Introduction: Auteurism and Generic Exchange in the Films of Nicolas Winding Refn

Nicolas Winding Refn is a highly divisive filmmaker whose work and career do not easily lend themselves to neat categorisations. Born to Danish filmmakers Anders Refn and Vibeke Winding but raised and socialised partly in New York where he attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, Refn’s screen media work is unequivocally international in that it has crossed between Europe, the United States and even Asia, borrows from a range of exploitation, Hollywood genre, and European art cinema traditions, straddles sectors from not only feature filmmaking but also advertising and episodic television, and encompasses many roles including directing, writing, producing, and even acting (in the form of cameos). Refn’s divisiveness, meanwhile, stems both from his adoption of European art cinema’s slow pacing in his more recent films and series, especially Only God Forgives (2013), Too Old to Die Young (2019), and Copenhagen Cowboy (2023), and from his depiction of violence, which often erupts suddenly and extremely in a manner reminiscent of exploitation cinema, and masculinity, which has been interpreted as a critique or an uncritical indulgence and even sometimes as misogynistic.

Refn is also a person who occupies a range of physical spaces, from family environs where – as My Life Directed By Nicolas Winding Refn (2015), the documentary shot by Refn’s wife and actor Liv Corfixen portrays – he seems to be a loving but creatively tormented and distracted husband, to production locales where he seems to engage collaboratively and relatively productively with other industry figures on-set and behind-the-scenes. Yet at the same time, ‘Refn’ is a brand that is multilayered and imbued with symbolic meaning, distorting and obfuscating who the person really is and what his practice actually entails. Indeed, Thomas Schatz and numerous other scholars have scrutinised romantic notions of authorship and the auteur theory for contributing to simplistic narratives of film history and for narrowing evaluations of film labour. As an auteur figure who is credited with manifesting his purportedly unique creative vision onto the screen, then, Refn’s brand is likely to centre our attention on the most creative seeming roles such as directing and writing, and it usually obscures the labour of his collaborators (including actors Mads Mikkelsen, Zlatko Buric, Ryan Gosling, and Jena Malone, editor Matthew Newman, composer Cliff Martinez, cinematographers Morten Søborg and Larry Smith, costume designer Erin Benach, and others) as well as his embeddedness in the more administrative, bureaucratic, and commercial components of the screen media industries.

Yet this ‘ReFocus’ edited collection aims not to present a portrait of the man or troubled artist, which would risk contributing to the myth, the brand and, indeed, overly simplistic authorial notions. Instead, it aims to create a kind of montage where insights are best found in the connections, and contradictions, between the different dynamics and components at play within and around his work. Doing so, the collection aims to unpack some of the creative, cultural, social and industrial tensions to offer more complicated insight into Refn than most promotional and critical discourse allows. This introduction sets out some of the themes that weave their way through this collection and frame Refn’s work.