In this essay, an interdisciplinary group of researchers sets out to address the period 1780–1840 in Sweden in a new way, by placing nature at its centre. With the help of ecocritical and transcultural theory, combined with renewed attention to the Swedish fine arts, learned discourses, and practices, we suggest a new approach to these revolutionary decades. The perceived dissonance, the interplay between climatic conditions and cultural template in early modern and modern Sweden, has not been fully addressed in current research, despite the fact that the relationship between humankind and the environment is a central issue in contemporary society and scholarship. Representations of nature situate the nation, they negotiate the relationship between a sensed reality and an ideal, between human and more-than-human beings. We suggest a focus on the unpredictable space created by negotiations of nature in Swedish representations during this crucial period, and, furthermore, on the ways in which this creative space is charged with utopian possibilities in the early Anthropocene. This is the background and the driving force of the planned research project ‘Cool Nature: Utopian Landscapes in Sweden 1780–1840’.

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During the last decades, scholars have paid increasing attention to how cinema deals with traditional aesthetic values in its representation of opera. This research shows that contemporary cinema both manifests and challenges conceptions of opera anchored in romantic-modernist ideals. Recent film, however, also reveals an intriguing complexity surrounding conceptions of opera through the way in which it reflects promotion strategies of the classical music industry. This article draws attention to promotions of singers and opera music found in recent cinema that contribute to juxtapositions of different conceptions of opera. By letting operatic performances have a particular impact on fictional listeners and their ensuing actions, films associate opera with ideals belonging to a romantic-modernist discourse. However, they let this impact emanate from a way of performing opera that stands in contradiction to these same ideals. Discussing some central scenes from three recent films, I argue that the films’ displays of singers and opera music in this way remodels romantic-modernist discourses.

The topic of this article is the intersection between media genres in 1960s Sweden. In a case study of Ingmar Bergman's Hour of the Wolf (1968) it is shown how the music contributes to intermedial qualities through the film's connection with opera. It is argued that the film, by how the music is related to sound effects and images, can be seen as an example of formal imitation. The imitation of opera is created through technical media of film, such as foregrounding of media in the audiovisual space, and manipulations of sounds, music, and images. Of special interest is how, by alternating between synchronicity and counterpoint between images, sound effects, and music, Bergman attracts attention to the media as visual and sonic experiences and creates formal structures that deviate from the overall character of the film. The intermedial dimension of the film revealed by the analysis is contextualized in relation to the historical discussion of mixed versus pure medialities. The film is seen in the light of an interest in media genre mixedness versus media genre specificity in 1960s Sweden.