Swedish Cinema

Labelled as ‘new extreme’, 'Ett hål i mitt hjärta' ('A Hole in My Heart') (Moodysson, 2004) controversially straddles the boundaries of art and pornography, challenging the supposed eroticism of pornography with disgusting re-enactments and rethinkings of the violence of pornography. It is transgressive but not excessively so; it is recognizably both artistic and pornographic but hardly representative of either genre. In this article, I show that Paul Ardenne’s theory of extremity is a good means for understanding the play with boundaries that takes place in 'A Hole in My Heart' as well as in Jacques Derrida’s analysis of genre labels. Through an analysis of 'A Hole in My Heart’'s relation to art and  pornography, I propose an account that allows for multiple permutations of genre affiliation and suggest that it could advance thinking about new extreme films and genre more broadly.

Show Me Love is Sweden’s first and until recently only lesbian coming-
out story.4 It has become a cult film of modern European and
international gay cinema. Show Me Love is both a coming-of-age
and a coming-out story, simultaneously a Hollywood-inspired high school film and a serious feature that foregrounds lesbian romance.
It oscillates between convention and innovation, between the mundane
and the unusual, and between conformity and radicalism. The
film is a product of its time and place—small-town Sweden in the
late 1990s—yet its reach extends far beyond national borders. Its
complexity derives from the multiple levels of character portrayal,
genre references, aesthetics, allusions to Swedish film history, the
conditions of production, and divergent receptions by audiences and
reviewers in Sweden and all over the world—most notably its Teddy
Award for Best Gay and Lesbian Film at the Berlin Film Festival in
1999 and subsequent screenings at dozens of international gay and
lesbian film festivals. This chapter examines  what it is
in this multilayered mix that has made the film a classic.

Anna Westerstahl Stenport book about Lukas Moodysson presents the director to a broad audience. Known for his English-language film Mammoth (2009) as well as his heartbreaking indictment of sex-trafficking in Sweden, Lilya 4-Ever (2002), Moodysson debuted as a writer and director while still in his twenties with Show Me Love (1998). The film received four Guldbaggar - the Swedish equivalent of the Academy Awards - including best film, best director, best screenplay, and best actresses. A coming-of-age and coming out film about two young women in a stiflingly oppressive small town, Show Me Love is widely considered a youth film classic and was called a "masterpiece" by Ingmar Bergman.

This book includes discussions of the film's genre, aesthetics, and style, and situates the film in both contemporary Swedish cinema and broader Swedish culture. It includes sequence and dialogue analysis and discusses how and why this particular film became so important: its queer significance, its unusually realistic depiction of youth, and its critical reception. Anna Stenport conducted extensive interviews with the cast and crew, including several enlightening discussions with Moodysson himself. Lukas Moodysson's Show Me Love offers an incisive introduction to Moodysson for readers interested in contemporary film, as well as a history and close analysis of changes in the Swedish film industry.

Pre-order at http://www.amazon.com/Anderssons-quot-Songs-Second-Floor/dp/0295998253/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1450151837&sr=8-1&keywords=ursula+lindqvist. It is hard to imagine a single film as long anticipated as Roy Andersson’s Songs from the Second Floor (2000). As film critic Jonathan Romney noted, “The 25 years between his second and third features make Andersson cinema’s champion absentee, beating even Terrence Malick and Victor Erice.” Leading up to the Cannes International Film Festival, many were skeptical that Songs could live up to the hype that had been building for decades—partly fueled by the director himself. When the film won the Special Jury Prize, Andersson reveled in the vindication. It was the ultimate comeback film for Andersson, then 57, whose debut feature A Swedish Love Story (1970) when the director was only 26 had won him international acclaim, awards, and meetings with Hollywood producers—only to be followed by three decades on the margins as Sweden’s most infamous film pariah. For the embattled director, the Cannes win symbolized the film industry’s embrace of his unique vision for film. Songs signaled the feature debut of a radically new “trivialist” film language, one so unprecedented that some questioned whether it could be called a film at all. This book examines the intermediality that forms the basis of Andersson’s film language, crafting cinema from a blend of poetry, painting, still photography, and music. It provides behind-the-scenes accounts of the film’s earliest conceptions, of the motley film crew and amateur actors who toiled four years to complete it, and of the unconventional methods of a scrappy film studio that has become a mecca of sorts for burgeoning and established filmmakers alike. It investigates the humanist ethos that informs every frame of the film, with inspirations from Peruvian modernist poet César Vallejo, to French anti-bourgeois writer Louis Ferdinand Céline, to philosopher Martin Buber, as well as the omnipresent specter of the Second World War and its brutal legacies of human greed, genocide, and apathy. And finally, this book situates the film as an art work intensely critical of both its immediate sociohistorical context—Swedish society—and the state of humanity as a whole at the dawn of the second millenium.

Today’s explosion of Swedish films made by and about transgender peo- ple is sometimes considered in a vacuum. This article explores the long history of cross-gender performance in Swedish cinema and the relationship of these new films to older traditions. In this article, I will outline the contours of cross-gender performance in Swedish films from the 1908 to today, using some exemplary films to display the variety of styles, genres, and meanings that can be found: the short dance film Dances Through the Ages (Skilda tiders danser, Walfrid Bergström, 1909); the swashbuckler Lasse-Maja (Gunnar Olsson, 1941); the romantic comedy Up With Little Märta (Fram för Lilla Märta, Hasse Ekman, 1945); the dramatic art film The Magician (Ansiktet, Ingmar Bergman, 1958); the recent romantic comedy Cockpit (Mårten Klingberg, 2012); and the trans art film Everything Falls Apart (Nånting måste gå sönder, Ester Martin Bergsmark, 2016). I will show that the two main shifts in Swedish cinema’s representation of cross-gender performance occurred in the mid-1950s and in the 1990s, due to social changes and changes in the structure of the Swedish film industry. In Swedish cinema, as elsewhere, cross-dressing has never meant any one thing, so we must attend to the specific contexts of its expression in order to understand what it meant.

Like many of Lukas Moodysson’s films, Lilja 4-ever (Lilya 4-Ever, 2002) centres on a complex female protagonist on the verge of adulthood. Lilya is based on a documented case of suicide by a trafficked young woman from the former USSR, whose eventual redemption, or at least her dream of escape, is self-consciously visualized in sequences featuring Lilya and her friend as winged angels. This tension in registers, between fantasy and social realism and between melodrama and societal critique, opens up interpretive venues that paradoxically signal both the film’s protest against, and implication within, ideologies and practices of neoliberalism and globalization. Moodysson’s questioning of neoliberalism and globalization within a double framework of gender and religiosity point to his desire to find alternate (political) discourses outside the dominant ones. This ambition, however, figures Lilya as a victim of abuse on multiple levels: as trafficked girl, as didactic vehicle for a political message and, arguably, also as part of a postmodernist experiment that reinserts a redemptive spirituality into a context marked by capitalist and political secularism.

From the back cover:

"‘Post-War Modernist Cinema and Philosophy: Confronting Negativity and Time' represents an advanced, sophisticated, extremely well informed and challenging contribution to the rapidly growing area of film-philosophy scholarship. It will become an important moment in (re)establishing the philosophical significance of cinema (and film studies’ efforts in addressing this) well before the current trend in Anglo-American Philosophy’s 'discovering' of film emerged. . . . Ford draws on a wide range of research across film, modernist cultural and aesthetic theory and continental philosophical terrains. The work engages both with more recent film-philosophy scholarship and the disciplinary resources of film studies work on the movements and individual filmmakers in question. A successful and important contribution to scholarship on these films, their historical and aesthetic significance and their capacity to 'do' philosophy."
— Patrick Crogan, University of the West of England, UK

"Often, work in this area is far too devoted to a particular theoretical corpus and tends to lose originality; alternatively it falls into being a merely impressionistic mention of philosophy to make otherwise unremarkable claims. Hamish Ford’s book is remarkable for its engagement with the deepest problems of modernist aesthetics and the presentation of time. He works closely with cinema, philosophy and criticism while always maintaining his own argumentative position."
— Claire Colebrook, Penn State University, USA
                                                     
"Hamish Ford’s energetic and erudite work is both theoretically and historically engaged and highly accessible to a broad readership. He is ideally positioned to contribute significantly to the discussion of post-war European cinema through this important book."
— Adrian Danks, RMIT University, Australia, co-editor of Senses of Cinema

'Post-War Modernist Cinema and Philosophy: Confronting Negativity and Time' is a unique study of four feature films chosen as emblematic works of 1960s modernist cinema. 'Persona' (Ingmar Bergman, 1966) and 'Two or Three Things I Know About Her' (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967) are explored through the theme of negativity, while 'L’eclisse' (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962) and 'Last Year in Marienbad' (Alain Resnais, 1961) are examined for their violent rendering of time. The book argues that these films exemplify film modernism at its peak of philosophical interest, substance and significance. Its focused analysis of four emblematic works selectively draws on the work of German philosopher and aesthetic theorist Theodor Adorno, in particular his account of negativity, and French poststructuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s analysis of temporality in post-war cinema, amongst other theoretical and critical sources. Grounding this study is a close consideration of the critical and aesthetically remarkable gaze these particular films cast upon their immediate social real and modernities as presented on screen. But rather than a strictly historical analysis, the book suggests that such complex and profoundly ambivalent renderings of the modern world have much to say to us today via what amounts to a genuinely challenging return in digital form, the films' remarkable aesthetic surfaces and layers looking even more properly science fiction-like than ever. 'Post-War Modernist Cinema and Philosophy: Confronting Negativity and Time' will appeal both to an academic audience, from upper-level undergraduate through to career researcher level, and a wider readership attracted by the book’s extensive analysis and appreciation of films that have countless and increasing admirers the world over."

Published review: Michael Godard, Senses of Cinema, July 2016, Issue 79, online: http://sensesofcinema.com/2016/book-reviews/post-war-modernist-cinema-and-philosophy/

On its release in 1998, Lukas Moodysson's film "Fucking Åmål" caused much stir, both critically and politically, especially for its portrayal of the life of typical small-town youths and in particular a lesbian schoolgirl. Moodysson was even pressurized to change the title of the film for the international market - soon rebranded as "Show me love". The film also put the small Swedish town of Åmål on the map. It had been reported that the town had been upset by its portrayal in the film - though in fact none of the final film was actually filmed there. The following essay discusses a number of issues: the critical relationship between the film and the town itself, the  policies of the town regarding both its economic development and in particular the youths of the town.

O estudo teve como objetivo analisar as relações e conexões de consumo entre o cinema e a moda através de uma abordagem analítica do posicionamento dos jovens na pós-modernidade a fim de compreender o caminho de consumo de Lisbeth Salander, personagem da literatura criada por Stieg Larsson, em suas adaptações para o cinema, partindo do pressuposto das influências e inserções midiáticas na contemporaneidade a partir da análise da construção da protagonista da trilogia Millenium. Presente nos filmes Man som hatar kvinnor (2009), de Niels Arden Oplev e The girl with the dragon tattoo (2011), de David Fincher e a coleção de roupas das lojas H&M inspirada na personagem, descobrindo e trabalhando em cima de perspectivas que constroem uma antítese às ideologias da obra.

Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film Wild Strawberries is a resolved study in unresolved psychic pain. Bergman’s own deep feeling of having been an unwanted baby is an underlying driver of the film, a common root of the suffering of protagonist Isak Borg and others in his family. Yet the film also pictures a possible break in the transgenerational transmission of parental rejection. An interpretation of Wild Strawberries is offered, including reflection on its tribute to Viktor Sjostrom’s 1921 film "The Phantom Carriage"; a reading of the first dream sequence as a sleep
paralysis dream; and a consideration of generativity internal to the film, contrasted with the author’s generativity in creating it. Ronald Fairbairn is a useful thinker for Wild Strawberries , not only in his account of schizoid character, but in his modification of the concept of libido: it is not (only) frustrated sexual desire, but (mainly) frustrated object-seeking, which gets sublimated into art by the filmmaker but tragically repressed by his protagonist. Bergman’s film depicts a journey of profound self-discovery that does achieve meaning, but far too late in Borg’s life to permit a
change of course. It seems love and its lack determine our pain; work and its success or failure determine the fate of that pain in generativity or in stagnation.

In his films of the late 1960s and the early 1970s, Jörn Donner, a Swedish-speaking Finnish author, critic and film director, employed his body and popular media image as a contemporary celebrity for narrative and marketing purposes. Focusing on the film Naisenkuvia/Portraits of Women (1970), a metanarrative about the alliance of art cinema and pornography in the 1960s and a parody of Donner’s public persona, this article investigates Donner’s ‘authoring practices’ and gestures of authorial ‘self-projection’ amidst the mediatized sexual revolution of the 1960s. Portraits of Women reveals Donner's appropriation and analysis of a newly sexualized public sphere, but the film also reads as a crisis point. While capitalizing on his public persona by casting himself as the male lead, Donner was forced to acknowledge that self-fashioning in the sphere of public sex escapes authorial control.

When a motion picture repeats an identical photographic image three times, accruing
purpose and synthesizing new meaning with each appearance, such an image demands
analysis. Surprisingly, no present study comprehensively examines the evolution of the
heroine's portrait photograph in Victor Sjöström's silent Swedish melodrama, Ingeborg Holm
(1913). The only existing scholarly work that focuses on Ingeborg's photograph with any
interest or value is Mark Sandberg's “Maternal Gesture and Photography in Victor Sjöström's
Ingeborg Holm,” in which the author explores the film's naturalist gestural system as
constitutive of character, and the transparent reliability of the photograph as the dialectic
antithesis to melodramatic gesture—the respite necessary to process truth from the
obfuscating activity of performance. While I agree, I propose that the photograph obtains
multivalent narrative and psychological functions with each appearance, morphing from a
talisman into a memento, and finally into the visual representation of the melodramatic
trauma cycle. Maintaining its own visual identicality, the photograph ultimately acts as
identity's savior through its transformative play of narrative function.

During the last two decades more than a dozen Scandinavian films have been officially remade by US studios, and rights have been purchased for a number of others that have yet to receive a green light. While a remarkable increase on its own, the phenomenon reflects on a larger scale changing media industry considerations, story‐telling practices, and cultural assumptions in the Nordic countries and globally. Building on interviews with film practitioners undertaken in Scandinavia during the period 2009‐2013, this chapter analyzes 21st‐century film remake practice through a set of pan‐Nordic examples. The horror and vampire genres are among the most commonly remade film genres, arguably because, as evolutionary psychologists show, physiological and psychological responses to fear, appear to be largely universal, transcending linguistic, cultural, and social contexts. The chapter indicates that re‐make practice, process, and infrastructure provide excellent vehicles for conceptualizing global polyvocality in the entertainment industry.

:  This essay offers a close comparison the original “director’s cuts” of two Ingmar Bergman films, Summer with Monika and Illicit Interlude, and their shortened and otherwise compromised exploitation market versions. Maintaining an open mind, it addresses the weaknesses of these compromised versions while also identifying surprising, potentially positive effects engendered by the changes to the original films. Considering these films in the context of mid-1950s Cold-War culture, it also identifies the parts they played as exploitation films in the political and ideological milieus of the era.  In doing so, the essay ultimately contributes a new and valuable chapter to the discourse arguing for a deep connection between “exploitation cinema” and “art cinema” in the mid-twentieth century.

Foregrounding a fundamental aspect of the Swedish auteur’s work that has been routinely ignored, as well as the vibrant connection between postwar American queer culture and European art cinema, this book offers a pioneering reading of Bergman’s films as profoundly queer work.

This text is an attempt to analyze selected elements of the incoherent narration in the first contemporary vampire movie from Sweden. Frostbite (directed by Anders Banke, 2006) is an image that reinterprets classical horror figures in various ways. The authors of the script use visual patterns from films and horror novels, intriguingly linking them with social criticism and a feminist perspective. The incoherent models of the narration may also be found in such strategies as mixing serious topics with comedy and dyschronic presentation of elements related to the plot’s time. By using these types of strategies the Swedish horror can be read as an attempt to create a hauntological reflection on the liminal status of vampires in postmodern fiction or even more general meditation on the spectral status of modern audiovisual media.

This is a timeline prepared for the panel "Pioneering Women in Cinema", organized by the Consulate General of Sweden in Istanbul and Swedish Research in Istanbul. Following the timeline prepared by the Swedish Film Institute, I undertook the research for the the Turkish counterpart and prepared this version for the panel.

This article discusses the motif of the sentient product in advertising during the 1930s and 1940s. The studied corpus consists of advertising that specifically targets children and adolescents but also short advertising films aimed at a wider audience. As a theoretical standpoint for my discussion, I apply Jean Baudrillardʼs theories about advertising and mass media and Nathalie op de Beeckʼs studies on the modern picture book of the interwar era and its connections to both the avant-garde and mass culture. The chapter proposes that children are to an increasing degree viewed as future members of the society but also as future consumers. The new ideas and marketing strategies expressed in the material also coincide with fundamental social changes in Swedish society resulting from modernity and new technologies. Consumption in general is described as an essential part of the modern, urban expe-rience and the aesthetics used to describe this experience fluctuate between popular culture and experimental arts.

Tutta Rolf’s career. Rolf was one of the greatest stars in 1930s Swedish cinema. She was also a popular stage actress, vaudeville performer and recording artist. Despite her prominence she has been largely neglected in scholarly work. This thesis aim to bring new knowledge about this underresearched star by conducting basic research. I situate her within the field of star studies by deploying Richard Dyer’s influential theory to abstract a method on how to look at the praxis of Tutta Rolf’s stardom. Thus, I deploy her films, newspapers, Filmjournalen and archival material to tell the story of her early career. My basic assumption, i.e. hypothesis is that there existed a Swedish star system in the 1930s. Earlier there has been a lack of research regarding a potential Swedish star system. Hence, this is an inductive study that will try to bring forward new knowledge about Tutta Rolf, Swedish stardom and its star system that may be used for future research.

Lukas Moodysson’s
trajectory as a script writer and director
after Show Me Love demonstrates a continued interest in contemporary
social observation, representations of gender and
sexual practices, and in crafting compelling young characters, whose
clear-sighted perspectives reveal the conceits of the adult world and
the political establishment. Whereas Show Me Love investigates the
insularity and confinement of small-town life, later projects expand
the range of inquiry to the construction of both contemporary Swedish
national identity and globalization processes of the early twentyfirst
century. Like Show Me Love, later films reflect Moodysson’s
self-professed dedication to cinematic authenticity in their dialogues,
characterization, or mise-en-scène and production design. These films
also reflect an increasing interest in experimenting with and exploring
film as a collective and collaborative medium. This chapter presents
some of these themes and strategies in Moodysson’s
later films from Together (Tillsammans, 2000) to Mammoth (Mammut, 2009).

BOOK DESCRIPTION
Lukas Moodysson is one of the most accomplished and unconventional filmmakers of his generation in Sweden. Moodysson, now well known for his English-language film Mammoth (2009) as well as his heartbreaking indictment of sex-trafficking in Sweden, Lilya 4-Ever (2002), debuted as a writer and director while still in his twenties with Show Me Love (1998). The film received four Guldbaggar - the Swedish equivalent of the Academy Awards - including best film, best director, best screenplay, and best actresses. A coming-of-age and coming out film about two young women in a stiflingly oppressive small town, Show Me Love is widely considered a youth film classic and was called a "masterpiece" by Ingmar Bergman.

This book, which is the first study of Moodysson in any language, includes discussions of the film's genre, aesthetics, and style, and situates the film in both contemporary Swedish cinema and broader Swedish culture. It includes sequence and dialogue analysis and discusses how and why this particular film became so important: its queer significance, its unusually realistic depiction of youth, and its critical reception. Anna Stenport conducted extensive interviews with the cast and crew, including several enlightening discussions with Moodysson himself. Lukas Moodysson's Show Me Love offers an incisive introduction to Moodysson for readers interested in contemporary film, as well as a history and close analysis of changes in the Swedish film industry.

This chapter examines the international and European contexts of Swedish director Lukas Moodysson's New Queer Cinema classic Show Me Love (1998). Specifically, it discusses the film's production in relation to Film i Väst (aka Trollywood), European Union cultural policy and funding mechanisms,  international reception, and
landscape and location depiction.

The chapter argues that Show Me Love both reflects and helps produce
geographical and spatial complexities that the seemingly stable,
small, and self-sufficient state of Sweden encountered at the end of
the twentieth century. From this perspective, Show Me Love appears
to be a nostalgic, cinematic reverie of small-town life at a time when
few small towns were considered as worthy screen locations. For
decades they had remained outside the scope of popularly received
Swedish films. Local elements are significant in the film’s production
history—it is the first feature film shot exclusively in the small Swedish
town of Trollhättan, where the new film production center Film i
Väst is located. Show Me Love’s domestic and international success
gave credence to this production center as “Trollywood” and helped
it rise to domestic and international prominence—over 250 films have
since been coproduced by Film i Väst.

Show Me Love’s production history also illustrates a historical
moment when Sweden became increasingly denationalized culturally and politically. Sweden’s entry into the European Union in 1995 led
to partial decentralization of cultural and economic policy. These
changes correlate with increasing political and popular recognition
that by the mid-1990s Sweden had become a fully multiethnic country
thanks to large-scale immigration. Sweden of course also receives
a substantial amount of its popular culture from international
sources, Hollywood and the US entertainment industry included.1
Show Me Love, as I show more specifically later in this chapter, is
the first mainstream product that made the European Union visible
in Swedish popular culture. It thereby exemplifies and illustrates
the complex renegotiation process of the nation-state at the end of
the 1990s.

Book Description:
Lukas Moodysson is one of the most accomplished and unconventional filmmakers of his generation in Sweden. Moodysson, now well known for his English-language film Mammoth (2009) as well as his heartbreaking indictment of sex-trafficking in Sweden, Lilya 4-Ever (2002), debuted as a writer and director while still in his twenties with Show Me Love (1998). The film received four Guldbaggar - the Swedish equivalent of the Academy Awards - including best film, best director, best screenplay, and best actresses. A coming-of-age and coming out film about two young women in a stiflingly oppressive small town, Show Me Love is widely considered a youth film classic and was called a "masterpiece" by Ingmar Bergman.

This book, which is the first study of Moodysson in any language, includes discussions of the film's genre, aesthetics, and style, and situates the film in both contemporary Swedish cinema and broader Swedish culture. It includes sequence and dialogue analysis and discusses how and why this particular film became so important: its queer significance, its unusually realistic depiction of youth, and its critical reception. Anna Stenport conducted extensive interviews with the cast and crew, including several enlightening discussions with Moodysson himself. Lukas Moodysson's Show Me Love offers an incisive introduction to Moodysson for readers interested in contemporary film, as well as a history and close analysis of changes in the Swedish film industry.

In 1908 the Danish company Nordisk Film sent cinematographer Ludvig Lippert on a journey to the East. His itinerary included Siam, where he shot impressions of Bangkok and the celebration of the 40-year jubilee of the reign of King Chulalongkorn. European photographers had been coming to Siam since the 1860s, documenting people, places, and culture, but Lippert’s visit marked the first time that a European filmmaker came to Siam on a mission to make scenic films, commonly known as ‘scenics’, meant for distribution in Europe. Between 1910 and 1913 the French company Pathé Frères also produced its first scenics in Siam. Thus, before the outbreak of World War I, film productions by Nordisk Film and Pathé Frères constituted the first cinematic representations of Siam. Most of these scenics have been lost because of the brittleness of early celluloid and the turmoil of history. As a consequence, no in-depth academic discussion about them has taken place. This paper seeks to close this research gap. By way of contextualizing the Nordisk Film and Pathé Frères productions, outlining relevant film-historic circumstances, and drawing connections to 19th-century representations of Siam in photography, the paper offers insights into the beginnings of European filmmaking in Siam and makes an original contribution to the study of western portrayals of this Southeast Asian nation.

Cinematic representations of musical listening may be understood as reflecting changing listening practices in society at large. Proceeding from this assumption the article examines a variety of scenes from Swedish feature films, all of them produced between 1930 and 1970, where characters are involved in different kinds of musical listening. Focussing specifically on representations of technologically mediated musical listening, the article aims to show how sound reproduction technologies such as the radio and the gramophone were represented in relation to both social and solitary forms of listening in Swedish cinema during the period in question.

A history of the global impact of Swedish cinema would likely highlight the popularity of Swedish Golden Age films in 1920s France, mid-century Swedish art films in Western Europe and North America, and Swedish-European co-productions of the 1990s through today. This chapter argues that Swedish films were made for and seen by global audiences from the beginning; they were never intended solely for Swedish or Nordic audiences. It explores the travels of Swedish film in even more countries by investigating Svenska Bio's distribution logbooks, records from the Swedish state department, and international newspapers. The chapter focuses on films made by Svenska Bio and its successor, Svensk Filmindustri, because these companies made the biggest, most consistent inroads into international markets. Swedish films traveled to audiences around the world from the very beginning, benefiting from Pathe Freres' and Nordisk's extensive networks, as well as the aggressive efforts of Svenska Bio/SF itself.

In the 1910s, the Finnish-Swedish filmmaker Mauritz Stiller directed a series of comedies that took up suffrage, women in the workplace, eugenics, dress reform, and womanliness as masquerade. I argue that these films, and THOMAS GRAAL'S BEST CHILD in particular, used comedy to contest the melodramatic tenor of these debates by modeling a light-hearted, cosmopolitan attitude toward social change.

In the Introduction to the first monograph in any language about director Lukas Moodysson, Anna Westerstahl Stenport presents the contexts that contribute to  Moodysson's status as one of the most accomplished and unconventional filmmakers of his generation in Sweden. Moodysson, known for his English-language film Mammoth (2009) as well as his heartbreaking indictment of sex-trafficking in Sweden, Lilya 4-Ever (2002), debuted as a writer and director while still in his twenties with Show Me Love (1998). The film received four Guldbaggar - the Swedish equivalent of the Academy Awards - including best film, best director, best screenplay, and best actresses. A coming-of-age and coming out film about two young women in a stiflingly oppressive small town, Show Me Love is widely considered a youth film classic and was called a "masterpiece" by Ingmar Bergman.

This book includes discussions of the film's genre, aesthetics, and style, and situates the film in both contemporary Swedish cinema and broader Swedish culture. It includes sequence and dialogue analysis and discusses how and why this particular film became so important: its queer significance, its unusually realistic depiction of youth, and its critical reception. Anna Stenport conducted extensive interviews with the cast and crew, including several enlightening discussions with Moodysson himself. Lukas Moodysson's Show Me Love offers an incisive introduction to Moodysson for readers interested in contemporary film, as well as a history and close analysis of changes in the Swedish film industry.

In 1915, Leonid Andreev debuted his play He Who Gets Slapped at the Moscow Art Theater. In the following years, this dramatic work about a vanquished intellectual-turned-circus-clown, more than any of his twenty other plays, achieved spectacular success among American audiences, first as a play in English translation, then when adapted for the silver screen, then as a novel and, finally, as an opera. Andreev had argued in his ‘Letters on the Theater’ that cinema would become the place for action and spectacle, diminishing the popularity of the realist theater. Not surprisingly then, a love affair, betrayal and humiliation are all vividly on display at the outset of Victor Sjöström’s He Who Gets Slapped (1924). At the end of Sjöström’s cinematic adaptation, the villains are devoured by a ferocious lion, just the type of spectacle that Andreev had predicted would be possible in the medium of film. Yet, Andreev could not have anticipated a novel adaptation by George A. Carlin (1925), which would attempt to capitalize on the play’s cinematic success, or an operatic adaptation by Robert Ward and Bernard Stambler (1956), that would focus on the clown’s failed search for love. In retrospect, Andreev’s play was astonishingly generative and was easily transported across both temporal and spacial borders, entertaining American audiences as a play, film, novel and opera.

Relacja z MFF Off Plus Camera 2012. Recenzje „The Raid” w reż. Garetha Evansa, „The Square” w reż. Nasha Edgertona, „Take This Waltz” w reż. Sary Polley, „Barney’s Version” w reż. Richarda Lewisa, „Silver Tongues” w reż. Simona Arthura, „Footnote” w reż. Josepha Cedara, „Tyranozaura” w reż. Paddy’ego Considine’a, „Avalona” w reż. Axela Peterséna, „Rampart” w reż. Orena Movermana i „Electrick Children” w reż. Rebeki Thomas.

En este artículo exponemos en qué medida La hora del lobo (1968) constituye una de las piezas esenciales en la evolución de Bergman en lo referente al uso del discurso sonoro y analizamos el modo en que música, ruidos y matices vocales son utilizados por el director como principales herramientas con las que vertebrar y graduar el grado de enunciación metafórica del relato.