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Warner Oland (1879–1938) är en av Sveriges genom tiderna största Hollywoodstjärnor. Han spelade mot Marlene Dietrich och Greta Garbo, medverkade i bortåt hundra filmer och levde lyxliv i Beverly Hills.

Hans osannolika karriär tog sin början mot fonden av världskrig, förbudstid och börskrasch. Under den amerikanska filmens första guldålder började svensken från Bjurholm i Västerbotten spela asiatiska roller. Yellowface, att vita skådespelare gestaltade rasistiska stereotyper av »orientaler«, utvecklades till Olands signum – och förbannelse.

Han blev världsberömd som skurken Fu Manchu och den kinesiske detektiven Charlie Chan, rollfigurer som kom att påverka hur asiater porträtteras på vita duken än i dag. I takt med framgångarna i Hollywood bleknade Olands egna visioner om konstnärlig film och Strindbergstolkningar bort. Svårt alkoholiserad återvände han till Sverige 1938 och firades som en fanbärare för landets framgångar ute i världen. Sedan blev det tyst.

I mer än tio år har Kim Khavar Fahlstedt forskat om Warner Oland. Resultatet är en berättelse om drömmar, tillhörighet och flykt. Ett levande porträtt av en kontroversiell Hollywoodstjärna som försvunnit ur den svenska filmhistorien.

Warner Oland (1879–1938) is one of Sweden's most renowned Hollywood stars, with a distinguished career that included nearly a hundred films and collaborations with iconic figures such as Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo. His rise to fame occurred during a time of significant global upheaval, including world wars, Prohibition, and the Great Depression. Originating from Bjurholm, Västerbotten, Oland gained recognition for his portrayals of Asian characters in early American cinema. His participation in Yellowface—a practice where white actors played racially stereotyped "Orientals"—became both his hallmark and his curse.

Oland earned international acclaim for his roles as the villain Fu Manchu and the detective Charlie Chan, characters whose portrayals have influenced the representation of Asians in film. Despite his Hollywood success, Oland's personal artistic ambitions and interest in Swedish playwright August Strindberg diminished over time. His battle with severe alcoholism led to his return to Sweden in 1938, where he was celebrated for his contributions to Swedish cultural prestige. However, soon after his death, Oland's legacy began to fade.

Kim Khavar Fahlstedt’s decade-long research offers a fresh perspective on Warner Oland’s intricate legacy. In this illuminating book, Fahlstedt delves into themes of ambition, identity, and escape, presenting a detailed portrait of a controversial Hollywood figure whose story has largely disappeared from Swedish film history. This work provides readers with a deep understanding of Oland's influence on both Hollywood and Swedish cinema.

Based on 40 filmed semi-open interviews with cinema-goers from the 1950s, this essay investigates, explores and contextualises memories of extra-filmic sound in Gothenburg’s (Sweden) and Bari (Italy) cinemas such as “ticket whistling”, the calling out of football scores each time actors kissed on screen and the inevitable silencing response from the usher. By foregrounding the auditory ecology of cinema theatres as an overlooked aspect of cinema-going memories, investigating them along the lines of what Julia Tonkiss labelled “aural postcards” (Tonkiss, Aural postcards: Sound, memory and the city. In M. Bull & L. Back (Eds.), The auditory culture reader (pp. 243–247). Routledge, 2016), this essay explores aspects of oral histories of the cinema-going experience which are not primarily tied to space or visual spectacle. More generally, the chapter aims to add a new methodological perspective to discussions on how to analyse and contextualise important cinema-going practices and phenomena often deemed too anecdotal or unverifiable to pass the rigours of film historical writing.

Late in 1914, Universal released The Master Key, a motion picture serial in 15 installments. Robert Z. Leonard directed and starred, and the project was marketed as the ‘most expensive serial yet’. The weekly film release was paralleled by a syndicated newspaper feuilleton, illustrated by stills from the motion pictures. Stills were also incorporated into an illustrated reissue of Fleming Wilson’s story, as well as in promotional materials, like illustrated ads and a 20-page poster stamp album published by the Wentz Printing Company. By way of a cross-media investigation of the (1914) serial The Master Key, this study contributes a case in point of how film stills circulated outside the movie theater. The film material has been reported lost, but some reels have been preserved at the Library of Congress. One of the preserved reels contains the episode set in San Francisco’s Chinatown. For this paper, various materials from The Master Key’s-cross media release have been acquired through online fan forums and collectible auctions. Following recent historical studies on film serials and the ”seriality” of stock characters, Chinatown scenes and the picturesque and efforts to write spatial film history, this paper argues that the proliferation of film images across media formats conceptualized The Master Key’s imagery of San Francisco Chinatown as a ”serialized” space, standardizing cinematic iconography in the public eye.

Chinatown Film Culture provides the first comprehensive account of the emergence of film and moviegoing in the transpacific hub of San Francisco in the early twentieth century. Working with materials previously left in the margins of grand narratives of history, Kim K. Fahlstedt uncovers the complexity of a local entertainment culture that offered spaces where marginalized Chinese Americans experienced and participated in local iterations of modernity. At the same time, this space also fostered a powerful Orientalist aesthetic that would eventually be exported to Hollywood by San Francisco showmen such as Sid Grauman. Instead of primarily focusing on the screen-spectator relationship, Fahlstedt suggests that immigrant audiences' role in the proliferation of cinema as public entertainment in the United States saturated the whole moviegoing experience, from outside on the street to inside the movie theater. By highlighting San Francisco and Chinatown as featured participants rather than bit players, Chinatown Film Culture provides an historical account from the margins, alternative to the more dominant narratives of U.S. film history.

This chapter investigates the transnational film persona of Warner Oland. Alongside Anna Q. Nilsson and Greta Garbo, Oland was one of Sweden’s first, and internationally most beloved, Hollywood film stars. During the 1920s and 30s, Oland gained global popularity for roles as Orientalist characters such as Dr. Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan. This case study probes into the last two years of Oland’s life, in which his fame rose to a career high while he was also struggling in his personal life from years of alcohol abuse. It investigates how a range of fleeting conceptualizations of national and ethnic identifiers, such as “Swedishness” and Orientalism, were utilized as heuristic tools to make sense of Oland's public disintegration. In the present study, Oland’s racialized and ethnic personae were reproduced and renegotiated within three geographical locations (Hollywood, Europe, and China) of that period’s transnational film culture.

This short subject initiates new research into the career of pioneering Swedish nature documentarian, Bengt Berg. During the silent era, the Swedish zoologist-turned-filmmaker earned international praise for his cinematic studies of the Swedish avifauna. But ties to the eugenics movement and the German Nazi Party haverendered him a problematic figure of Scandinavian film history. Drawing on newly restored film prints, contextual archival findings and previous research on Berg, this article explores new paths of inquiry into Berg’s oeuvre

The reenacted newsreel The Chinese Revolution (1912), partially preserved in the Library of Congress, has long been misattributed to American immigrant filmmaker Benjamin Brodsky. Careful reconstruction of the film's production and circulation history reveals that it was made in China in 1911 by M. Pathe, a Japanese film company which, through its founder Shokichi Umeya, had connections to Yat-sen Sun. Analysis of the US-based distributor's promotional campaign demonstrates that this unusual early trans-Pacific import fostered the independent film market of the early 1910s while articulating with emerging American discourses about a modernizing China. This reconsideration argues that The Chinese Revolution was a pioneering media commodity with economic and political impact on both sides of the Pacific.