Stockholm cinema studies – serie

This dissertation is a historical and theoretical study of a number of discourses examining colour and cinema during the period 1909 to 1935 (trade press, film reviews, publications on film technology, manuals, catalogues and theoretical texts from the era). In this study, colour in cinema is considered as producing a number of aesthetic and representational questions which are contextualised historically; problems and qualities specifically associated with colour film are examine d in terms of an inter- relationship between historical, technical, industrial, and stylistic factors, as well as specific contemporary conceptions of cinema. The first chapter examines nations concerning the technical, material, as well as perceptual, origins of colour in cinema, and questions concerning indexicality, iconicity, and colour reproduction, through focusing on the relationship between the photographic colour process Kinemacolor, as well as other similar processes, and the established non-photographic colour methods during the early 1910s, with an in-depth analysis of the Catalogue of Kinemacolor Film Subjects, published in 1912. The second chapter examine s nations concerning the stylistic, formal and narrative functions of colour in 'cinema, featuring a survey of the recurring comparisons between colour and sound, found in the writing of film history, in discourses concerning early Technicolor sound films, film technology, experimental films and experiments on synaesthesia during the 1920s, as well as Eisenstein's nations of the functions of colour in sound film montage. The third chapter examines the question of colour and meaning in cinema through considering the relationship between colours and objects in colour film images (polychrome and monochrome, photographic and non-photographic) during the time frame of this study.

As the subject of extensive research in visual arts and literature, landscape has been explored as a vehicle to assert national or artistic supremacy, and for how it forms and reflects cultural values and identities. Instead, this study examines landscape as a site where nationhood and representation is contested and interrogated, and how it can be advanced to reflect on the construction and mediation of such values and identities. Considering the New Hollywood cinema in the late 1960s and early a period marked by an impulse for retrospection and self-examination, the study offers new interpretations of a number of key films of the era. Applying landscape as a concept for analysis and interpretation, it also launches attention to what has remained a largely uncharted field of investigation in film studies.

Bio för barnens bästa? Svensk barnfilm som fostran och fritidsnöje under 60 år ser bortom myten om den svenska barnfilmen som "världens bästa". Med hjälp av den moderna barndomsforskningen och Michel Foucaults idéer om makt och kunskap undersöker avhandlingen de idéer om barn och barndom, de barndomsdiskurser, som filmerna rymmer. Begrepp som välviljans förtryck, barnets realism och sunda hjälteideal är i detta sammanhang centrala. Utförliga analyser av Rolf Husbergs BARNEN FRÅN FROSTMOFJÄLLET (1945), Olle Hellboms ALLA VI BARN I BULLERBYN (1960) och Kay Pollaks ELVIS! ELVIS! (1977) sätts i relation till de diskussioner om filmcensur, barnfilm och barnkultur som fördes i press och statliga utredningar vid tiden för respektive films premiär. Därigenom ges en mångfacetterad bild av vad idén om "bio för barnens bästa" inneburit vid olika perioder i den svenska filmhistorien. Avhandlingens avslutande kapitel behandlar även dagens biografrepertoar och diskuterar barnfilmens bromsklossar, ur såväl historiskt som samtida perspektiv. Här tas kraven på lönsamhet upp, liksom den vuxna skräcken för att uppröra barns känsloliv och barnbokens hämmande effekt på biofilmen.

This dissertation examines the coming of sound film in Sweden during the years 1928–1932, and the reception of mechanically recorded sounds both in the trade press and among audiences. The novelty of sound film opened up for a negotiation of the perception of sound and image, as it made visible the film medium’s technological construction, before this visibility was once more absorbed by the cinematic discourse. The conversion to sound film is considered from three perspectives -- technology, reception and practice -- as well as through the concept of intermediality, focussing how the audio-visual expression changed during this period.

There is a current wave of interest in pornography as a vehicle for queer, feminist and lesbian activism. Examples include Dirty Diaries: Twelve Shorts of Feminist Porn (Engberg, Sweden, 2009), the Pornfilmfestival Berlin (2006-) and the members-only Club LASH in Stockholm (1995-). Based on ethnographic fieldwork designed around these cases, the purpose of the thesis is to account for, historicize and understand this transnational film culture and its politics and ethics. The fieldwork consists of interviews, questionnaires and participant observation, including participation as one of the filmmakers in Dirty Diaries. The thesis studies queer, feminist and lesbian pornography as an interpretive community. Meanings produced in this interpretive community are discussed as involving embodied spectatorial processes, different practices of participation in the film culture and their location in specific situations and contexts of production, distribution and reception. The thesis highlights a collective political fantasy about a safe space for sexual empowerment as the defining feature of this interpretive community. The figure of safe space is central in the fieldwork material, as well as throughout the film culture's political and aesthetic legacies, which include second wave feminist insistence on sexual consciousness-raising, as well as the heated debates referred to as the Sex Wars. The political and aesthetic heterogeneity of the film culture is discussed in terms of a tension between affirmation and critique (de Lauretis, 1985). It is argued that the film culture functions both as an intimate public (Berlant, 2008) and as a counter public (Warner, 2002). Analyzing research subjects' accounts in terms of embodied spectatorship (Sobchack, 2004, Williams, 2008), the thesis examines how queer, feminist and lesbian pornography shapes the embodied subjectivities of participants in this interpretive community and potentially forms part of processes of sexual empowerment.