The Life and Afterlife of Swedish Biograph: From Commercial Circulation to Archival Practices

Abstract

On September 22, 1941, a disastrous explosive fire took place at Vinterviken outside of Stockholm. In the devastating explosion, two people were killed, and many negatives of feature films produced by the Swedish film company Svensk Filmindustri were destroyed. The highly flammable nitrate films that the company stored in one of their facilities were consumed when a film-scrap business next door caught fire. Most of the films the company produced in its earliest years, as AB Svenska Biografteatern (Swedish Biograph), disappeared in the fire. This was the most disastrous of several accidents that befell Svensk Filmindustri and Swedish cinema in these years. A few years earlier, in 1935, another explosion happened, but that time, very little footage was destroyed, and in 1948, yet another fire destroyed a sizeable number of the paper documents held by Svensk Filmindustri.Especially, the 1941 explosion and fire had important repercussions for the afterlife of early film production in Sweden. The loss of original materials, and first and foremost, film negatives, made it hard to discuss and evaluate Sweden's early film production. This also impacted the so-called Golden Age of Swedish cinema between 1916 and 1924. Some of the most important films made in Sweden in these years, like Mauritz Stiller's Vingarne (1916; The Wings), today regarded as the first explicit love story between two men in cinema, were lost for many decades. Many other films remain lost and may never resurface.Some of the surviving films have been canonized as “masterpieces” of early cinema, especially a small number of feature films by the directors Victor Sjöström and Mauritz Stiller, but early film production in Sweden has often been overshadowed by Danish, French, Italian, and US cinema. Despite the recognition of the importance of films like Ingeborg Holm (dir. Sjöström 1913) and Erotikon (dir. Stiller 1920), the lack of international critical and academic attention to Swedish cinema before and during the Golden Age is striking. And the explosion at Vinterviken is one of the causes of this lack of attention.A book that may change this situation of neglect is Jan Olsson's The Life and Afterlife of Swedish Biograph: From Commercial Circulation to Archival Practices. Professor emeritus Olsson is the perfect man for the job of illuminating the many lives of the films produced by Svenska Bio in the early 1910s, and putting early Swedish cinema back on the map of early film history internationally. Since the mid-1980s, Olsson has published a large number of books and articles about early Swedish cinema, as well as on other topics like Hitchcock and cinematic culture in Los Angeles, and in his new book, he brings together ideas and discourses he has spent many years researching. A meticulously researched and sometimes overwhelmingly detailed book, The Life and Afterlife of Swedish Biograph is rich and rewarding. It is more than just a complex case study of early Swedish cinema, and also addresses issues regarding canon formations, archival practices, and historical research more generally. Even though the book will appeal to readers interested in Swedish cinema, or early cinema in general, the book is also a fascinating journey through paper trails, censorship records, newspaper articles, company ledgers, and anecdotal memoirs. Anyone interested in how a historian works with sources will also appreciate this book.On one level, Olsson outlines the story of early Swedish cinema, before the companies Svenska Bio and Skandia merged into Svensk Filmindustri in 1919. Olsson focuses mainly on the years between 1912—when Svenska Bio hired Sjöström and Stiller and started producing films at Lidingö outside of Stockholm—and 1917, when the company changed their production practices after the success of Sjöström's Terje Vigen. Usually, when the story of early Swedish cinema is told, authors will start with Terje Vigen, but Olsson gives us the background and backstory in great detail.On another level, Olsson describes and discusses the afterlife of early Swedish cinema. Even though his focus is mostly on films produced before 1917, he also discusses many of the so-called Swedish Golden Age films in detail. When covering early Swedish cinema, Olsson's emphasis is mostly on the development of film style. Elegantly and with an abundance of sources, he discusses the changes in style, business strategies, and production practices both before and immediately after 1917. The international success of Terje Vigen saw the beginning of what was later called a Golden Age of Swedish cinema, and Olsson carefully discusses the style shift in Swedish cinema that led to this era. Using famous literary texts, like Henrik Ibsen's poem in Sjöström's Terje Vigen, but also the adoption of American-inspired filmmaking devices like close-ups and analytic editing, Swedish films reached a new level of success on the international market. Olsson traces a history of film style in early Swedish cinema and uses this not only to tell us something about historical and aesthetic change, but also links these changes to film reception, canon building, and taste formations. Especially the adoption of a more “American” style, as well as a change from “peasant films” to more modern subjects, were at the heart of many discussions in Sweden in the 1910s and 1920s.By the term “afterlife” in the title, Olsson means something more than just how certain Swedish films from the 1910s and 1920s have been canonized. The book also meticulously discusses how the material traces (film copies, film scripts, business letters, censorship cards) can give us different information and lead to new interpretations of these films and the company Svenska Bio. Many early films have survived in severely truncated versions, like Sjöström's Ingeborg Holm, and paying attention to other sources might change our interpretation of certain canonical films, or may at least remind us that history only comes to us in a changed and often fragmented form. That this should lead to caution when discussing especially early cinema is obvious from Olsson's many discussions and close readings.A central concept in Olsson's book is what he calls “film ecology,” by which he means the whole environment in which a film is conceived and produced. Olsson initially points out not only how market functions and censorship practices, but also more fundamental material elements, like reel length and shot scale, are essential to the understanding of early cinema. This gives his micro-history an implicit polemical force. All the old film-theoretical discussions of the immersed spectator get a new twist in Olsson's discussions of how the use of a single-projector system in Sweden resulted in a non-immersed experience characterized by many short breaks when a new reel was put in the projector. This is one of many examples of how issues of materiality and historical in-depth research can cross-pollinate and question theoretical discussions in film studies.The book concentrates on the dynamic interrelationships between two distinct networks, the first being the commercial network when films are scripted, produced, and released in a both local and global market, and the second being the archival network when films circulate in noncommercial contexts such as television broadcasts, festivals, and archival screenings. So Olsson does not stop when the Golden Age is over; he also meticulously follows the historical traces to today, like a forensic detective, to see how canons are built, how conceptions of the Golden Age are constructed, and how these old films become part of new archival networks.By focusing on corporate strategies and financial matters as much as changes in style, Olsson gives us a rich and detailed picture of early filmmaking in Sweden in the 1910s, the period that led up to the Golden Age. The Life and Afterlife of Swedish Biograph is partly historical overview and partly historical detective story. Olsson focuses more on style than content, and sometimes while reading the book, I was yearning for a discussion of the content of films like Ingeborg Holm, Vingarne, and Balettprimadonnan (dir. Stiller 1916), and how these films resonated with contemporary Swedish society, but Olsson gives us a wealth of new information as well as perspectives that are broader than just early Swedish cinema. If you want to know about film production in Sweden in the 1910s and how these films have traveled through archives and histories, Olsson's book is the perfect start.In 1920, the journalist, screenwriter, and film director Carl Theodor Dreyer wrote a newspaper article about Swedish cinema (“Svensk film,” Dagbladet, January 7: 7). Like many of his contemporaries, Dreyer felt that Swedish directors like Victor Sjöström and Mauritz Stiller had given cinema a soul. But Dreyer saw that it was the Swedish director's appropriation of “American” stylistic elements, like the close-up, that created this new soul. The close-up, Dreyer wrote, forced actors to abandon theatrical antics: “The days of the grimace were over. Film had found its way to human representation.” The road to this “human representation” in cinema is what Jan Olsson's book is all about.