Swedish Contemporary Film

The aim of the present study was to investigate how the impermanence of contract work affects working lives, self-perceptions and the career strategies of Swedish screenwriters of finding and keeping work. Furthermore, it also explored how screenwriters experience their abilities to exercise authorial leverage over media content.

Introducing the concept of “career authoring” to cover different aspects of the professional lives of screenwriters such as managing a career, establishing authorship and contractual negotiations, the study was able to embrace various mind-sets and strategies for career success. Combining ethnographical studies and textual analyses the study was able to ascertain that the contingency of the Swedish film and television industries necessitates strategies to cultivate reputations, industrial visibility, consciously receive writing credits and conform to a traditional division of labour. Moreover, the study illuminated the importance of contractual negotiations for career success in terms of both retaining and wavering rights to their work. Strategies for exercise increased authorial leverage were not only confined to the script, but extended beyond the page, where the latter  accentuated processes of reconfiguring traditional conceptions of screenwriters’ abilities to influence media content.

The wildly popular genre of Nordic Noir has been seen to elucidate ‘dark aspects of the welfare state model’ and to ‘portray violence and human darkness as “normal” parts of contemporary life’ (Brodén 2008). Crucial to this reading of Nordic Noir is the notion that the welfare state is premised on a Nordic modernity that furtively supported eugenics, colonialism and predatory capitalism (Keskinen et al 2009, Naum and Nordin 2013). Influenced by this trend, new Nordic Gothic in general, and Nordic B-Movie Gothic in particular, can also be seen to interrogate the demise of the welfare state and to open up society to the possibility of senseless violence. Increasingly, the Nordic gothic B-movie industry is now finding purchase for the bloody narratives that were successful in the US during the late 70’s and 80’s, and which were during this period largely banned in Sweden and other European countries.

From this vantage point, the present chapter examines the violent B-movie gothic of Swedish Stockholm Syndrome Films. Inspired by, and frequently referencing, US splatter and gore cinema, this independent studio explores a Nordic geographic and social context through gothic horror. Frequently set in the cabin endemic to low-budget cinema, the terror that rises to rend bodies asunder in these films is located in a complex historical past. Madness (2010) portrays the emigrant Swede (canonized in Swedish national literature) as monstrous redneck, while Wither (2012) allows horror to ascend from a Swedish mythological, underground past. Thus, Stockholm Syndrome Films’ movies show a present that, in gothic fashion, is rent asunder by a past that refuses to forget the violence and injustice whitewashed by historiography, and which demands terrible retribution exacted on the society that has neglected it.

I detta arbete undersöker jag hur samtida manusförfattares arbetsförutsättningar ser ut i Sverige, vad gäller deras arbetsförhållanden, utbildning, men framförallt hur de uppfattar sin roll som manusförfattare (enskilt och i relation till andra). Genom att inkludera yrkets historiska förutsättningar, så betonas negligeringen av manusförfattares anseende (i Sverige) som en viktig aktör inom filmskapande och att arbetsförutsättningarna har gått i vågor efter branschens behov. Analysen utgår från Bridget Conors tes om att manusförfattares arbetsförutsättningar kan utrönas genom en blandning av en  kritisk sociologisk analys av kreativ produktion och en Foucauldiansk förståelse av "technologies of the self" – skapandet och reglerande av självet i relation till det egna arbetet.       

Resultatet visade att manusförfattare i Sverige länge varit en bortglömd aktör inom filmskapande, vilket bland annat uttryckts i att en formell yrkesutbildning först blev aktuell på 1990-talet. Betydelsen av den formella manusutbildningen vid Stockholms dramatiska högskola visade sig inte vara centralt för yrkets identitetsskapande, utan det är något som kan utvecklas i yrkeslivet och utbildningen riktar helst sig till dem som anses behöva den. Däremot så kan utbildningen ge möjlighet att lära sig yrket i en mer skyddad miljö. Yrkesverksamheten präglas av en ständig osäkerhet, vilket tar sig uttryck både ekonomiskt och praktiskt. Därmed så måste manusförfattare göra sig själva tillgängliga för arbete och skaffa sig ett brett kontaktnät, vilket ställer krav på en social kompetens. Det är vitalt för manusförfattare i Sverige att vara verksamma inom andra områden än film som behöver deras tjänster, exempelvis TV, radio och teater. Yrkesrollen kräver ett pragmatiskt tänkande och att välkomna det kreativa samarbetet med regissörer och producenter. Uppfattningen att yrkesrollen idag skulle vara marginaliserad visade sig vara ambivalent. Respondenterna betraktade sin underställda roll inom filmskapande som naturlig, men däremot att deras insatser ofta försummades i relation till regissörer och producenter.

Today, Sweden enjoys a positive international reputation for its commitment to human rights issues, for instance, in relation to the recent migrant crisis. Abuses committed by the Swedish state against certain ethnic groups within the country are less well known, both within and beyond its borders. These included systematic attempts to curtail the use of indigenous and local languages, thereby causing communicative and ideological rifts between children and their parents. These policies were enacted through the school system from the 1920s until the 1970s, and particularly affected people living in the Arctic region where the national borders are disputed. In this article, we examine two twenty-first-century films set during this era, featuring feisty female characters responding to the school policy. Elina: As though I wasn't there is a children's film created by people "outside" the cultural group represented; and Sámi Blood features an adolescent protagonist (and her older self), created by "insiders" of the cultural group represented. In both films, the female protagonists' relative lack of agency within the state school system is contrasted with their powerful connections to the Arctic landscape. We seek to examine how these films contribute to the work of apology, beginning with a public acknowledgement of the wrongs of the past. Whilst one of the films concludes with a celebration of the female protagonists' agency, the other proffers a more ambiguous portrayal of power in relation to culture, nationality, and identity.

Today, Sweden enjoys a positive international reputation for its commitment to human rights issues, for instance, in relation to the recent migrant crisis. Abuses committed by the Swedish state against certain ethnic groups within the country are less well known, both within and beyond its borders. These included systematic attempts to curtail the use of indigenous and local languages, thereby causing communicative and ideological rifts between children and their parents. These policies were enacted through the school system from the 1920s until the 1970s, and particularly affected people living in the Arctic region where the national borders are disputed. In this article, we examine two twenty-first-century films set during this era, featuring feisty female characters responding to the school policy. Elina: As though I wasn’t there is a children’s film created by people “outside” the cultural group represented; and Sámi Blood features an adolescent protagonist (and her older self),...

Today, Sweden enjoys a positive international reputation for its commitment to human rights issues, for instance, in relation to the recent migrant crisis. Abuses committed by the Swedish state against certain ethnic groups within the country are less well known, both within and beyond its borders. These included systematic attempts to curtail the use of indigenous and local languages, thereby causing communicative and ideological rifts between children and their parents. These policies were enacted through the school system from the 1920s until the 1970s, and particularly affected people living in the Arctic region where the national borders are disputed. In this article, we examine two twenty-first-century films set during this era, featuring feisty female characters responding to the school policy. Elina: As though I wasn’t there is a children’s film created by people “outside” the cultural group represented; and Sámi Blood features an adolescent protagonist (and her older self),...