Anne Marit Myrstad
About
Anne Marit Myrstad is a Professor of Film Studies. She has work experience as a teacher, cultural worker and as a Film archivist at the National Library of Norway. At NTNU she has worked as Head of, and Research fellow at the former Centre for Women's Research, and as Associate Professor in Media Studies, then Film Studies at the Department of Art and Media Studies. Myrstas served as Head of this Department from 2009 till 2017.
Research
Myrstad's main research interest is Norwegian film production within a history of culture and cultural studies perspective. Gender constructions, ideas of nation and national identities, including whiteness are recurring thematics. Myrstad has studied, for instance, fiction films from the silent area, the commercial film genre housewife film, modernist and other films with a female lead. Resent studies on the state financed film company Norsk Film A/S and studies in costyme design differs in taking a production studies approach.
Ongoing research
1. Woman on Screen. Leading ladies in Norwegian film history
This ‘umbrella’ project contains analyses of female protagonists in Norwegian film history from silent fictions to feature film productions after 2000. The analyses concern narrative agency and visual style and discusses the performances in relation to female stereotypes in western cinema and discourses of ethnicity, whiteness and/or class in a Norwegian and Nordic context.
«Utfordrende ungdomsportrett. Den norske filmen Line fra 1961» i Jon Inge Faldalen red. Fabelaktig! En feiring av professor Ove Solum. Institutt for medier og kommunikasjon, UiO. 2024.
«Heroines of Norwegian silent fiction: Nordic femininity and the conventions of cinematic whiteness.» Journal of Scandinavian Cinema. Fortcoming 2023.
«Soft Strength, Mild Mystery. Female characters in the films of Joachim Trier». Journal of Scandinavian Cinema, vol. 9, nr 2, 2019.
«Kvinnens plass - mors yrkeskarriere som filmatisk konflikt I Kvinnens plass 1956 og Tusen Ganger Godnatt 2013» i Myndighet og medborgerskap:Festskrift til Gro Hagemann på 70-årsdagen 3. september 2015, Kari H. Nordberg m.fl. red, Novus Forlag
«Hjemløs? Kvinnekarakteren i 1960-tallets norske kunstfilm». Anne Birgitte Rønning og Geir Uvsløkk (red.): Kjønnsforhandlinger. Studier i kunst, film og litteratur. Oslo: Pax 2013.
2. Costume design in Norwegian film. Through survey and interviews the project investigates working conditions and ackowledgement as experienced by costume designers. The project is a response to the workshop-series Feminist film history in Scandinavia: new approaches, methodologies, and connections initiated be the National Libraryof Norway togeter with film scholars at the Universities of Copenhagen and Stockholm. Første publikasjon
«Costume design in Norwegian film production; working conditions and acknowledgement» i antologien Feminist film history in Scandinavia: New approaches, methodologies and connections. Nota bene, The National Library of Norway. Fortcoming 2025.
Teaching areas
Myrstad has taught photography and visual culture, gender and media, but first and foremost film studies at every academic level, and with a focus on fiction film history, and prominent research traditions of this disipline.