Journal of Scandinavian Cinema (Journal)
‘The usual thing: loneliness’. This is the response Isak Borg receives in Ingmar Bergman’s Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries) (1957) when asked about his punishment for withdrawing from human companionship. In the Nordic countries, where personal space and independence are valued, solitude and even loneliness can assume meaningful dimensions. International travelers, journalists and researchers often puzzle over the seemingly paradoxical nature of the Nordic welfare states’ ‘almost nearly perfect people’ who at the same time are strangely devoid of companionship and love, caring more about their domestic animals than other people. While many view solitude positively, as a time for reflection and personal growth, especially when spent in nature, long stretches of both voluntary and forced solitude can lead to experiences of loneliness due to a lack of social connections. In this Special Issue, we invite you to join us in exploring the unique aspects of solitude and loneliness in the Nordic context and how these themes are woven into Nordic cinema.
Recently, loneliness has become a major topic in the academic world. It has been studied from numerous perspectives, including those of cognitive neuroscience, as in John T. Cacioppo and William Patrick’s Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection (2008), philosophy, as exemplified by Lars Svendsen’s A Philosophy of Loneliness (2017), and cultural history, as in Fay Bound Alberti’s A Biography of Loneliness (2019). David Vincent’s historical study A History of Solitude (2020) provides an overview of the subject, while Peter Stadius explores it from a regional perspective in his article ‘Happy voluntary solitude? Notes on a Nordic theme’ (2024). Studies on loneliness and solitude in Nordic cinema are scarce, but some research has been done, as demonstrated by Jaakko Seppälä’s articles ‘Loneliness in the films of Aki Kaurismäki’ (2022) and ‘L’Année du lièvre: le bonheur de la solitude dans les forêts de la Finlande’ (2024).
In psychological research, loneliness is defined as social pain, an emotion cluster that stems from a lack of meaningful social connections, causing unhappiness. According to sociologists, loneliness can be a root cause behind surface-level ills, including depression, obesity, alcoholism and suicide. Yet simply being alone is neither positive nor negative, as everything depends on how one is alone. In films such as Risto Jarva’s Jäniksen vuosi (The Year of the Hare (1977), solitude in nature celebrates freedom, reinvigoration and even happiness. Loneliness and solitude are thus two distinct, but related, states of being. Consequently, representations of loneliness and solitude are worth studying from cognitive, cultural and philosophical perspectives, focusing on how films represent the roots and causes of the phenomena. Of particular interest here is the way films represent the relationship between individuals and society. Is it (welfare) society that causes loneliness and solitude or do these conditions stem from individual life choices? And when it comes to curing loneliness, is it the responsibility of the individual or the collective?
The desire to address these themes has inspired Nordic filmmakers to visualize, imagine and understand what loneliness and solitude look, sound and feel like. For cinema, representing these conditions or states of mind in a manner that evokes affect and engagement can be narratively and aesthetically challenging, especially since there are no facial expressions or gestures that correspond to them. Thus it is interesting to study how filmmakers convey the multiple dimensions of loneliness and solitude and how their choices contribute to an understanding of a particularly Nordic sense of being alone.
The editors encourage submissions on the following topics, but we also welcome work outside or combining these areas:
- Fictional and documentary film approaches to loneliness/solitude
- The visual aesthetics of solitude/loneliness
- Narrating solitude/loneliness in visual media
- Sounds and voices conveying solitude/loneliness
- Cinematic representations of solitude/loneliness in the context of other cultural expressions
- Historically contextualized understandings of solitude/loneliness
- Nordic welfare states and loneliness/solitude
- The impact of policies and practices such as neoliberalism
- Social categories related to solitude/loneliness, such as sexuality, gender, class, ethnicity, age
- The social psychology of solitude/loneliness
- Philosophies of solitude/loneliness
- Technology connecting and disconnecting people
- Posthumanist perspectives on solitude/loneliness
Projected timeline: Proposals due: 15 April 2025. Full article submissions due: 15 September 2025. All contributions will undergo double-blind peer review, with publication planned for 15 February 2026. Both feature articles (max 8000 words) and short subjects (2000–3500 words) are welcome.
Please send proposals to guest editors Jaakko Seppälä (jaakko.i.seppala@helsinki.fi) and Outi Hakola (outi.j.hakola@helsinki.fi). Feel free to contact them to discuss potential contributions.