Pietari Kääpä is Associate Professor in Media and Communications at University of Warwick, UK. His work combines ecocritical analysis with media industry and policy studies. His books include Ecology and Contemporary Nordic Cinema (Bloomsbury 2014) and the anthology Transnational Ecocinema: Film Culture in an Age of Environmental Depravation (2013), co-edited with Tommy Gustafsson. He is an editor of Journal of Scandinavian Cinema. Tommy Gustafsson is Professor of Film Studies at Linnaeus University, Sweden. His work is mainly concentrated on film history, both international and Nordic. He has been published in Cinema Journal and Journal of Scandinavian Cinema, and his books include Masculinity in the Golden Age of Swedish Cinema: A Cultural Analysis of 1920s Films (2014), and the anthology Nordic Genre Film: Small Nation Film Cultures in the Global Marketplace (2015) co-edited with Pietari Kääpä.
This is an accessible book for a wide range of readers (including undergraduate students) interested in film and cultural studies, and its commentary on the intricacies of moral politics in Nordic countries is definitely a contribution beyond exploitation or Nordic film studies. * Scandinavian Studies * This book fills a clear gap in the scholarship, and does so very well. The Politics of Nordsploitation: History, Industry, Audiences examines exploitation in a Nordic context, arguing that, because of local societal, political, and economic norms, the exploitation cinema of these countries 'both shares and challenges normative modes of exploitation....' The primary difference has to do with cultural attitudes toward sex, which is viewed as relatively unproblematic in Scandinavia, versus violence, which has been rigorously censored, and this volume consequently excludes sexploitation while focusing on violence and gore as the primary subject of censorship debates in the Nordic region. Distinguishing between two principle modes, local genre production and global exploitation, the book covers a wide range of films and topics, from Mats Helge Olsson's 'Entertainment Violence Factory' of the 1980s to Nordic Nazisploitation, from the Norwegian slasher cycle to transnational genre films, to an era of 'fanchising' and crowdfunding that produced hits such as Iron Sky. The Politics of Nordsploitation is therefore an essential volume for Bloomsbury's Global Exploitation Cinemas series. * Linda Badley, Professor of English and Film Studies at Middle Tennessee State University, USA, and author of Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic (1995) and Lars von Trier (2010 *