” created by DETECt, the panel described the different objectives of a MOOC on crime fiction as part of a research project: for instance, its ability to reach a large public has the potential to build a strong international learning community where it is possible to spread research outcomes and encourage transnational dialogue. Analysing the locative screen tourism experience “DETECt Aarhus”, the panel went on to show how smart screen tourism can provide “a multifaceted perspective on locations”, as it encourages people to explore local cultures: users can visit the places of the fictional worlds depicted in films and TV series.

 

Plenary session: Crime, Creative Industries and Contemporary European Media Policies

Research Fellow Federico Pagello from Università di Chieti-Pescara chaired this session that saw the participation of two teams of researchers, Italian and Danish. Research Fellow Luca Antoniazzi from Università di Bologna talked about the potentials (e.g. pursuing extra economic goals in media policy) and weaknesses (e.g. absence of future-led policies) of the new AVMSD. Next, Associate Professor Luca Barra from Università di Bologna focused on “foreign content and its travelling paths”: in his paper, he went on to the topics of format adaptations, subtitling and dubbing, which help to circulate ideas, safeguard minority languages and, eventually, build a more diverse European culture. Moving to the Danish team, Assistant Professor Cathrin Helen Bengesser from Aalborg University reflected on the geographical imbalances in fiction funding decisions while analysing Creative Europe’s TV Programming Scheme: for instance, looking at application statistics, you may notice that “big applicants have below average success rate” and “smaller applicants often do get a chance (but hardly ever for fiction)”. Finally, Associate Professor Kim Toft Hansen from Aalborg University took the example of “The Team” (2015-2018) to illustrate how TV crime drama can be a form of transcultural communication: as the first genuine “European” series of its kind (5 different European producers, 7 European broadcasters, 6 different languages, etc.), the series proves “the European added-value” behind the promotion of “differences that transcend various traditional cultures” (Hepp).

In the final afternoon, it was the turn of a keynote speech, a round table discussion and, finally, the DETECt Screenwriting Contest award ceremony.

Keynote by Peppino Ortoleva

In the Beginning Was a Murder. The Changing Meanings, and Pleasures, of Crime

Full Professor Peppino Ortoleva from Università di Torino started his speech on the gratifications we get from following a crime story by mentioning The Mechanics of Emotion (1913): in this article, Cohan and Nathan argue “there are emotional reflexes as well as physical reflexes”. Professor Ortoleva went on to recall the Latin etymology of “emotion” (to move), claiming that movements of the psyche are essential for crime stories. Introducing what he calls “the field of the gratifications tied to detective fiction”, Professor Ortoleva started to explore “the vertices of this rough pentagon” and finally tried to consider the whole area: for instance, he mentioned the need for “a spice of danger” expressed by Agatha Christie’s Poirot, which blends with the vicarious experience of the audience; in fact, “noir genre is full of danger” and what makes it so interesting is the shift in emotions it provokes. Professor Ortoleva concluded that it is incorrect to regard a particular emotion as central, since “it is a field open to further investigation”.

During the discussion following the keynote speech, Full Professor Maurizio Ascari from Università di Bologna asked a few questions to Professor Ortoleva, who claimed, for instance, that nowadays “the notion of genre is partially blurred” and that according to him the two main supergenres in contemporary mass culture are noir and melodrama.

 

Concluding round table: Research Impact in the Humanities – New Directions

Associate Professor Luca Barra from Università di Bologna chaired this discussion that involved the testimonies of research projects like DETECt, ViCTOR-E and CInCIt. Full Professor Monica Dall’Asta from Università di Bologna and PI of DETECt Project pointed out what guided her team in the elaboration and evaluation of the project, of which one of the most successful activities has been the Screenwriting Contest itself, which highlighted “what it means to be European today in popular culture products”. Next, Full Professor Valentina Carla Re from Link Campus University, after hinting at the project results in terms of impact, offered some provocations considering the critical issues they have faced as scholars and researchers: for instance, she wondered “how can we make dissemination and promotion more interesting and attractive for researchers” or “how to manage an international press office”. Moving from DETECt, Full Professor Francesco Pitassio from Università degli Studi di Udine and PI of HERA ViCTOR-E Project mentioned some “pitfalls and advantages of measuring and assessing the impact of a research project”. Next, Associate Professor Simon Popple from University of Leeds talked about “the slightly different concept of impact” they have in the UK, which is closer to the concept of “social consequences of research”. Finally, Full Professor Massimo Scaglioni from Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore and PI of CinCIt Project suggested the importance of interpreting impact “as a substantial concept” and later mentioned some of the project’s academic challenges.

DETECt Screenwriting Contest Award Ceremony

The award ceremony was preceded by a conversation with writer and Jury President Maurizio De Giovanni. Interviewed by writer and Associate Professor Alessandro Perissinotto from Università di Torino, Jury President De Giovanni wanted to congratulate all finalists of the Screenwriting Contest for their new takes on crime fiction: in fact, he went on to talk about the reasons for the success of the crime genre, which DETECt Project has demonstrated to be international in scope. Next, hinting at the role played by literature in leading the way to TV seriality, the Jury President commented on his choice to take a close interest in the transformation of his novels into TV series. Moving to the setting of his literary series, he mentioned how important it is for him to portray a city of Naples that is far from postcard stereotypes, as in the case of “I bastardi di Pizzofalcone” (2017-present).

Approaching the proclamation of the winner, Ben Harris, Head of Programme for Serial Eyes, asked Jury members Steve Matthews (HBO Europe), Karen Hassan (Cattleya) and Giacomo Poletti (Mediaset Group) about their impressions of the projects to get an insight into how the mind of an industry executive works.

It was then the turn of two special mentions: the Special Mention for the Best Character(s), given by Link Campus University Student Staff, went to Peff and Solo from “Silver Ghost” by Carsten Jaeger, and the Special Mention given by DETECt Researchers went to “Red Planet Blues” by Harry Ayiotis. Finally, Jury member Karen Hassan, on behalf of the International Jury, announced the winner of DETECt Screenwriting Contest: “Magerdo” by Ewa Stec, for addressing “social and cultural tensions that can be of interest to viewers across Europe” and presenting “a suspenseful cat and mouse game between its main characters […] as a good crime story should do”.

Full Professor Valentina Carla Re closed the DETECt Conference thanking again all the Jury members and Ben Harris and congratulating all the participants of the Screenwriting Contest.

A reportage of #DETECt2021 Conference. Written by Nicola Pimpinella and Lavinia Sansone, Students of the Dams Degree Course (Link Campus University).

The second day of the DETECt Conference at Link Campus University started with several panels taking place in rooms A, B and C.

 

PARALLEL SESSION 3

Panel A3: Crime Narratives: A Crossborder Perspective

Starting with Stefano Sollima’s work as the first authentic Italian showrunner, this panel mentioned: “Romanzo Criminale – La serie” (2006-2008), “Gomorrah” (2014-present) and “ZeroZeroZero” (2020-present). In the first case, characters still embody the struggle between good and evil; in “Gomorrah”, they become highly complex in a claustrophobic world. Unlike the novel by Roberto Saviano, from which the series was adapted, the absence of that figure who guides us through the events and who represents the alternative to crime should be noted. Instead, a more global dimension can be found in “ZeroZeroZero”, a series in which deep human feelings (e.g. desire for power and revenge) lead to the eventual dehumanization of characters. Finally, aesthetically speaking about the role of landscape, although the representation of Southern Italy is authentic, none of the clichés of the Campania region (e.g. sea, sun and Vesuvius) is present.

Panel B3: Crime Narratives, Periphery and Multiculturalism

Analyzing the concept of “peripheral locations”, which “does not exclusively imply a distance from Rome” (Coviello and Re 2021), this panel focused on some recent examples of films set outside of primary tourist routes. For instance, over the last thirty years, the Po Valley has become a “particularly dark crime setting”, as it is full of unexplored areas that are ideal for hiding mysteries: not surprisingly, it has been described as a “Padanian-Gothic landscape” (Cappi 2007). In the case of “Human Capital” (2013), the director Paolo Virzì “transplants a novel set in Connecticut to Brianza” (Bertarelli 2014), proving that local specificities can be integrated into innovative but also challenging ways. In fact, locals have accused Virzì of painting an inaccurate picture of the area. As in the case of “Mediterranean noir”, the label “Padano noir” can be interpreted also in terms of glocal narratives, transnational identity, and cosmopolitism: ultimately, “the river has no centre […], it is the elsewhere” (Belpoliti 2021).

Panel C3: The Geography of Crime Fiction: Local / Global

Mentioning the works of Spanish authors like José Luis Correa, Antonio Lozano, Dolores Redondo, Ibon Martín and Eva García Sáenz de Urturi, this panel reflected on the description of routes taken by characters, which add realism and also contribute to follow the steps of the investigations. Moreover, in the case of “La Ceguera del Cangrejo” (2019) by Alexis Ravelo, the author promotes sustainable tourism in Lanzarote: in fact, the description of natural and artistic heritage of the island occupies more than six pages in the novel, that is therefore located halfway “between narration and transmission of knowledge”. And as more and more readers wish to visit the story’s locations, literary routes have been organised with the involvement of the writer himself. The fertility of regional crime fiction in Spain shows how Madrid and Barcelona are no longer the main settings: in fact, always more writers choose to set their stories in territories they know very well and wish to make known. If similar phenomena can be found in Italy, France and other European countries, instead of a literary movement tout court, one can talk about “exchange and openness in the mosaic of Europe, whose cultural unity emerges strongly”.

PARALLEL SESSION 4

 

Panel A4: Crime Narratives: a Transmedia Perspective

This panel reflected on how the subgenre of noir narratives have become perhaps “the most critically and commercially successful case of transnational TV seriality in Europe”, as is shown by series like “Inspector Montalbano” (1999-2021), “Wallander” (2008-2016), “Babylon Berlin” (2017-present), “Money Heist” (2017-present) and “Witnesses” (2014-present). Taking as an example the noirification of the Italian TV “giallo”, which took place first in the field of literature, the panel reflected on the equivalence between this process and that of complexification. As “the act of labeling something noir, particularly a visual fiction, is a way of insisting on its status as art” (Steenberg 2017), these series have achieved the status of “quality” products and therefore present recognizable elements that can “gain audiences and circulate transnationally”. And if “the Italian public broadcasting system didn’t take long to follow this model”, similar trajectories can be seen in other countries, too.

Panel B4: New Takes on the Police Procedural

Through the analysis of series like “Criminal” (2019-present) and “In Treatment” (2008-present), this panel went on to investigate the modus operandi of the “chamber play” as a transnational format and how it articulates popular geopolitics and social or psychological realities linked to crime and criminality. Either the police interrogation room and the therapist’s office show the so-called “aesthetics of the closed place”, but each local series has its peculiarities. For instance, in the case of “Criminal”, even if the criminal act stays the same, there is a difference in terms of framing and/or social status (e.g. the depiction of sexual abuse in “Criminal: UK” and “Criminal: Spain”). Furthermore, the panel showed how “Western chamber plays highlight the crisis of modern democracies’ institutions”, whereas “Eastern chamber plays highlight how multiple modernities reframe the institutions of modern democracies”.

Panel C4: Crime Narratives and Ecocriticism

Analysing the novel “Earthly Remains” (2017) by “eco-detective writer” Donna Leon, this panel reflected on the “use of crime fiction formula to orientate some of its conventions into environmentalist discourse”. Talking about global issues, while also succeeding in reaching exoticism, the ecocriticism conducted by Leon starts in the Venetian lagoon and concretizes the “large-scale effects of climate catastrophe”, thus reaching a worldwide audience. The crime novel also underlines “the connivance between local criminal organizations and large international corporations”. The panel went on with the role played by the Mediterranean in making these “complex scalar tensions” visible: they also contribute to the global circulation of the author’s work and ecocriticism, indeed a vast and challenging topic, closely related to the theme of narrative delocalization, too.

In the afternoon, it was the turn of two parallel sessions and one keynote speech:

PARALLEL SESSION 5

 

Panel A5: Crime Narratives and Politics

Analysing “Suburra” (2017-2020) through the concept of “New Italian Epic” by literary group Wu Ming, this panel reflected on the series’s political plot, which is also evident by the presence of a character of a corrupt, professional political figure. Still, in reality, “every level of community in Suburra is basically rotten to the core” (e.g. church, police and industrial corruption). The solution then is either revolution or apocalypse: in fact, Stefano Sollima’s film “Suburra” (2015) is punctuated by chapters entitled “7 days before the apocalypse”, “6 days before the apocalypse”, etc. A similar atmosphere is also reflected in advertisement, as in the dark clouds in the background of the series’s poster. The panel concluded that “the apocalyptic vision of crime and politics is a shortcut for spectacularizing Italian plots in the New Italian Epic TV”, as proved by the idea of interconnection between criminality and the fertile ground it finds in recent Italian political history.

Panel B5: Crime Narratives and Gender

Analysing Turkish crime drama miniseries “Persona” (2018), which takes the form of a critique of social justice while focusing on gender inequalities, this panel reflected on gender representation in cultural identity, stereotypes and roles. Female roles generally present passive characteristics as wives, mothers or daughters; the male ones, on the other hand, are more dominant in the shoes of workmen, husbands and fathers. The “male-dominated social order” is also represented by the fictional, conservative town of Kambura, where a male-dominated culture pressures women. Concerning social memory, the character of Reyhan witnesses and concretises through his diary the suppression of social memory perpetrated by men: in fact, protagonist Nevra Elmas “forgets what was traumatic for her” and this inability to remember is compared to Alzheimer’s disease, since “if the facts are forgotten or made to be forgotten, there is neither a crime nor a conscience”.

Panel C5: Netflix and the Popularity of TV Crime Drama

Focusing on pop songs as relevant tools on both narrative and production sides of TV series, this panel considers their role in building genre identity, as proved by Netflix’s local productions. The two main functions of pop songs in crime TV series are enhancing the mood (e.g. fear) and changing the mood (e.g. love song in a murder scene): in the second case, pop songs can be used to “contradict the typical dark tone of crime series in contrast with stereotypical song choices”. Examples of sound branding include Italian partisan song “Bella Ciao” (in “Money Heist”) and “Red Right Hand” (in “Peaky Blinders”). In Italian crime series, it can also be noted the presence of electronic sounds and lyrics in Neapolitan dialect (e.g. “Gomorrah”) and dark, blues-rock theme songs (e.g. “Rocco Schiavone”. The panel concluded that pop songs have become “a quality trademark, a production tool through which a crime series can display its originality and modernity”.

Keynote by Janet McCabe

“Divided Bodies, Crossing Borders, Transnational Encounters: Towards a Feminist Approach of Transnational TV Studies”

Dr Janet McCabe from Birkbeck, University of London started with a case study of the high-concept scripted TV format of “The Bridge” (2011-2018) to discuss on feminisms in the world, locational feminism and new ways of feminism thinking. By showing a series of audio-visual essays (“Flow/Cut”, “Body/Matters” and “Law/Fear” by McCabe and Grant, 2018), she went on with the theme of cultural legitimacy in relation to crime stories involving women, especially complex female detectives with borderline personalities. Later, Dr McCabe moved to the concept of locational feminism, which translates in different spatial-temporal contexts (Stanford Friedman 2001).

During the discussion following the keynote speech, Associate Professor Pia Majbritt Jensen from Aarhus University, answered the questions with Dr Janet McCabe, hinting at structures of representations and other available tools to tell different stories.

PARALLEL SESSION 6

 

Panel A6: Crime Films and Transnationalism

Stressing that crime fiction communicates Europeannes at a transnational level like no other genre, this panel reflected on the complex structure of European crime films in relation to the more prosperous case of TV production. Claiming that crime is “a national genre” whose international reach does not depend solely on its autonomy, the panel mentioned national and supranational support schemes like the Selective Distribution one: even though crime is the most popular genre, it obtains less funds than drama (52%) and comedy (12%); for instance, French drama takes as much budget as the total of comedy and crime all over Europe. The panel concluded that “supranational supports in distribution could help a broader circulation of European crime films”, which seem to become European only when associated with an authorial figure.

 

Panel B6: The Other in TV Crime Dramas

Mentioning the importance of the crime genre in Hungary, this panel wanted to systematise a large amount of data in relation to the representation of international relations and foreigners: Italy and France, mainly associated to the drug trade, are countries where Hungarians go to study; Austria, Germany and the UK are countries where they go to work, therefore are connected to immigration; Luxembourg represents the banking centre of incomes in many Hungarian storylines; from Russia and Ukraine come, for instance, many Hungarian characters trained in the former KGB; Thailand and New Zealand, at the end of the world, represent an “escape route for criminals”, and South America comes across as a place where “everything illegal can happen”.

Panel C6: Generic and Narrative Hybridity in European Crime Television

Mentioning films like “Almanya: Welcome to Germany” (2011), “Jupiter’s Moon” (2017) and “District 9” (2009), this panel reflected on the detection of the “Other” through the figure of the “Intermediary”. For instance, “Diamantino” (2018) suggests that “the African refugee has always been part of the country [Portugal]”, therefore he is a constant reminder of Portuguese colonial history, implying that “the external is just the internal in disguise”. In the case of “Morgen” (2010), the fear of the refugee is conceived through that of the internal other. The panel concluded that, in European cinema, the representation of the “Other” is not new, since it can be traced back to German Expressionism; some have even ventured to argue that “immigration is simply the new term for race”.

A reportage of #DETECt2021 Conference. Written by Nicola Pimpinella and Lavinia Sansone, Students of the Dams Degree Course (Link Campus University).

The first day of the DETECt Conference at Link Campus University “Detecting Europe in Contemporary Crime Narratives:
Print Fiction, Film, and Television” started with a short welcome address by Full Professor Valentina Carla Re. She greeted guests and attendees joining online and then briefly presented the conference programme.

The Director of Link LAB (the Social Research Centre of Link Campus University), Associate Professor of Sociology Nicola Ferrigni welcomed everyone.  He pointed out the goals of DETECt Project, which have found in the host Research Centre a correlation even in terms of mission. Next, Full Professor Roberta Bartoletti from Università di Urbino Carlo Bo and Coordinator of PIC-AIS (Associazione Italiana di Sociologia, Sezione Processi e Istituzioni Culturali) stressed the impact crime narratives have on the audience, as they produce a critical vision of society while dealing with controversial, transnational topics. Later, Giulia Anastasia Carluccio, from Università degli studi di Torino and President of CUC (Consulta Universitaria del Cinema) discussed the importance of interrogating the concept of “Europeanness” as a critical category, which is particularly useful when applied to the works of crime fiction.

It was then the turn of Full Professor Monica Dall’Asta from Università di Bologna and PI of DETECt Project: she commented on some of the project results. To evaluate what was learned over the last years of research, she suggested getting back to the initial hypotheses and then comparing them with the results. For instance, Professor Dall’Asta recalled how the research team assumed that the crime genre had increasingly worked as a driver for narrative delocalization.

 

Keynote by Theo D’Haen

“How Glocal are Contemporary European Crime Narratives?”

Full Professor Theo D’Haen, from KU Leuven, started with the interest that T. S. Eliot had in detective fiction, a popular kind of literature that, besides providing entertainment, echoes general feelings and attitudes. He went on with a broad background to European crime fiction and its place in world literature, analyzing such a productive genre, socially and ideologically. Professor D’Haen ended his keynote speech suggesting a more fitting label for the most recent crime European fiction that, rather than “glocal” from a national perspective, might be called “Euro-glocal”: he even ventured to say that “these recent TV crime fiction and drama series argue not only for diversity and unity, or rather, unity in diversity, but even for ever closer union”.

During the discussion following the keynote speech, Associate Professor Andrew Pepper from Queen’s University Belfast, answered the questions with Professor D’Haen and mentioned, for instance, to what extent crime fiction can be considered a driver of tourism, a theme that will be discussed later in the conference.

PARALLEL SESSION 1

Panel A1: New Takes on Mediterranean Noir

Mentioning Mediterranean noir writers like Andrea Camilleri (whose stories are set in Vigata, Italy), Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (Barcelona, Spain) and Batya Gur (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, Israel), this panel reflected on the terms “Mediterranean crime fiction” and “Mediterranean noir”, always highlighting their contribution to the crime fiction genre at large. Even though it is usually challenging to go from local to global, from the nation to the world, attempts to go beyond the national approach in research have been made and similarities among different crime fiction traditions, like the Scandinavian one, have been spotted. In the geopolitical region of the Mediterranean, since the ancient Greeks, the literary and cultural dynamics of the Mare Nostrum have been significant, as the very Latin name immediately evokes the movement of people, history and cultures.

Panel B1: New Takes on Nordic Noir

Mentioning a series like the British Nordic noir “Marcella” (2016-present), this panel reflected on how the character of Marcella Backland reflects the pained city of London, littered with bodies and, besides the dead, full of “moribund zombie-like workers”, including DS Backland herself. The scripts, written in Swedish and then translated into English, criticize the economic system of the UK, describing the capital as an “ignominious expression of violence… hidden beneath ideology, mundanity and the suspension of critical thought” (Springer and Le Billon 2016): “Marcella is, in many ways, a product of what it condemns”. Then, the choice of the setting, which is “one of the biggest, most challenging metropolises in the world” meant that it would potentially be a “hit here [in the UK] and in America” (Larder 2019), perhaps introducing the more easily exportable label of “London noir”.

Panel C1: A Tale of Three Cities: Crime and the Urban Tissue in Contemporary Fiction

Mentioning Loriano Macchiavelli’s literature, primarily set in the historic centre of Bologna, this panel retraced the geopoetics of the noir identity of the same Italian city to give an example of a so-called “edge city”. Noirisation and fictionalisation of places often lead to various levels and forms of historical, social and political depth. When real and fictional places come to coexist, fans may even want to visit them, constituting yet another source of enjoyment. Riding the hybridization of reality and fictional universes, Bolognese noirists like Macchiavelli have succeeded in exploiting even the symbolic potential of Bologna: in so doing, even street names prove to be germs that can blossom into stories. And when the construction of the place is so powerful and vivid, in later novels or chapters even some tiny details are enough to perceive the noir atmosphere.

PARALLEL SESSION 2

Panel A2: French Noir and the Transformations of European Crime Fiction

As a symbol of humanity’s quest for truth, the figure of the journalist is a crucial one in contemporary noir fiction, sometimes becoming part of wide imagery of a more inquisitorial process. Even when the journalist gets closer to being a spy or when he investigates conspiratorial tendencies, it proves to be an indeed fascinating trend to analyze. The comeback of James Bond in 2006, for instance, shows how “spies had to be, in a way, more noir in order to be successful”. This panel reflected on how noir fiction is the heir of criminal and urban mystery of the XIX century yet showing a strong realistic aim. In this sense, realism can be interpreted as aesthetics but also as a cognitive process. By paying attention to some metaphors that Frédéric Paulin or Dominique Manotti have always used to describe their quest as noir writers, we can also spot the obsessive presence of the image of the underground world (“bas-fond”) exactly as in the urban mystery of the XIX century.

Panel B2: Crime Films and National Identities. The Case of Greece

Through the analysis the period between 1966 and 2004, strongly marked by immigration flows, redistribution of political power and also new forms of entertainment, studies on “Modernisation noir” in Greece have shown how Athens, becoming a space of multiethnic conversation, boasts filmmakers with greater awareness and even crime TV series with growing popularity. Nevertheless, talking specifically about adapting literature to cinema or TV, there is still little adaptation, for instance, of the greatest Greek noir writer Petros Markarīs, although his stories have proved to be very good for the small screen, but less easy to export abroad. One of the reasons is the authorial tradition of Greece: filmmakers write their own scripts and most creators are also writers; likewise, on the production side of things, the budget restrictions discourage the purchase of rights.

Panel C2: The Black Rome. The Eternal City as Protagonist of Crime Narrative

Analysing the very complex concept of “Romanità” (Romanism, i.e. the idea of Rome) in terms of journalistic coverage and audience’s perception, this panel aimed to show the link between them, all starting from case studies from Italian TV series like “Distretto di polizia” (2000-2012), “Suburra” (2017-2020) and “Rocco Schiavone” (2016-present), which are all set in Rome or otherwise involve Roman characters. Talking about the media in relation to setting, in both “Suburra” and “Rocco Schiavone” we can observe “a transferred idea of Romanism from periphery to the city centre” or, especially in the second case, “from Rome to other cities”. Talking about the audience’s perception, instead, and in relation to characters, it seems that Romanism strongly depends on Roman actors and accent: Romanism, in fact, is “a way of thinking, living and speaking”. When asked to express the level of influence they perceived from the journalistic sources, most of the respondents of a survey answered “Little” and 1 out of 4 answered “Not at all”, so it can be concluded that “the TV series represent the real Romanism storytelling more than the journalistic coverage”.

The conference “Detecting Europe in Contemporary Crime Narratives: Print Fiction, Film, and Television” on 21-23 June 2021 wraps up DETECt, a European research project investigating the crime genre in relation to the creation of a shared European identity.

Over 80 international scholars and professionals will speak in 21 panels, while a professional jury will award the winners from the 250 participants in the crime TV series script contest.

From 21 to 23 June 2021, Link Campus University will host the final conference of the project DETECt – Detecting Transcultural Identity in European Popular Crime Narratives.
The conference, entitled “Detecting Europe in Contemporary Crime Narratives: Print Fiction, Film, and Television”, will be free of charge, after registration, and will take place mainly online. Over 80 international experts will discuss the crime genre in literature, film, and TV series, debate the representations and stereotypes linked to gender, crime, and minorities, and analyse the different geographical declinations of crime, from Mediterranean to Nordic noir. The 21 panels will be interspersed with plenary sessions that will be streamed live on Link Campus University channels (Facebook and YouTube) and during which speakers Theo D’haen (University of Loviano and Leiden), Janet McCabe (Birkbeck, University of London) and Peppino Ortoleva (University of Turin) will intervene.

DETECt is a research project funded by the European Commission in the framework of the Horizon 2020 programme and focuses on identity and popular culture: it seeks to show how the transnational circulation of crime-related cultural and creative products from different EU countries has contributed to the formation of an intercultural and shared European identity since 1989.

During the three and a half years of the project, which will end in October 2021, DETECt has identified and analysed the importance of the crime genre within the new European serial landscape, its production, distribution and consumption practices which, within popular culture, foster the emergence of unprecedented representations of European identity. International products from all European countries included: La casa de papel (Spain), Peaky Blinders and Killing Eve (UK), Babylon Berlin and Dogs of Berlin (Germany), Hackerville (Romania), the co-production The Pleasure Principle (Poland, Czech Republic and Ukraine), Dicte and The Killing (Denmark), The Bridge (Sweden, Denmark), Beforeigners (Norway), Trapped (Iceland), Gomorrah and Inspector Montalbano (Italy).

Some of the main areas of research have considered:

• the representation of the female figure in crime fiction in various European countries;
• the role of production and distribution on digital platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and RaiPlay in the construction of a shared identity;
• the composition of crime fiction audiences and the peculiarities on a European and local scale of the consumption of creative and cultural products in the crime genre.

Among the main initiatives carried out during the project, it is worth mentioning a free online course (MOOC) dedicated to European crime, recently available on the Edx platform; a digital atlas for mapping European crime production; an App dedicated to crime narratives places, already available for the city of Aarhus (Denmark) and under development for Bologna.

Last month the “DETECt Crime Series Contest”, a scriptwriting competition for TV series in the crime genre, was closed. Among the participants: TV authors and scriptwriters, either professional or in training, interested in developing a detective or noir plot with a European perspective. Over 250 proposals were received, but only five will make it to the finals and will be examined by a prestigious international jury, made up of esteemed professionals from the audio-visual sector: Karen Hassan (Cattleya), Steve Matthews (HBO Europe), Giacomo Poletti (Mediaset Group), Eva Van Leeuwen (Netflix). President of the jury will be Maurizio de Giovanni, author of the Commissario Ricciardi, Bastardi di Pizzofalcone and Mina Settembre novels, three successful TV series aired on Rai Uno.

Keynote Speakers

Theo D’haen (Leuven University and Leiden University)
Janet McCabe  (Birkbeck, University of London)
Peppino Ortoleva (University of Turin)

Conference Chairs: Monica Dall’Asta (University of Bologna), Federico Pagello (D’Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara), Valentina Re (Link Campus University)

Advisory Board: Stefano Arduini (Link Campus University), Maurizio Ascari (University of Bologna), Jan Baetens (KU Leuven), Luca Barra (University of Bologna), Stefano Baschiera (Queen’s University Belfast), Giulia Carluccio (University of Turin), Silvana Colella (University of Macerata), Caius Dobrescu (University of Bucharest), Andrea Esser (University of Roehampton), Nicola Ferrigni (Link Campus University), Katarina Gregersdotter (Umeå University), Kim Toft Hansen (Aalborg University), Annette Hill (University of Lund), Dominique Jeannerod (Queen’s University Belfast), Sandor Kalai (University of Debrecen), Matthieu Letourneux (University Paris Nanterre), Natacha Levet (University of Limoges), Giacomo Manzoli (University of Bologna), Janet McCabe (Birkbeck University), Jacques Migozzi (University of Limoges), Andrew Pepper (Queen’s University Belfast), Marica Spalletta (Link Campus University)

Organizing Committee: Luca Antoniazzi (University of Bologna), Sara Casoli (University of Bologna), Massimiliano Coviello (Link Campus University), Paola De Rosa (Link Campus University)

Students Staff: Eleonora Mercuri, Nicola Pimpinella, Lavinia Sansone (Link Campus University, undergraduate degree programme in Film and Theatre Making)

The conference is also supported by CUC – Consulta Universitaria del Cinema and by PIC-AIS – Associazione Italiana di Sociologia, Sezione Processi e Istituzioni Culturali (Italy).

DETECt final international conference will take place at Link Campus University (Via del Casale di San Pio V 44 – Rome) in Italy from 21 to 23 June 2021.

Detecting Europe in contemporary crime narratives: print fiction, film, and television

 

Conference Chairs Monica Dall’Asta (University of Bologna), Federico Pagello (University of Chieti-Pescara), Valentina Re (Link Campus University)

Organizing Committee Luca Antoniazzi (University of Bologna), Sara Casoli (University of Bologna), Massimiliano Coviello (Link Campus University), Paola De Rosa (Link Campus University), Lorenzo Orlando (Link Campus University)

Advisory Board Stefano Arduini (Link Campus University), Maurizio Ascari (University of Bologna), Jan Baetens (KU Leuven), Luca Barra (University of Bologna), Stefano Baschiera (Queen’s University Belfast), Giulia Carluccio (University of Turin), Silvana Colella (University of Macerata), Caius Dobrescu (University of Bucharest), Andrea Esser (University of Roehampton), Nicola Ferrigni (Link Campus University), Katarina Gregersdotter (Umeå University), Kim Toft Hansen (Aalborg University), Annette Hill (University of Lund), Dominique Jeannerod (Queen’s University Belfast), Sandor Kalai (University of Debrecen), Matthieu Letourneux (University Paris Nanterre), Natacha Levet (University of Limoges), Giacomo Manzoli (University of Bologna), Janet McCabe (Birkbeck University), Jacques Migozzi (University of Limoges), Andrew Pepper (Queen’s University Belfast), Marica Spalletta (Link Campus University)

The conference is supported by CUC – Consulta Universitaria del Cinema, Italy.

Among the different expressions of popular culture, no other genre more than crime – meant as a composite made up of many different variants or subgenres – has proved able to travel and expand its reach into international markets and with audiences. Nor has any other genre been more adept at laying bare the conflicts and contradictions – social, political and historical – that characterise contemporary European societies.

The Detecting Europe conference offers an open forum to explore and discuss how narratives of crime and investigation, as well as their production and reception, have helped define the major industrial, commercial, thematic and stylistic trends of European popular culture since 1989, fostering both the transnational circulation of its products and the appearance of new transcultural representations in line with the emergence of new social identities.

We welcome proposals that interrogate the notion of Europeanness as a critical category, and its viability for the study of contemporary popular culture, both in print and screen media. We wish to explore both the scope and limits of the interrelated notions of transnational identity and cosmopolitanism when applied to the works of European crime fiction, including print fiction, film, and TV.

A few general — but not exclusive — questions may be asked. Are we to conceive of cosmopolitanism and the process of European transculturation merely as unifying factors, fostering the generation of a shared and uniform transnational identity? Or should we better acknowledge the existence of a variety of European transcultural identities, expressed in different writing and audio-visual styles, characteristic narrative models, place-specific production cultures and distribution and consumption patterns? What is the impact of national media ecologies in shaping the idea of the European, and how the national translate the European when foreign products appear in its mediascape? Should hybridization and transculturation be assumed as markers and powerful drivers of cultural homologation? Or rather the opposite is true, namely that cultural hybridization entails a growing differentiation of narrative forms and styles, contents and formats, production and reception practices, thus contributing to the emergence of a post-national assemblage of multiple and possibly diverging cosmopolitan identities? We deem it important, at this particular time, that the notion of Europeanness and its eventual instantiations in contemporary crime narratives is approached having in mind the multiple crises that are currently affecting the continent and its population.

We invite proposals from multiple fields of cultural studies, including representation studies, industry and production studies, and reception and audience studies. Possible topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Hybridization and transculturation: toward homologation or increased cultural differentiation?
• Crime fiction and the European crisis: immigration, migrant labour, Brexit, and the rise of right-wing popularism.
• The restaging and critical analysis of Europe’s recent past in the work of crime writers, screenwriters and directors.
• Images of Europe and Europeans: investigating social change through the study of popular crime narratives.
• Restating vs challenging class, gender and ethnic stereotypes, prejudices and discrimination in the representation of crime.
• The multiple facets of European diversity: how have social, spatial and historical identities been expressed in the works of the European crime genre?
• Ecocriticism and environmental humanities in the era of widescale ecological crisis: eco-noir and the challenges to European environment policies.
• The profiled position of crime in fostering transnational cooperation in the European cultural and creative sectors.
• Relationships and discrepancies between national/local creative industries and transnational cultural policies in the production milieu of the European crime genre.
• Transnational production and distribution and the emergence of transcultural formats.
• The hopes and limits of European cohesiveness, as revealed in practices of co-production and distribution of crime novels, films and TV dramas across the continent.
• Crime narratives and the media discourse on organized trans-European crime.
• Fictional representations of legal and forensic practices in comparative perspective.
• Translation, dubbing, subtitling as strategies for cultural adaptation and appropriation.
• The imbrication of local, national and transnational identities in the reception of foreign crime stories, between old and fresh perspectives on proximate or distant neighbors.
• Transnational distribution and the role of audiences in shaping the circulation patterns of European crime narratives across the continent.
• Detecting transcultural identity and social change through the study of the audiences’ response to crime stories and trans/cross-media universes.
• Engagement and design of crime audiences in the age of digital markets and online distribution.
• Making sense of social change through the audience’s response to the representation of female, gay, lesbian and queer characters.
• Theorising transnational/transdisciplinary research for the study of European crime narratives in print and screen media.

Submissions guidelines

Submissions are welcome as individual papers (max. 20 minutes) and pre-constituted panels (3/4 papers). Individual presenters are required to provide their name, email address, the title of the paper, an abstract (max. 300 words), references (max. 200 words), and a short bio (max. 150 words).
Submit your paper proposal.
Panel organizers are also asked to submit a panel title and a short description of the panel (max. 300 words). Submit your panel proposal.

Deadlines and practicalities

Abstracts deadline: 30 November 2020
Feedback: 15 December 2020
Registration deadline: 31 January 2020
Regular conference fee: €120
Reduced conference fee (PhD students, Postdoctoral researchers): €90
Further information: info@detect-project.eu

Download the Call for Papers.

The third day of the Euronoir conference began with a keynote panel about Nordic Noir in its European Context. Professor Sue Turnbull form the University of Wollongong, Dr. Anna Estera Mrozewicz from the Adam Mickiewickz University in Poland and Professor emerita Gunhild Agger from Aalborg University presented their thoughts on three different case studies of Nordic/Euronoir series, which introduce their audiences to foreign countries, pressing issues as well as to the shared history of the European continent.

Keynote panel

Sue Turnbull started off the morning with “a walk around Iceland”, via the Icelandic TV drama Trapped. This seems like a curious topic for a researcher working in Australia on TV shows like Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries or Mystery Road., which make a big contribution to the value of the TV drama. However, Sue Turnbull showed that there is a lot of connection between Iceland and Australia – at least in terms of television. For both landscape is an important element and key to success with audiences abroad. Moreover, both Australia and Iceland are two relatively small TV markets, which means that they have to deal with constraints of funding and creative resources.

“Iceland and Australia – two relatively small television markets”

What brought Sue Turnbull to Iceland was a trip to the country advertised by Nordic Noir and Beyond, inviting crime fans to explore Iceland in the footsteps of Trapped. The narrative of Trapped and its main character, Andri, were used as a starting point for guiding tourists across the island – including Andri’s food tips. However, as much as she enjoyed her trip around the island, Sue also pointed to the problem of over-tourism. After Croatia, Iceland has the second highest ratio of tourists to inhabitants. In 2017, more than 2.2 million people visited Iceland, which has a population of about 360,000.

In Iceland, Sue Turnbull talked to the people involved in film and television production, which helped her construct a timeline of Icelandic television series. Her timeline highlights that TV production in Iceland has sped up in the past 15 years, but still it is a small television market with only about one new domestic series per year. Sue reminded her audience: “because the Icelandic audience is so small funding has always had to come from somewhere else” for Icelandic television. Now, this funding also comes from streaming services like Netflix, which is co-producing the upcoming Valhalla Murders.

 

“The problem for Iceland is – they haven’t got much crime, so they have to invent it.”

Another element of Iceland as a small TV nation is the fact that the group of creatives involved in Icelandic TV production is quite small. Sue Turnbull introduced her audience to three central figures in Icelandic TV: Margrét Ornólfsdottir, Baltasar Kormakur, the former the storyliner and the latter the director of Trapped, and David Oskar Olafsson, who founded the production company behind The Valhalla Murders. The next ‘problem’ of the small TV nation Sue pointed her audience to is: “they haven’t got much crime, so they have to invent it.” Sue reminded the audience thought that serial killers, again, something Iceland doesn’t actually have: “The only one they had was executed in 1596.” Finally, the creatives she spoke with were frustrated that what the international television market is interested in is only the Icelandic landscape, but the upcoming Valhalla Murders will take place in the city and it will also be the first crime drama with a serial killer.

Wataha: “A crime story has the power to transmit all kinds of values”

Anna Mrozewicz introduced the audience to the Polish TV series Wataha (The Border). The series is set at the border between Poland and Ukraine. The first two series were the most expensive TV series produced in Poland and the most watched on HBO Poland. Its third series on HBO Europe will launch soon. The series also travelled beyond Eastern Europe to the UK where it got favorable reviews, praising the ways in which it addresses current issues in European politics and society. Wataha deals with issues such as migration and arms trafficking.

Combining tourist gaze, Nordic Noir and societal critique

Anna Mrozewicz introduced her international audience to the difference between the mainstream (public and private channels) and the premium TV outlets (pay-TV and streaming) in Poland. The two differ not only in budget, but also in the way they explore characters and address social and political issues. She emphasized that Wataha would have been a very different series if it had been produced by one of the mainstream commercial channels, for example because the channel would not have invested in shooting the series on the actual location it is set in – the Bieszczady mountains between Poland and Ukraine.

Pointing the opening of the series, Anna Mrozewicz showed the use of Nordic Noir aesthetics in the series. Looking at the changes between series one and two, she highlighted how the series developed from a national into a transnational and European show. Season two has the Ukrainian war as a background, but also evokes memories of World War II. A plotline about a brutal murder of refugees in Poland was told in a way that is reminiscent of the 1941 pogrom against Jews in Jedwabne. She concluded that the series combines a tourist gaze on the Bieszczady mountains with a vision that is “dark and gloomy” – reminiscent of Nordic Noir. Anna Mrozewicz summarized the importance of Wataha: “It reflects the dark underside of European society and our European community at large.”

Gunhild Agger: “The dark history of Europe” in the aftermath of 1968

TV historian Gunhild Agger’s talk took a look back into European (TV) history, focusing on how political crime in the aftermath of 1968 was represented on screen in Denmark, Germany and the UK. She explained that she was inspired to look at this period with the anniversaries of 1968 in 2008 and 2018. She highlighted that most of European film and television draws on the historical and contemporary conflicts in the region. Reviewing academic literature about historical film and TV drama, Gunhild Agger drew attention to the importance of remembrance through and around the media.

Her Danish example is Blekingegade – The Left Wing Gang (2009 on TV 2 Danmark), which is based on real events, politically-motivated crimes and robberies that unfolded in the 1980s in support of the PFLP. The central figure was Jan Weimann. The Left Wing Gang is a series about the consequences of 1968 as a “dark heritage of Europe”, she explained. Gunhild Agger pointed out that the series was a game changer for TV 2. It featured high-profile actors such as Nicolaj Coster-Waldau and aimed at an international market, too, travelling to 48 countries. Subsequently, Gunhild Agger compared the Danish case to Der Baader Meinhof Komplex, a German film from 2008, based on the crimes of the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF), who not only committed bank robberies but also hostage-taking and murders. Gunhild Aggers third example is The Little Drummer Girl, a series screened on the BBC in 2018, which is based on a novel by John Le Carré and tells the story of an actress recruited by Mossad to infiltrate a Palestinian terrorist group during the 1970s.

TV drama, “the canary down the mine” of European society

During the discussion, the panelists explored the idea that the cases they talked about are “modern fairy tales”, dramas that do really important cultural work by exploring dark sides of European society and history. Sue Turnbull highlighted how crime drama is “like the canary down the mine”, dramas honing in on what is “bugging” their audience and the societies they live in. After the first morning panel, four parallel session focused on crime fiction from Hungary and Germany, on audience research about the popularity of Euronoir as well as on the production strategies of HBO and Netflix in Europe.

Keynote by Robert Saunders on “the Political Culture(s) of European Crime Series: Place, Power, Identity”

Robert Saunders’ keynote addressed the topic “the Political Culture(s) of European Crime Series: Place, Power, Identity”. In Europe today, Saunders is a Professor of history, politics and geography at Farmingdale State University of New York. He pointed his audience to the competing flows of geo-political cultures in today’s society, such as elite vs. mass culture, conservative vs. progressive attitudes and identitarian vs. pluralist conceptions of identity. To introduce the audience to the topic he showed the opening sequence of the German-Austrian television series Pagan Peak. In the scene, a group of Austrian Policemen open a truck in which migrants have been trafficked across the border – the migrants are found to be dead.

Starting with a definition of political culture, Robert Saunders pointed his audience to the complexity of the issue and its intersection with popular culture. In his talk, Saunders was interested in the intersection of Identity, Place and Power in Crime Drama series that explore geo-political themes. His research interest into this topic started out with US-crime series The Wire. In the series, the city of Baltimore is a central character, which underlines how intertwined the issues the series addresses are with the place.

“Television now is very global and we take it with us wherever we go”

Television today, as the papers in the conference have provided ample evidence for, acts as a catalyzer of border-crossing. Saunders emphasized: “Television now is very global and we take it with us wherever we go. “The internationalization of content – Saunders highlights – is driven by online platforms”. Saunders himself was astonished how subtitled drama arrived in the USA on the back of streaming services. Saunders explained that he is interested in narratives that engage in world-building that impact cultural citizenship and promote civic agency. He looks at recent long-form drama from Europe which address elements of European identity and culture and engage with thematic elements that go beyond personal motivation for crimes committed. He illustrated this point with a clip from the third season of the French-British series The Tunnel, which shows a migrant boat being set on fire by a masked man.

Saunders developed a typology of crime series that explore themes of the “villainous corporation, “murderous neoliberalism”, “the deadly border”, “the dead other”, “globalized gang violence” and “terrorism as crime drama”, introducing his audience to a range of examples for these categories. Examples of the first category include the French-Swedish series Midnight Sun and the Finnish series Deadwind. Murderous neoliberalism is addressed in shows like Spanish Money Heist, British Marcella and the Icelandic Trapped, which Sue Turnbull has focused on in the morning.

Crime as reflection on the state of the nation is the topic Saunders is most interested in and told his audience that “this is really were Nordic Noir excels”. His examples for this theme includes the Swedish-Danish The Bridge, Blue Eyes from Sweden and Stella Blómkvist from Iceland.

Saunders’ last clip comes from the Irish series Taken Down focusing on a Nigerian immigrant who arrives in Europe via Italy and then comes to Dublin that presents itself as a “carnivorous city” that eats up the migrants. All of the series he showed addressed issues of migration from outside Europe’s borders, but with different degrees of (de-)humanization. He highlights, that it is not surprising that we see more and more of representations of the migrant crisis on television today, because the TV production cycle is about three years behind events in Europe.

To conclude the conference, project leader Monica Dall’Asta and Federico Pagello from the University of Bologna presented the DETECt Portal introducing the audience to the maps and learning material developed by the project. The conference began with the question “who put the ‘euro’ into ‘noir’?”. Over the three days, the five keynote panels and twelve parallel sessions, the picture of what “Euronoir” means as an academic concept, but also as a form of popular culture in Europe, became more complex thanks to the interventions and ideas of all speakers and participants from across Europe.

 

 

Fieldtrip to Aarhus: “a perfectly good city for killing people” – in film, TV and novels

The second day of the Euronoir conference started out with a field trip from Aalborg to Aarhus to test the trial version of the DETECt App. The DETECt web-app is a screen tourism experience, currently developed by Aarhus University in cooperation with VisitAarhus. In the trial version, the conference delegates could explore Aarhus on a 1.5 hour walk that not only introduced them to Denmark’s second biggest city, but also to films, books and television series which are set and/or produced in Aarhus. The app features videos, audios and pictures about the crime TV series Dicte, the upcoming film Undtagelsen (The Exception), the film Lev Stærkt (On the Edge, 2014) as well as on Aarhus’ history as a centre of silent film production. On the tour users can, for example, meet Elsebeth Egholm, the author of the famous Dicte novels that were adapted for television – the most internationally renowned crime story from Aarhus. The content offered on the app will be expanded in the next months, building on the feedback from the trial period.

Keynote by Annette Hill: Rights to roam and contrary freedoms in today’s vast media landscapes

From French dining cars to today’s television

In the afternoon keynote, Annette Hill, Professor of Media and Communication at Lund University in Sweden and visiting Professor at King’s College in London, introduced her concept of “Roaming Audiences”, which will also be the focus in her upcoming book. She started with explaining what “roaming” means for her in relation to Nordic Noir. Rather than seeing audiences as “nomadic”, Annette Hill argued we should conceptualize them as roamers around stories, media and storyworlds. She explored the different ideas of “rights to roam” in societies, relating to the right of way through the landscape. Applying this idea to media, she argued that audiences roaming between stories also means shaping collectives’ ways through media. However, freedoms of roaming can today also be restricted by legal means such as geo-blocking, which are limits that media roamers subvert through illegal media sharing, hence making their own paths through the media landscape. She highlighted that people now have “roaming expectations” about how they can engage with media and share them.

In the second part of her lecture, Annette Hill used Roland Barthes’ description of a dining car experience in France as a springboard for elaborating on her concept of roaming through the contrary experience of stasis whilst on the move. In the story, Barthes reflected on the importance of materiality and performance of an illusion of “immobility” created in the train. Television and its audiences, she argued, also use ways to create an illusion of immobility through certain programming strategies and rituals around TV viewing, although today’s media environment is so vast and fragmented that we feel constantly on the move.

The freedom not to binge

Talking about her research on The Bridge, Hill reminded her audience that many people don’t even have a television set anymore, but consume TV on the train – maybe even watching on somebody else’s screen. Habits have changed too, for which Annette Hill mentions the trend of “binge watching”. However, binging can also be truncated and mixed with traditional experiences of waiting for a broadcast, for example on Sunday night. This experience is also still important for people, who save up their time to watch The Bridge on the weekend. She showed examples from her audience research that show, how people shifted from legal or illegal streaming and binging to broadcast viewing in a social set-up. Another interesting discovery she made was the “social media black-out”, which means that even young students viewed the series on broadcast without using a second screen. She quoted a 24-year-old Swedish student who said: “Sometimes I pick up my phone, and stop myself – ‘no I need to focus’.” This evidence led Hill to conclude that The Bridge became an antidote to the binging and snacking of online and multi-screen television. Hence, this is where we see “roamers in action”, who pick their media experiences consciously.

Dreaming of solving The Bridge

The third part of Hill’s lecture moved to the dream of The Bridge “bootcamp”, a dream formulated by her participants who imagined how it would be to devote themselves to solving the mystery of The Bridge II for 10 weeks. The people formulating this dream enjoyed immersing themselves in the story to solve human relationships – so much so that they wished they had time to do nothing else. Hence, the fans of series like The Bridge enjoy roaming around in the stories of crime and “feeling at home in the stories”, Hill explained. She concluded that this is a case of creating “contrary freedoms” of creating constraints to the viewing experience despite today’s media’s mobility. During the discussion, Hill elaborated further that many of the participants in her audience study expressed that they wished for having watched The Bridge as a more social experience rather than binging it on streaming. This led her to emphasize the importance of time for reflection that is lost in binging.

Where Nordic Noir meets the soap opera

Esser, however, warned against seeing these processes as something new, given that immersion and empathy for characters is also an important element of other forms of television such as soap operas. This view is supported by industry professionals. One of her industry interviewees described the Saturday night slot for the European dramas on BBC4 as “posh soap for people, who want to drink wine.” Playing a brief clip from The Killing, Esser illustrated how the series also uses aesthetics often associated with the soap, such as close-ups and the use of music to convey emotions. She concluded that the close-ups cause “emotional contagion” and argued that “the fact that viewers don’t speak the language does not impede the process” at least when they are really focused on the series, a state supported by the concentration required by the subtitles. The fact that in Nordic Noir series emotions are often conveyed through faces, rather than dialogue helps the process, too.

“The travelling experience paved the way to writing”

For Arne Dahl, Europe opened up when he was 11, in 1973 and traveled across Europe in a caravan with his family, and also discovered reading and was mesmerized by fiction as a world to enter. He said that he now believes that “the travelling experience paved the way to writing.”  After a long Inter-rail summer through Europe he began to study literature and also completed a PhD, whilst developing as a writer and literature critic. In the mid-1990s, he said, he felt he had to made his choice between critical/academic writing and being a novelist. When trying to find a new way of writing, he began to explore the world that his two daughters would grow up in. At the same time, Dahl emphasized how he was at the looking for writing that was fun: and the answer to this quest was the crime genre. He explained to his audience how he reinvented himself as a different writer as Arne Dahl, who “rose from my surname Arnald”. He began to look for real crimes “that were morally interesting in the year that I was writing.” This was and is interesting to Dahl, because it allowed for the exploration of what is different between what is legal and what is just.

Restarting after the Global Financial Crisis – “one gigantic crime”

Dahl pointed out that his crime stories form a timeline of his own relationship with Europe. His books show us that no crime is ever just domestic. His series about the A Group dealt with international crime at a time when the Iron Curtain had just fallen and Sweden also became challenged in its self-conception as a neutral and “special” country. The books explored the 1990s financial crisis in Europe, human trafficking, race ideology, the remnants of the Cold War.

Dahl’s next series, the Intercrime books, began around the Global Financial Crisis, “which began to look like one gigantic crime”, Dahl said. At the same time, he pointed to the hope in the world with Barak Obama as a new US-President and an unprecedented strength of the European Union, which found expression in ideas about more European collaboration in crime investigation. In his series, the idea of a European FBI is realized. The team tackles big crime and “tests the borderline of crime fiction, thriller and spy novel.” The crimes covered here included human trafficking, tax evasion, the mercenary industry, rogue DNA research, surveillance, which Dahl sees as his attempt to find a voice for Europe through crime fiction. However, he now says he did not see many things coming ten years ago, things that he summarized in a list: climate change, the feminist uprising, international interference in democratic elections, the close connection between Russia, the Mafia and other criminal organisations, Fake News, the rise of leaders like Trump, a country leaving the European Union, gang violence and crime, waves of immigration at the borders of Europe, and the conflict between nationalism and internationalism.

Following from this list, Dahl asked, though, whether this conflict between nationalism and internationalism is really the new big rift in society, that replaces the conflict between the rich and the poor. “We live in a very dangerous world”, he concluded. This dangerous world discouraged Dahl from exploring this complex society, turning towards explorations of characters. But in these new books, Dahl found that he did not abandon the political issues he looked at earlier, but that he just changed perspective to the inside of people, uttering a feeling of insecurity that “you really can’t trust anyone anymore.” Hence, in his more recent books, Dahl shifted more towards the spy genre.

“We need to dive into the abyss to appreciate the light”

Concluding his talk, Dahl observed a turn of literature on the one hand to escapist entertainment, but on the other hand also a feeling that “violence could always be just around the corner”, a feeling that crime has come much closer. Dahl highlighted, though, that a distance is necessary to enjoy crime fiction, summing it up: “Nobody reads crime fiction in Aleppo.” Dahl is convinced that “we need the thriller, we need the chaos”, but he is also convinced that we also need clarity and reality. He concluded his talk with a call for enlightened crime fiction:

“We need to dive into the abyss to appreciate the light.
Today’s crime writer has to work really hard to get to this light, but the promise of today’s crime fiction is that there is after all a light at the end of the tunnel.”

The first day of the DETECt Euronoir conference at Aalborg University started out with a short welcome address by Associate Professor Kim Toft Hansen, who greeted the 50 guests who came to Aalborg for the three-day conference.

WELCOME

“Who put the ‘euro’ in Noir”
In his welcome address he asked, “who put the ‘euro’ in Noir”? The usual suspect must be Barry Forshaw, who wrote “Euro Noir: The Pocket Essential Guide to European Crime Fiction”. But it is also viewers and fans of European crime series that have popularized the term. IMDB now also has a list on Euro noir shows, featuring for example The Bridge (Denmark/Sweden) and Fortitude (set in Iceland), but also The Fall (British) and Dark (German). Journalists now also use the term. The British online newspaper iNews, for example lists Midnight Sun (F/S), Occupied (NOR) and The Team (D/BEL/DK) as “Euro-noir” shows its readers might have missed. On social media like Facebook and Twitter, we see how the DETECt project who is filling the term “Euronoir” with meaning through its posts about the activities of the research project. This led Hansen to conclude that the concept is still developing, changing and shifting through its usage in journalism, by viewers and researchers: “This is what we will be doing during the conference: putting meaning into Euronoir.”

During the three days of the conference, we have the pleasure of a number of keynotes to hear their input on the terms, for example Andrea Esser, who is Professor of Media and Globalization at Roehampton University in London.

 

Keynote by Andrea Esser

In her keynote she addressed the transnational appeal of contemporary crime series. Her talk focused on the audience perspective. In her research Esser studied British audiences who enjoy watching subtitled TV drama – an increasingly big group as the growth in online fan groups and ratings for subtitled drama in Britain testifies. Over the years, an audience of around 1 million viewers for European subtitled developed in the UK, mostly watching on BBC 4, which showed programmes like Montalbano, Wallander and The Killing. The Bridge even developed an audience of about 1.5 million viewers. Esser pointed out that “for the hugely competitive and fragmented British TV market this is very remarkable.”

“The thing you are watching for is – the people.”

In her keynote speech, Esser stressed the importance of relatability and empathy in the process of watching television drama, which leads viewers to feel similar emotions to those people we see on screen. This point is illustrated by a quote from one of her research participants, who said she felt as though she had to watch the Icelandic series Trapped with a coat on, because it was so dark and bleak. Surprisingly, Esser found that “language does not make as much of a difference as previously perceived” in this process of empathy for what is happening on screen, “at least under the right conditions”. Esser explained that because they have to focus so hard on the subtitles, viewers also focus on just the drama, which helps the immersion into the series. In the focus groups she found that viewers of Euronoir series watch not so much for the crimes and homicides, but for the people and the relationships in the series, for example reading the first series of The Killing as a study in human grief.

Where Nordic Noir meets the soap opera

Esser, however, warned against seeing these processes as something new, given that immersion and empathy for characters is also an important element of other forms of television such as soap operas. This view is supported by industry professionals. One of her industry interviewees described the Saturday night slot for the European dramas on BBC4 as “posh soap for people, who want to drink wine.” Playing a brief clip from The Killing, Esser illustrated how the series also uses aesthetics often associated with the soap, such as close-ups and the use of music to convey emotions. She concluded that the close-ups cause “emotional contagion” and argued that “the fact that viewers don’t speak the language does not impede the process” at least when they are really focused on the series, a state supported by the concentration required by the subtitles. The fact that in Nordic Noir series emotions are often conveyed through faces, rather than dialogue helps the process, too.

Industry panel: Conditions of co-production

In the afternoon several smaller panels looked into issues of European Transculturalism on Screen, representation of the Mediterranean region and British crime drama, before the whole group reconvened for the industry Panel with the invited speakers:

• Katrine Vogelsang, head of fiction at TV 2 Danmark, who produced series like Greyzone and Norskov.
• Hanne Palmquist, Commissioning Editor and Vice President of Original Programming at HBO Nordic, producing series like The Beforeigners (Norwegian).
• Trin Hjortkjær Thomsen, Producer at Nordisk Film, produced series such as the new crime drama DNA, which is currently shown in Denmark and which was also screened at the conference at the end of the first day.

DNA: Co-producing a new Euronoir series on TV 2 Danmark

Starting the conversation Kim Toft Hansen asked how DNA, the first Danish-French co-production came about. Trin Hjortkjær Thomsen and Katrine Vogelsang then explained that the project had been in production for many years, with writing starting at least six years ago, when TV 2 was already on board, while the production company Nordisk Film and co-producer Arte came into the process shortly after. The original idea was an episodic, procedural TV drama, but then the story focused on the story of the investigator. Hjortkjær Thomsen emphasized that “the story is rooted in a contemporary European context.” The series is set in Copenhagen, North Jutland, Czech Republic (depicting Poland and some places is France), Paris and rural France and was shot on 90 locations across Europe.

Katrine Vogelsang explained that because DNA had three different production companies, three different sales agents and already a complex story, so it was important that the broadcasters spoke with “one voice”. Arte, she told the audience, was very interested in making the series authentic and real when set in France, but there was never a demand that more of the series would be set in France. In fact, although a lot of the series is set in Poland, there was no Polish funding partner involved.

HBO’s The Beforeigners: Subverting the crime genre

Hanne Palmquist emphasized the difference of HBO Nordic with broadcasters like TV 2 Danmark. HBO Nordic is not a national broadcaster but targets the entire Nordic region, so shows must be made to travel. HBO Nordic does drama, but also documentary series. For HBO Nordic the exclusivity of rights for the Nordic region is important, but this cannot always be achieved, for example when there is national production funding involved that requires a national distribution, too. HBO is funding the projects fully, but still also exploring options of “soft funding” e.g. when there are tax incentives. This was part of the reason The Beforeigners was partly shot in Lithuania (for interiors). The local rooting of the stories is very important for HBO Nordic. But Palmquist showed that it is interesting to see how these locally rooted stories are viewed. The Beforeigners, she explained, is clearly a Norwegian show, but it ended up being the most watched show in Spain on HBO Europe for a couple of weeks.

 

Why crime? Because “you can’t have a story in which nothing happens.”

Hanne Palmquist echoed Andrea Esser’s point about the relatability of drama: “If you are happy or sad in Denmark you can probably relate it to someone else?” She argued that the stories are about “what does it mean to be a human being”. The stories can be very universal and thereby relatable. However, she also agrees that the exotic quality of HBO’s series can also be an appealing quality.

Katrine Vogelsang explained that crime drama has a strong motor for the stories, which also keeps the viewers watching. On TV, “you can’t have a story in which nothing happens.” She summarized that a crime story is always about “there has been a crime and it needs to be fixed.” Answering Kim Toft Hansen’s question why HBO Nordic hasn’t done a classical Nordic Noir series, she claimed that: “The traditional Nordic Noir show has been done many times by both the public service and the commercial broadcasters. We should offer to the audience something else.” The Beforeigners is a crime show at heart, but it is written by comedy writers and it also parodies the Nordic Noir genre.

Looking for collaboration, but you have to have the right story

To conclude the panel, Kim Toft Hansen asked about the importance of European collaboration in TV. Original programming for the Nordic region on HBO started three years ago and Spain started shortly after. “It’s obvious that when the right story comes, it will be obvious to collaborate within the HBO family, but that moment hasn’t happened yet,” said Hanne Palmquist. In contrast to this Hjorthkjær Thomsen emphasized that it is very difficult to finance from the Danish market only. So “a patchwork of finance” is important for Danish producers. Katrine Vogelsang added that they mainly look at the European market for selling the Danish programmes, but highlighted that “you have the right story”.  Trin Hjortkjær Thomsen agreed that “developing the stories and then trying to find the money” is the path to new success.

The conference continued with another parallel panel session, before moving on to the screening of DNA in the evening at Aalborg University’s city campus.

DETECt’s first international conference will take place at Aalborg University in Denmark from 30 September to 2 October 2019. We are happy to announce a packed programme with 10 distinguished keynote speakers, over 35 talks by researchers from across and beyond Europe as well as plenty of Euronoir activities such as the screening of the upcoming Danish crime series DNA and the launch of the beta phase of the DETECt Aarhus app.

The conference is dedicated to exchanging our findings about the qualities of and the reasons for the popularity of Europe’s “Noirs” with international colleagues and industry experts.

The final programme and the book of abstract are now online.

For more details about the conference, please visit the conference website.

DETECt’s first international conference will take place at Aalborg University in Denmark from 30 September to 2 October 2019. We are happy to announce a packed programme with 10 distinguished keynote speakers, over 35 talks by researchers from across and beyond Europe as well as plenty of Euronoir activities such as the screening of the upcoming Danish crime series DNA and the launch of the beta phase of the DETECt Aarhus app.

Although a widely popular genre for over a century, crime narratives are presently experiencing an unprecedented popularity all across Europe. DETECt’s Euronoir conference is dedicated to exchanging our findings about the qualities of and the reasons for the popularity of Europe’s “Noirs” with international colleagues and industry experts.

The preliminary programme is online.

For more details about the conference, please visit the conference website.

Meeting at Aalborg University in the beginning of October, one could say means, “everything goes back to the beginning”, because the Nordic crime series like Bron / Broen and Forbrydelsen set in the dark half of the year have been instrumental in propelling the trend of Euronoir across the continent. Keynote lectures Gunhild Agger (Professor Emerita of Danish Media History, Aalborg University) and Sue Turnbull (Senior Professor of Communication and Media, University of Wollongong) will look at the characteristic features and appeal of the Nordic Noir series, such as their societal engagement and explorations of Nordic landscapes. The Swedish novelist and literary critic Arne Dahl, whose stories about the “A Gruppen” have also been adapted for the TV screen, will show us how Europe finds a voice through crime fiction.

Our keynote speakers from the Danish film and TV industry will show us where the Nordic crime series are going next. Trin Hjortkjær Thomsen, producer at Nordisk Film, will present a taster of the upcoming series DNA (TV 2, 2019). It tells the story of Rolf, a policeman in Copenhagen who is searching for his daughter; an investigation that leads him on the trail of a case of illegal child trafficking. Hjortkjær Thomsen describes the series as “a character-driven crime thriller, rooted into the contemporary European context. It’s also a human story – and not just Rolf’s, which drives the investigation and is our entry point into the series’ broader themes.“

During an excursion to Aarhus, the DETECt Aarhus web app helps the participants to discover what and who makes Danish crime narratives. The app guides users through Denmark’s second biggest city and introduces them to novels, films and series set in Aarhus. Location scout Ulla Malmos tells us how to stage murders on the streets of Aarhus without causing a scene and introduces the upcoming film Undtagelsen (The Exception). Users meet familiar faces and locations from Dicte – Crime reporter, but will also learn about the thriving silent film culture in Aarhus before the First World War.

 

Of course, Euronoir also looks beyond the Nordic region. The DETECt team in Limoges presents their findings on the themes of the French “polar” novels. Colleagues from Italy, Spain and Turkey investigate the Mediterranean Noir. Crimes in Berlin are at the centre of the panel “Crime Scene Germany”, while the panel on British crime fiction sends us to Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh and investigates corporate crime in recent British TV series. Our colleagues from Debrecen and Bucharest introduce recent trends in Eastern European literature and audio-visual culture, investigating the representation of gender and ethnicity as well as HBO Europe’s inspiration from Hungarian and Romanian cinema.

We are looking forward to a truly European conference hosted by our colleagues in Aalborg. Watch this space for updates on the programme and coverage of the conference!

For more details about the conference and preliminary programme please visit the conference website.