_ Rymdinvasion i Lappland is most unlikely to feature in anyone's list of classic movies. However, once watched, it is extremely difficult to forget. Indeed, this Super 8 science fiction epic dating from 1959 really has to be seen to be believed. Despite being a joint Swedish / American production the movie was never actually released in the United States. Instead, a newly shot, alternative version entitled Invasion of the Animal People was unleashed on the American public in 1962. Fortunately my fellow Britons were allowed to experience the original, rechristened as Terror in the Midnight Sun. This is an apposite title for a film set in the snowy wastes of northern Sweden. This world has been turned upside down by the arrival of a spaceship whose crew includes a band of humanoid telepaths and a very hirsute escaped giant. The latter runs amok, much to the consternation of a figure skating American and her uncle plus the latter's scientific colleagues (whose number includes that heart throb of the geological community, the dashing and dangerous Erik Engström). They, together with a band of torch-wielding Sami, see off the extraterrestrial Yeti and his dome-headed masters. See? I said it was an unforgettable film. Terror in the Midnight Sun refers not only to the space visitors. It also alludes to the film's principal song, "Midnight Sun Lament". This terrifying acoustic experience kidnaps the music of that famous folk melody, "Ack, Värmeland du sköna" and sets it to new words by Gustaf Unger and Frederick Herbert. The relocation of this song from the county of Värmland in mid-Sweden to Lappland, plus the urban scenes of Stockholm with which the film begins, underscores the extent to which Rymdinvasion i Lappland presents a wildly inventive interpretation of "the North". It strikes me, therefore, that this unique landmark of cinematic history is a perfect candidate for bringing to a close the Nordic Spaces project in which I have participated for the past four years. This multinational, multidisciplinary exploration of all things "Nordic" could find no more fitting denouement than an icicled, grizzly monster going up in smoke in the company of locals, visiting scientists and a troupe of guests from far further afield. _________
Supplemental 04/01/2012 Aldous Huxley (1894-1963): Man has lived only too frequently on his planet almost like a parasite living upon the host it infests. And whereas many parasites are sensible enough not to destroy their host (as, after all, if they kill their host, they destroy themselves) man, instead, is not one of the sensible parasites. So, he has lived at the expense of his host, to which he caused its absolute ruin. Cited in PAN, No.40, August 2011, p.2 _ Bayou Arcana is the title of a graphic novel anthology illustrated entirely by female artists. Its imminent release has prompted The Guardian to declare that "a new generation of female artists and readers is radically changing the face of comics."(1) In support of this claim they cite last month's Thought Bubble festival. This six-day event featured the Comics Forum 2011, at which I gave a talk on the Estonian artist, Kristina Norman "from a Dreddful perspective". Lisa Wood, co-founder of Thought Bubble, told The Guardian that the prevailing "comic book culture" tends to leave "many female comic book fans... [feeling] ignored, harassed, or treated with hostility".(2) This struck a chord with me given that I'm currently reading the science fiction novel Stjärnpesten (The Star Plague) written in 1975 by the Swedish writer, Dénis Lindbohm.(3) I have reached page 87, just as "the gates of hell" are about to open. The story so far concerns an as-yet-unidentified entity that has wiped out life on earth. Seemingly the only survivors are a 20,000 strong community that managed to build a hermetically sealed underground city before the "plague" struck. Unfortunately, this band of plucky survivors has swiftly descended into internecine conflicts and is languishing in the subterranean equivalent of George Orwell's 1984. Whilst I am thoroughly enjoying this dystopian distraction, it is striking that every single one of the protagonists so far has been male. The first challenge to this crops up on page 41 in the form of an unnamed female's corpse (p.41). Fifteen pages later appears an unidentified woman who gets pregnant without permission and undergoes a brutal forced abortion. Finally, a couple of mothers, an old lady and a young girl are paraded in front of the cameras and used for propaganda purposes by the dastardly dictatorship (p.84). Fingers crossed that there are some interesting female characters behind those gates of hell... Maybe as an antidote to all this sci-fi and comic machismo I ought to follow The Guardian's advice and read Ursula K Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness published in 1970?(4) With luck by the time I've finished it Bayou Arcana will have been published. ____ Notes (1) Ben Quinn, "Ker-pow! Women kick back against comic-book sexism", The Guardian, 28/12/2011 accessed 29/12/2012 at, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/dec/28/women-comic-book-sexism. (2) Ibid. (3) Dénis Lindbohm, Stjärnpesten, Stockholm, Regal, 1975. (4) Justine Jordan, "Winter reads: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K Le Guin", The Guardian, 27/12/2011 accessed 29/12/2012 at, www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/dec/27/winter-reads-the-left-hand-of-darkness. __________ Supplemental 02/01/2012 But we must get the world to rot, because not until all dead organic material has decomposed can we sow the world with life anew. We must bide our time; our long period of waiting. Stjärnpesten (The Star Plague), p. 151 Well, I've now finished Dénis Lindbohm's entertaining novel. Alas, female characters didn't fare any better after page 87. The only properly identified woman was a Satanist by the name of Raader. She is allocated a single paragraph (p. 111). The narrator's meeting with "Lucifer's Alpha" wasn't terribly productive: "When I left her I wasn't any wiser than before I came." Perhaps things might have gone a tiny better for this ark of humanity if they'd opted to share power amongst both men and women? Lindbohm's novel would certainly have benefitted... The wing-tip of the aircraft blazes in the dying light of the setting sun. Night is falling. The day is drawing to a close and with it my time in Scandinavia. In an effort to repress this deeply depressing thought I reached for the in-flight magazine. Only then did I realize that I was racing through the skies in a flying memorial. This was not an intuition that the plane was going to crash. It was instead based on an article entitled, "Norwegian's tail icons" (Blågestad 2011). The low-cost airline, Norwegian has opted to dedicate each of its aircraft to "famous Scandinavians". Their faces appear on the empennage (i.e. the fin or tail of an aeroplane). The list includes Roald Amundsen (1872-1928) – a memorial to whom has featured in an earlier blog posting. His entry in the in-flight magazine notes that he was "one of the greatest polar explorers of all time. The Norwegian explorer was the first person to reach both the North and South Poles" (Blågestad 2011: 110). One person missing from this roll call of famous Scandinavians is Dénis Lindbohm (1927-2005). You've probably never heard of this Swedish science fiction writer. But he features in my own personal canon of famous Scandinavians. Lindbohm would be a doubly-appropriate candidate for a flying memorial given that he wrote Bevingaren (The Wing-Giver). It tells the tale of John. One day whilst out walking in the forest he comes across what looks like a crater left by a falling meteorite. Closer inspection reveals it to be filled with pristine, ice-cold water. Stooping down he drinks from this unearthly spring – and soon realises this fissure was formed by no shooting star. It was caused by a crash-landing spaceship. The watery remains of its unfortunate pilot enter into symbiosis with John. It teaches him things that will change not only John's life but that of everyone on the planet. For this parasitic extraterrestrial is, quite literally, The Wing-Giver. John becomes the first of a new species of para-humans. He hides this fact until the day comes when he climbs to the top of a mountain, unfolds his wings, leans ever further over the edge... "Then gave out a sudden cry, an exultant and almost wild laugh, and flung himself forwards, upwards, straight into the wind, beating down with his wings. And flew. "The ground fell away as he ascended like an express elevator... He climbed like a kite in the wind. The treetops and then the whole landscape disappeared beneath. He couldn't stop laughing in furious jubilation. He literally threw himself upwards into the blue, blue atmosphere" (Lindbohm 1980: 44). _________ References Blågestad, Nina (2011) "Norwegian's tail icons", Norwegian in-flight magazine, no. 4, pp. 108-111 Lindbohm, Dénis (1980) Bevingaren, Vänersborg _________ Supplemental, 02/09/2011 A flying memorial of a different and far more tragic kind took place today. The Royal Air Force Aerobatic Team - more familiarly known as "the Red Arrows" - conducted a ceremonial flypast in the skies over Chatsworth House Country Fair in Derbyshire and at a RAF Linton-on-Ouse in North Yorkshire. Both events were dedicated to the memory of Flight Lieutenant Jon Egging. He suffered fatal injuries when his aeroplane crashed during a public event that took place near Bournemouth Airport on 20th August. _________ Supplemental, 23/09/2011 The BBC reports that Flt Lt Jon Egging is to be honoured with a permanent memorial located near the scene of his fatal accident. See Anon (2011) "A Red Arrows pilot Jon Egging memorial for Bournemouth", BBC News, 22/09 accessed 23/09/2011 at, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-dorset-15012137. "One could not learn history from architecture any more than one could learn it from books. Statues, inscriptions, memorial stones, the names of streets – anything that might throw light upon the past had been systematically altered." George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (orig. pub. 1949), Penguin, 1969, p. 82 "The amount of audio-visual material that Duncan [Makenzie] had stored under MISC was remarkable, even for an inquisitive ten-year old. It was not that he lacked organizing ability - that was the most celebrated of all the Makenzie talents - but he was interested in more things than he knew how to index. He had now begun to discover, the hard way, that information not properly classified can be irretrievably lost." Arthur C. Clarke, Imperial Earth (1975/1982), Aylesbury: Pan Books, p. 16 A paralabel for a paramuseum Professor Arvid Gunnarsson from the city of Lund in the kingdom of Sweden on the planet Earth would make for an interesting artefact in the galaxy's most distinguished museums... [The] last human being of the original type. Dénis Lindbohm, The Judgement's Stars Delta, 1978, pp.110-111 At the start of my article "Sweden's Memory: Museums, Monuments and Memorials" I refer to the classic novel, The Time-Machine (1895). H.G. Wells' gloomy prediction for the human race is symbolised by the ruined vestiges of London's Natural History Museum. Hundreds of thousands of years in the future it has become nothing more than an "ancient monument of an intellectual age‟. Inside the wrecked and neglected building the narrator comes across: "brown and charred rags that... I presently recognized as the decaying vestiges of books. They had long since dropped to pieces, and every semblance of print had left them. But here and there were warped boards and cracked metallic clasps that told the tale well enough. Had I been a literary man I might, perhaps, have moralized upon the futility of all ambition. But as it was, the thing that struck me with keenest force was the enormous waste of labour to which this sombre wilderness of rotting paper testified." The time-traveller discovers that our future selves have evolved into two separate species: infantile, dim-witted Eloi and blood-thirsty Morlocks. Despite their extreme differences they share at least one significant characteristic: they are both illiterate. This doesn't bode at all well for Brewster Kahle's attempt to warehouse every book he can get his hands on - a fact reported in Anon (2011) "Internet Archive founder turns to new information storage device – the book", The Guardian, 01/08, accessed 01/08/2011 at, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/aug/01/internet-archive-books-brewster-kahle PS For a non-paper copy of The Time-Machine click the image of the book above. |
Para, jämsides med.
En annan sort. Dénis Lindbohm, Bevingaren, 1980: 90 Even a parasite like me should be permitted to feed at the banquet of knowledge
I once posted comments as Bevingaren at guardian.co.uk
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Note All parasitoids are parasites, but not all parasites are parasitoids Parasitoid "A parasite that always ultimately destroys its host" (Oxford English Dictionary) I live off you
And you live off me And the whole world Lives off everybody See we gotta be exploited By somebody, by somebody, by somebody X-Ray Spex <I live off you> Germ Free Adolescents 1978 From symbiosis
to parasitism is a short step. The word is now a virus. William Burroughs
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