Aalborg, meditating on the Anglophone world

We came north from Aarhus to Aalborg today by train. (It was a bit rainy and gloomy for photography, so I am cheating and using a photo from the Internet of the Aalborg train station.)

I gave a talk today at Aalborg University, comparing the globalization of film, TV and music. The three are quite different in this regard. Film is still heavily dominated by the USA for a series of accidents of history (like many of its competitors being crippled by WW I, Great Depression and WW II at crucial moments) and the continuing exercise of Hollywood economic clout. Still tiny Denmark does 25 films a year, which are pretty well attended, thanks to government support for the intitial productions and good local talent.

TV is pretty nationalized most places, including Denmark, where roughly 60% of what is shown on the major networks is national and 70% of audience time is spent watching national
programs, which is impressive, but not uncommon. In Brazil, the numbers are 75-80% and 80-85%. Ethnographies show that usually there is something about TV that makes it the comfort medium of daily life, very different from film. Plus many governments use a lot of levers to make sure that a medium so close to political life stays nationally focused. (Here is a picture of Sonia Braga as Gabriella, heroine of the the first telenovela I saw in Brazil. It took the Portuguese speaking world by storm, even did pretty well translated into Spanish.)

Music is kind of all over the map, very globalized in many places, including Denmark, but very national or even local in places like Brazil, where roughly 70% of FM radio time and CD sales are for national music.

One interesting dimension is language and culture. Music shows that Danes live in a certain cultural dilemma with English. So many Danes understand English so well, that many listen with great comfort in English and many even perform successfully in English -- who would think that Barbie Girl by Aqua was sung by Danes? (Being Danish does not automatically give you great taste.)

When I came to Denmark, one of the things I wanted to look at was whether they traded a lot of TV with the other Nordic countries. It turns out that the Nordic countries don't share quite enough to make each other's TV that interesting, despite all their common history, because the languages really are too different for comfortable daily viewing among each other on a broad scale. But many Danes have become so immersed in English and in Anglophone culture, that they do watch a fair bit of U.S. and, to lesser degree, British TV, in English with subtitles with some enthusiasm, when they decide they don't want to watch their own shows (which they mostly do).

It strikes me that at some layer of their increas- ingly multi- layered identities, many Danes are becoming a part of the transnational Anglophone world in how they both consume and participate more easily than many in its cultural industries. Is our friend Viggo Mortensen ( a classic but slightly old fashioned Danish name) a fluke or an example of where more Danes may go? It is interesting that Lord of the Rings, with Viggo here as Aragorn, was a very broadly inclusive Anglophone production: British story and actors; American money, actors and distribution; and New Zealand direction, special effects, actors, locales and extras.

It may seem like Viggo is a bit unusual, having grown up enough in the USA, Argentina and Denmark to have a claim on all three cultures and languages, and to act in at least English and Spanish. (Here he is as the swash- buckling Capitan Alatriste in a Spanish film, where he speaks pretty passable Spanish.) But quite a few Danes speak English just about as well, and more and more seem to move and work around the world, aided in part by their position someplace between Europe, which offers certain advantages and the Anglophone world which sprawls all the way from the UK to New Zealand, significantly including the USA (and just maybe a part of Denmark?).