Jörgen Lindström and the troubled status of the sexualized child on-screen

Abstract

This article examines the problem of using child actors in sexual scenes in film, with special attention to Ingmar Bergman’s Tystnaden (The Silence) (1963) and Mai Zetterling’s Nattlek (Night Games) (1966), both featuring the Swedish child actor Jörgen Linström. I argue that seeing the sexualized child in film can evoke the viewer’s concern for the well-being of the child actor, thus disrupting absorption in the fictional world on-screen. I further contend that two modes for managing the problematic presence of the sexualized child on-screen – cuteness and queerness – ultimately fail to eliminate our ambivalence about this figure. The article draws attention to the underexamined figure of the child in 1960s Swedish cinema; additionally, it includes material from a 2017 interview with Jörgen Lindström.