Regional Aesthetics: Locating Swedish Media
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Regional Aesthetics: Locating Swedish Media ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ eds. Erik Hedling, Olof Hedling & Mats Jönsson ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Regional Aesthetics: Locating Swedish Media ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ mediehistoriskt arkiv 15 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- MEDIEHISTORISKT ARKIV 15 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- kungliga biblioteket box 5039 102 41 stockholm ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- © författarna & kungliga biblioteket 2010 formgivning: www.bokochform.se tryck: fälth & hässler, värnamo, april 2010 issn 1654-6601 isbn 978-91-88468-14-7 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Table of Contents -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 8. Acknowledgements 9. erik hedling, olof hedling and mats jönsson Mapping the Regional: An Introductory Note -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Globe -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 21. mariah larsson Representing Sexual Transactions: A National Perspective on a Changing Region in Three Swedish Films 43. tommy gustafsson The Last Dog in Rwanda: Swedish Educational Films and Film Teaching Guides on the History of Genocide 63. ann-kristin wallengren John Ericsson: Victor of Hampton Roads. Images of Sweden in American History 81. anders marklund Beyond Swedish Borders: On Foreign Places in Swedish Films 1980–2010 105. emilia ljungberg Regions of Globalization: The Asian City as Global Metropolis in a Swedish Travel Magazine -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Nation -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 125. anders wilhelm åberg Seacrow Island: Mediating Arcadian Space in the Folkhem Era and Beyond 141. patrick vonderau Just Television: Inga Lindström and the Franchising of Culture 153. cecilia mörner Film in Falun – Falun on Film: The Construction of an Official Local Place Identity 169. åsa jernudd Cinema, Memory and Place-Related Identities: Remembering Cinema-Going in the Post-Industrial Town of Fagersta in Bergslagen 191. ulrika holgersson Regional Conflicts: From the Merchant’s House to the “People’s Home” 213. magnus rodell The Multitude of Celebratory Space: National Day Celebrations and the Making of Swedish Spaces 229. patrik lundell Regional Aesthetics in Transition: Ideology, Infrastructure and History -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Region -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 243. ingrid stigsdotter Crime Scene Skåne: Guilty Landscapes and Cracks in the Functionalist Façade in Sidetracked, Firewall and One Step Behind 263. olof hedling Murder, Mystery and Megabucks? Films and Filmmaking as Regional and Local Place Promotion in Southern Sweden 291. mats jönsson Lund: Open City? Swedish Municipal Mediation 1939–1945 307. erik hedling “On the Rocks”: The Scanian Connection in Ingmar Bergman’s Early Films 323. fredrik persson From Patriotic Jigsaw Puzzling to Regional Rivalry: Images of the Swedish Nation and Its Regions 337. tina askanius Video Activism 2.0: Space, Place and Audiovisual Imagery 359. ann steiner Town Called Malmö – Nostalgia and Urban Anxiety in Literature from the 1990s and 2000s 377. List of Contributors 381. Index -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Acknowledgements -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- the research for this project has been supported by Sparbanken Syd, Ystad, and Wahlgrenska stiftelsen in Malmö. Also, Stiftelsen Elisa- beth Rausings minnesfond, The Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University and Holger och Thyra Lauritzens stiftelse generously contributed to the completion of the book. Much of the work has been accomplished within the research project ”Film and the Swedish Welfare State”, funded by The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation. Many contributions were first presented at the NECS-Conference (European Network for Cinema and Media Studies) in Lund, Sweden, in June 2009. We thank Grace och Philip Sandbloms fond, Gyllenstiern- ska Krapperupstiftelsen, and the National Library of Sweden for fund- ing this event. We would also like to direct our gratitude to the producer Daniel Ahlquist at Yellowbird Films for giving us permission to use Kenneth Branagh as Kurt Wallander on the cover of this volume. Finally, we thank Karen Williams for improving our English. Lund, January 2010 Erik Hedling, Olof Hedling, Mats Jönsson -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Erik Hedling, Olof Hedling and Mats Jönsson -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mapping the Regional: An Introductory Note -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- in many respects, this book functions as an academic GPS, mapping more than two centuries of Swedish media representations, while slight- ly altering the direction with each new chapter. Encompassing anything from written travelogues in the eighteenth and nineteenth century via literature, press, feature films, documentaries and TV programmes to con- temporary video activism on the Internet, Regional Aesthetics navigates us through a variety of media landscapes that have changed significantly in both form and content. Our exclusive focus on Swedish imagery should not, however, be seen as a narrowing factor. On the contrary, we are firm- ly convinced that our discussions are just as relevant to other contexts. So, regardless of your origin, background, position and place, we hope that “you’ll always know exactly where you are and where your next turn is” while reading the following pages. Now, you may ask why we choose to publish an anthology such as this right now, when digital, virtual, glocal and social media appear to have taken over as the predominant forms of communication. One significant, perhaps commonsensical, reason is that the media of all periods and genres always need to be put in historical perspective if they are to be compre- hended in any depth. And naturally, the activities and responses trig- gered by this output also need to be scrutinized individually, in relation to each other as well as over time. Contemporary techniques can, in turn, shed new light on how issues of space, place and location have been dealt with medially in the past. For instance, being posted on a digital social network with images of yourself, your friends, family and home is no longer an implicit request that you may choose to act on or disregard. Instead, you now constantly need to meet the never-ending bombardment of non-negotiable precon- ditions if you wish to remain included on these virtual – and increasingly predominant – media platforms. Websites such as Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter comprise some of the most telling examples of this massive con- temporary trend, and their apparent success suggests that, in the future, we by all accounts will be confronted with even more advanced concep- tions of space and place. Indirectly, however, this development also hints at the possibility that analogous media networks have existed in the past. If we remain in the present, there are numerous examples of websites on the Internet that skilfully operate globally around the clock. Many of them have had – and will probably for a foreseeable future continue to have – a tremendous impact on the ways in which particularly younger generations think about their immediate and distant environments. With regard to the questions posed in this volume, one must thus con- tinuously ask oneself whether future generations will experience a dimin- ishing need for spatial belonging owing to even more elaborate and far- reaching social media. Or whether the development will be the opposite: Will the mediated identity assembly we see on the Internet today even- tually fade out and lead to a renaissance of geographically located iden- tity making and social interactions of a more traditional nature? Our analytic journeys through past and present media landscapes at- tempt to answer questions such as these. The analyses have been made significantly easier to pursue thanks