“If a female director had made a war film, with a female lead role, it would have been fantastic,” replied the director of the new film “No. 24”, John Andreas Andersen.
Perhaps this is the crux of the problem?
I went hard in the podcast “Tusvik&Tønne” and criticized the film about the resistance fighter Gunnar “Kjakan” Sønsteby. Completely without thinking that it would be used as “ragebate” in VG the next day. But for fear of being perceived as a whining woman who can’t stand men’s films about heroes, I thought I’d rant here.
A tendency in most Norwegian war films is for the women to be portrayed with very beautiful hair, narrow waists in ruby ​​red dresses and small handbags that help the brave, tough resistance fighters during the occupation. Or they are poor, wear knitted jackets and are portrayed as scared. In the film “No. 24”, we don’t even get to see the torture of the one woman, Reidun Andersen, while the men are both beaten and burned on the screen. This is where I get pissed off.
I don’t know if we should write and make more war movies about World War II
Why do I get so pissed off at these war movies about these male heroes we all love? Is it because most of these war movies are made by men? No, Sønsteby will of course get its own movie, but we don’t have to be left with one-dimensional female characters and feel like we’ve seen everything about this war before for that? I need something new, I need a bigger perspective.
For women was so much more. Twenty-year-old Anne Sofie Østvedt was one of the country’s most important spies during the war, and among other things helped Sønsteby and the boys survive. You can hear about her in the podcast from the National Library “Old Stuff: Codename Aslak”. The study that became a great spy”. You have the Sharpshooters lots in Finnmark, which should soon become a TV series, you have the play “Drontheim”, which will be staged at Trøndelag Teater in January, which is about the resistance women Thora and Johanna Matheson, where the latter was killed in Ravensbrück.
Or Anne Marie Breien, who saved the lives of almost a hundred Norwegians, many of whom could have received the death penalty, but who cunningly saved them because she had been the Nazi Fehmer’s mistress. Sønsteby and Milorg CEO Jens Christian Hauge did not want to know about her. They tried to get her convicted of treason instead. The book came out this week and is called “Fehmer’s List” by Alexander Wisting and Jan Helge Østlund.
Read also: The lesson from the school ballad in Innlandet is that it’s no use, no matter how good you arewrites Jo Moen Bredeveien
Or my own relative, Mai Eitrem, Hauge’s secretary throughout the war, faithfully took all the secrets to the grave. But when they were to take a picture of the Milorg management after the war, it was her friend and boss Hauge who asked her to step aside because the picture “should only be with us men”, as she told us when we were little.
Or what about Werna Gerhardsen, who was a bicycle messenger and courier during the war, but about whom Einar Gerhardsen does not say much in his memoirs, writes Sigrun Slapgard in the book about Werna. Ingeborg Refling Hagen was guarded by 16 men around the clock during parts of her captivity during the war, a documentary I hope will be made soon. 2,000 women were in the Grini prison camp, they will have their own exhibition at the Grini Museum on 14 November, so no, Ørjan Greiff Johnsen in NettavisenI am not without history when I miss tougher female roles in Norwegian war films. I could ramble on forever.
There is an exception to the rule, the film “The Spy” about the actress Sonja Wigert, which was both directed and written by men. But in “No. 24”, the key figure Gudrun Collett is not even given five minutes to her work. We learn in the film that she has apartments all over Oslo, and she comes like a real Florence Nightingale and warns Kjakan in one of the apartments. Mild, clean and short of breath, she serves breakfast, while he jumps up and puts the hand grenades in his pocket. As if everything is at stake for Kjakan, but not Gudrun?
Because as we see: A story full of heroines all over the country. But most of the people who have written the literature about the heroes are mostly men, like that Trude Teige wrote in VG this week. And those who want to write scripts or make films about the war are also mostly men.
The question I ask is: DOES a “female” director make this film about women? Why can’t these movies feature both genders? Preferably made by a man. Why can’t this group of men in the film industry show the cool stories about the women too? We don’t need our own films, they can contain everything at once. There is plenty of double agents, mistresses, torture, rape and murder that a film needs. I understand that we need one hero, one main character to relate to, but where is the nuance in all the supporting characters? It is the eternal camaraderie, the eternal betrayal, the eternal film adaptation of the Nazis up to Karl Johan and the dynamite that blows up what needs to be blown up.
Read also: Israel’s moral collapsewrites Lars West Johnsen
I don’t know if we should write and make more war movies about World War II. It must soon reach a peak! That is perhaps what the women in the film industry are trying to say, since they do not make countless war films about the same five years time and time again. The whole film reeks of men patting each other on the back and saying good job. What will become of the criticism Sønsteby has received afterwards? That he overturned the entire narrative about the home front? Wouldn’t it have been brave to make a film where we showed that the heroes weren’t as big as we wanted them to be? We know more about what the home front knew, we know who told the women to keep quiet and which men were allowed to shine.
My second point, in the same episode of the podcast, was that we have gone to war in so many other countries, disguised as “peace”. We have men who have sacrificed their lives, men with PTSD and broken psyche who live to this day. Men who should tell the stories from wars in Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq again, Libya and Mali. There are plenty of heroes and anti-heroes. Something is told in the series “Nobel”, but here too there are women who can be portrayed. It is most likely such a war that our soldiers will go into again. That’s the world we live in now, even if we lull ourselves into waders and nylon stockings from the 1940s.
We must never forget, we say. It is true. We’ll never forget, and the guys in the movie business never forget World War II – be sure. But we don’t need to spend tens of millions making a one-dimensional hero movie about a war no one can relate to anymore. Unfortunately, we have wars aplenty, also on our own continent, but give those who will understand that we should never forget a better and broader picture.
So “never forget” can be replaced by “never experience”.