Boundaries: Infiltrated Identities

Whereas Eastern noir narratives reproduce the ‘iron’ border and operate by means of clear-cut national identities, Chapter 2 reconsiders the hard border promulgated by the master narrative of the Cold War. Devoted to a set of films which address historical themes (late 20th-century and 21st-century productions looking back to the Cold War and earlier periods), the chapter focuses on spies and double agents, who by default operate by navigating across borders. The films analysed do not utilise typical spy film formulas and their protagonists are nowhere near the affirmative James Bondian narrative. The films re-examine a range of historical issues which during the Cold War qualified as inconvenient (and were therefore censored), often relating to the complicated past of the border regions (such as Finnmark) and involvement of Nordic citizens on the wrong side of the global conflict. Using the concept of infiltration, the analysis follows the spies that embody the discourses of boundary, ‘contaminating’ an assumed pure national community. These films (such as Jörn Donner’s The Interrogation or Knut Erik Jensen’s Ice Kiss) produce affective and relational spaces, alternatives to arbitrary maps, and highlight the protagonists’ entanglement in identities which might be defined as transnational.