To Örebro University

The short subject argues that the short animated film, Sagan om Karl-Bertil Jonssons julafton/Christopher's Christmas Mission, which is screened annually on Swedish public service television to the delight of around a million spectators, offers sharp satire criticizing lingering class inequalities in the 1970s, despite decades of Social Democratic rule.

Film exhibition was a regular and common feature in hundreds of multipurpose venues owned by local divisions of the temperance and labor movements in Sweden since the beginnings of film. I argue that the investment by civil society in film exhibition is important to understanding Swedish film history and culture at large. It provides an interesting case of blurred boundaries between the state, civil society and the commercial film industry. Film exhibition in the venues provided income for maintaining the venues per se, thus encouraging the continued existence of grassroots progressive activity also after the democratic breakthrough. At the same time, it offered an opportunity for its largely rural audience to participate in the national disciplinary project of gathering the people of the modern welfare state under the auspices of its own spaces.  

This article is a contribution to the ‘new cinema history’ vein of media studies concerning the experience of American films in foreign, local contexts. It explores the cinema memory discourse of senior citizens living in a post-industrial mining region in central Sweden. The informants offer a variety of narrative strategies of cinema memory that can be related to social differences within the group based on class, membership in social societies and local geopolitics. The informants also take care to mention Swedish films and actors in more or less equal proportion and with similar enthusiasm compared to American ones, yet Swedish film has only had a limited amount of screen time throughout the age of cinema. The elderly informants’ cinema memories are constructed in dual terms: on the one hand acknowledging traits of cinema culture in terms of glamour, sincerity and novelty tied to the dominant Hollywood fare and on the other hand taking care to anchor the experience of cinema-going in a strong sense of national community. The contention is that the informants are evoking a cinema-going culture that caters to a deeply felt human need of belonging, and this belonging is identified with the prosperous Swedish post-war nation state.

Åsa Jernudd: Movies and Entertainment in Örebro 1897-1908

This dissertation is a historical study of film exhibition in the context of emerging popular entertainment in Örebro, a medium-sized town in Sweden, 1897 to 1908. It argues that since 80% of the population resided in towns and rural areas around 1900, studying the impact of film culture in a town setting is essential for an understanding of early film culture in Sweden. The local press is used as primary source of marketing schemes, venues and programming policies as well as of cultural debate and conflict.

Across Europe, theatres and fairgrounds were the preferred venues of traveling exhibitors of film shows. In Örebro, however, film exhibition preferably took place in the ‘respectable’ halls of voluntary organizations. Of special importance to local film culture were two working class societies: the liberal Arbetareföreningen (AF) and the labor-based Arbetarekommun (AK) ― albeit in different ways. AF, which embraced reformist ideals, owned the most popular venue for film exhibition and transformed their hall into a movie theater in 1907. AK encouraged the working class population to spend leisure time (and money) on popular forms of cheap entertainment by opening an amusement park in town and by frequently organizing bazaars, funfairs and variety shows. Socio-cultural conflict was concentrated to the fairground around the turn of the century and later turned to AK’s bazaars and funfairs. The emerging film culture influenced opinion in the big cities of Sweden, yet in Örebro it only received sporadic public attention.

In stark contrast to the situation in the big cities, the transformation of itinerant film exhibition to permanent forms was a gradual and relatively inconspicuous process in Örebro that took place in the shadow of AK’s more obtrusive culture of cheap amusements. Three movie theatres opened in 1907 and were accepted by the town’s public with relative ease.

Between the years 1877 and 1962 Allan Holmström kept a diary recording his actions every day after work at the factory. Holmström worked as a clerk and supported a wife and three children. The diary reveals Holmström’s passion for theatre and film stars, press clippings of which were inserted in the bursting diary notebooks. His celebrity-based scrapbook practice has been explored as an early example of converging and consumer-participant media culture (Jarlbrink 2009, 2010). However, the notes about his visits to the cinema - which provide unique insight into how cinema during its process of institutionalization (Gaudreault and Marion 2002, Moore 2013) became an integrated part of a white-collar worker’s life – has not been studied.

My intention is to test a method for analysis of Holmström’s cinema going borrowed from geography which has a focus on time, rather than space. The time-geography method (Hägerstrand 1970, 1973, 1985, Ellegård 2019) captures how cinemagoing interacts with (and replaces) other activities and events in Holmström’s life. His cinemagoing habits will be analyzed in relation to the process of institutionalization of cinema with a focus on the years 1914 to 1920.

References:

Ellegård, Kajsa (2018). Thinking time geography: concepts, methods and applications. First edition New York: Routledge Gaudreault, André and Marion, Philippe (2002) The Cinema as a Model for the Genealogy of Media, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 8:4, https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856502008004 Jarlbrink, Johan (2010). En tidningsläsares dagbok: Allan Holmströms klipp och läsvanor 1877-1962. Presshistorisk årsbok. 2010, s. 7-27 Moore, Paul S (2013) The grand opening of the movie theatre in the second birth of cinema, Early Popular Visual Culture, 11:2, 113-125, DOI: 10.1080/17460654.2013.783148

The 1950s was a decade of major social transformation in Sweden when the welfare state was being realized, and it has been suggested (Gunnemark, 2006) that the youth of this age became proponents of modernity, caught between the old and the new structures of society. With the film Hon dansade en sommar (One Summer of Happiness, 1951) as a reference, this chapter discusses how youth became more defined as category and identity in Sweden in the post-war period through its relation to leisure culture, not least cinema. Cinema had evolved in rural areas as part of a modern associational culture with progressive roots in the temperance movement and oppositional roots in the worker’s movement. In the post-war period, the government supported this culture and contributed to its expansion. It became a space in which youth throughout the country could come together, or individually, and submit themselves to, as well as reflect upon, images and narratives of the rapid and intense ongoing changes.

The 1950s to the mid1970s marks the final phase of urbanization in Sweden and full implementation of the Social democratic welfare state. It’s a period of prosperity in which the industries and their workforce are celebrated and provide models and standards also for other wakes of society and life.

In the year 1956 cinema going peaked in Sweden! Seven years later the number of cinema tickets sold had cut back by half and continued to dwindle. Is television to be blamed?

For the rural and industrial region of Bergslagen we will present a cinema location analysis that identifies the venues that persisted with film exhibition 1956-76. The map is layered with data on population density, ownership of television sets, entertainment hubs and transportation routes. An analysis will address the hypothesis (1) that cinema more or less perished in rural areas (2) as a result of the dissemination of television. We seek to complicate the history of rural cinema by exploring social, cultural and geographical relations in the region. The result is an attempt at writing rural industrial history taking leisure as a point of departure, rather than the more established practice of organizing the historical narrative around “work”.

Fresh empirical work on rural cinema, Catholic cinema, and of film exhibition in non-commercial cinema circuits challenges the idea of a single normative mode of (commercial, metropolitan) cinema exhibition in a purpose-built venue and destabilizes this exhibition mode as a standard point of reference in the history of cinema (Allen 2006, Fuller-Seeley 2008, Aveyard & Moran 2013, Biltereyst & Treveri Gennari 2015, Thissen & Zimmermann 2016). Featuring the rural and industrial region of Bergslagen in Sweden, our research highlights the importance of grass-roots civic society involvement in cinema exhibition in villages and small towns throughout the twentieth century. With a location analysis that traces opening and closing dates of cinemas in the region as well as changes in ownership patterns over the years we unravel the extent of civic society engagement in cinema. Our analysis suggests that civic societies contributed to the high number of cinemas in rural and small town Sweden as well as to the persistence of a surprisingly evenly distributed and decentralized pattern of exhibition up until this day.

Leif Furhammar was an esteemed professor of Film Studies at the University of Stockholm. In 1990 he produced a report on filmgoing in Stockholm during the 1930s. The report is little known to film scholars, especially outside of Sweden. Furhammar takes a novel approach to investigate what films people watched by counting film programmes listed in a daily city newspaper. Using similar methods to POPSTAT, Furhammar produces charts of the annual best-attended films in Stockholm for the decade, including all Swedish movies released. His work introduced an entirely new type of evidence concerning film popularity. This chapter discusses his methods, replicates his results (where data permits), and analyses his findings.

Marshall McLuhan famously noted that each new medium represents its predecessors, undermining the teleological view that new technologies succeed and replace old ones. Contrary to this understanding, the “death of cinema”-rhetoric in academic and public discourses in Sweden in the 1960s blamed the demise of cinemagoing on the introduction of television (Furhammar, 2003:249). Also among respondents in an interview project focusing on cinema memories from the 1950s and 60s, television was mentioned as the direct cause of cinema’s rapid decline. This points to a strong conceptual affiliation between cinema and television, and the idea that television arrived to replace cinema. However, a closer analysis of the memory narratives suggests a more complex conceptual relationship between the two media. Television is mentioned only in the margins of the memory narratives of the respondents and seems not to  have played such a significant role in their everyday lives.

Complicating the issue further, early Swedish television was modelled on the production protocols and consumption patterns of noncommercial, public service radio. Thorslund (2018:43) writes: "one could argue that television in Sweden in the 1950s hardly was a medium in its own right, being so closely linked to radio." A seminal ethnographic study of early broadcast media in Sweden confirms the affinity between the two media forms (Höjer, 1998). The overlap between the two domestic forms of broadcast media makes the threat of television to cinema ever more enigmatic.

Our paper aims to investigate how television features in memory narratives of cinema in the context of quotidian life in the late 1950s and 1960s in Sweden. The study will draw on memories collected in two large-scale memory projects, Swedish Cinema and Everyday Life and European Cinema Audiences. With a focus on cultural practices and Lisa Gitelman’s definition of media as “socially realized structures of communication, where structures include both technological forms and their associated protocols,” (Gitelman, 2006:7) we ask how cinema, television, and to some extent radio are conceived in relation to one another in hindsight, when remembering television as new.

In this chapter, cinema memories collected in Sweden from the 1950s—when cinema-going peaked—are compared with ditto a decade later, when attendance had drastically dropped. The comparison is based on 40 interviews divided into two age groups and includes men and women who come from a variety of social backgrounds and who lived in urban as well as rural locations. The selection allowed us to tease out similarities and differences in the memory narratives related to the mentioned intersecting features, to determine whether they had an impact on the rupture of cinema-going. Our results show that gender accounts for the most prominent difference. In the interviews with male participants, delightful memories of childhood matinées are especially salient, and we could only detect slight variation in the memories of this group when we compared the two time periods. In the interviews with female participants, matinées are mentioned only briefly, and we found stark differences in the memory narratives of the two time periods. Cinema-going is remembered by female participants as a special event in the 1950s, while in the memories from the 1960s, it is recalled as a subdued activity in a broader youth culture involving music, dancing, and fashion.

This data collection presents a fully harmonized data set originating in several research projects on post-war cinema programming. The collection consists of data of feature films screened for public viewing in cinemas in the cities Bari (Italy), Antwerp and Ghent (Belgium), Gothenburg (Sweden), Leicester (United Kingdom) and Rotterdam (Netherlands) for the year 1952.

This article is an international collaboration focusing on three European port cities – Antwerp (Belgium), Gothenburg (Sweden) and Rotterdam (Netherlands) – in 1952, during the golden age of cinema prior to the rise of television. The objective is to test an approach for making transnational comparisons of distribution and exhibition based on film programming data. We use a mixed-method approach that combines data visualisations based on a simple network analysis and time plot visualisations. Our aim is to show how these visualisations can be helpful in characterising and comparing cinema markets in an attempt to answer the question of how films move through a city from one cinema to the other and how this flow can be characterised and compared.

Academic and industry discourses in Sweden blamed the rapid decline of cinema-going in the late 1950s on the introduction of television. Complicating the issue, Swedish television ties in with radio as a domestic medium, making the conceptual links between television and cinema seem less obvious. If we write a history of media characterized by replacement, we tend to overlook how new and old media exist simultaneously in everyday life. Our article investigates how television features in memory narratives of cinema in the context of quotidian life in the late 1950s and 1960s in Sweden. The study draws on memories collected through 60 oral history interviews in two large-scale projects. With a focus on cultural practices and Lisa Gitelman’s concept of ‘associated protocols’ in media use, we ask how cinema and television are conceived in relation to each other in hindsight when remembering television as new.