Editors' Preface

Mariah Larsson & Anders Marklund

This book has a long history, which starts at the point when two doctoral students shared the same office and taught the same course, namely Swedish Film for exchange students at Lund University, in the autumn of 2003. We both felt that, considering how much literature there was on Swedish film in Swedish, the lack of such material in English was conspicuous. There was – of course – an enormous amount of literature on Ingmar Bergman, but very little on almost everything else. Until recently, scholarly tradition had it that most studies on Swedish cinema were published in Swedish. Although our own doctoral theses dealing with Swedish film – Mai Zetterling as a director in the 1960s and Swedish film between 1985 and 2000, respectively – were also written in Swedish, the notion of editing a larger, educational volume by translating already existing Swedish-language material into English was born there and then.

Thus, this book is compiled to cover Swedish film history from the early film screenings to contemporary filmmaking. Included are articles and excerpts on topics as diverse as censorship, comedies from the 1930s, specific auteurs, Swedish filmmakers abroad, and ethnicity in Swedish film. The aim is to present a wide and yet concise introduction to the history of Swedish film, through a number of carefully selected in-depth articles by Swedish and inter national film scholars. By translating research already published in Swedish, we want to make that research available to international students and researchers.

Undoubtedly, the scope of such a project raises issues of historiography and scholarly canons – questions not only of the exclusion and inclusion of certain films and directors but also of the exclusion and inclusion of certain authors and scholars. This, however, we have found unavoidable. In order to steer clear of misunderstandings and provide a preliminary guideline for how this book may be used, we want to delineate how we have related to a number of issues.

Established Swedish film history: At first, Swedish film history was formulated by film critics such as Robin Hood (pseudonym for Bengt Idestam-Almquist, 1895–1983), writing from the 1930s to the 1970s. Cinephile and filmmaker Gösta Werner (1908–2009) contributed with a more thorough volume which for a long time served as an introductory text to Swedish film history. Later, film students would also read Rune Waldekranz's (1911–2003) Filmens historia parts 1–3, which covered international film history but also included large sections on Sweden. Since its publication in 1991, however, Leif Furhammar's Filmen i Sverige: En historia i tio kapitel has been the standard Swedish-language film history for students of Swedish film. Furhammar was the second full professor of film studies in Sweden, succeeding Rune Waldekranz at Stockholm University. Many scholars have taken his volume as a starting point in order to examine phenomena that Furhammar mentions very briefly, or, occasionally, neglects to point out. In this reader Furhammar is only represented by a short piece, which of course does not reflect the influence he has had on generations of film students. However, Furhammar is indirectly present in about one third of the contributions to this volume through references.

Scholarly writing: At the end of Janet Staiger's 1985 article 'On the Politics of Film Canons', she notes that not only films are selected and preserved by film historiography; scholarly writings on film also share that same destiny. We are, needless to say, well aware of this. The texts chosen here, however, have not generally achieved canonical status, mostly for the simple reason that they are quite recently published – and a handful of them are published here for the first time. However, other...