making the invisible visible Making theRiksäpplet invisible visible ArkeologiskaReclaiming women’s perspektiv agency på ett in Swedishbortglömt film history regalskepp and beyond Niklas Eriksson Edited by Ingrid Stigsdotter checkpoint Published with generous support from Gertrude och Ivar Philipsons stiftelse Gunvor och Josef Anérs stiftelse Holger och Thyra Lauritzens stiftelse för främjande av filmhistorisk verksamhet Letterstedska föreningen Magnus Bergvalls stiftelse Nordic Council of Ministers Riksbankens Jubileumsfond Nordic Academic Press P.O. Box 148 SE-221 00 Lund Sweden www.nordicacademicpress.com For enquiries concerning printing/copying this work for commercial or extended use please contact the publisher. © Nordic Academic Press and the Authors 2019 This volume is an edition from Nordic Academic Press Checkpoint – a series dedicated to peer-reviewed books. It is also published within the framework of Kriterium, a quality hallmark for Swedish academic books. All Kriterium publications undergo peer review according to set guidelines, and are available as open access publications at www.kriterium.se Typesetting: Frederic Täckström, Sweden Cover design: Lönegård & Co Cover photo: Still taken from Skandinaviska Filmcentralen (1925), Filmarkivet.se Print: ScandBook, Falun, Sweden 2019 ISBN 978-91-88661-85-2 (print) ISBN 978-91-88909-05-3 (epdf) ISSN 2002-2131 Kriterium (Online) DOI 10.21525/Kriterium.21 Contents Foreword 7 Acknowledgements 11 Tracing women’s agency in Swedish film history and beyond 13 An introduction Ingrid Stigsdotter i archival interventions – locating women’s agency in the archive 1. Visible absence, invisible presence 33 Feminist film history, the database and the archive Eirik Frisvold Hanssen 2. Female cinema musicians in Sweden 1905–1915 49 Christopher Natzén 3. Women film exhibition pioneers in Sweden 65 Agency, invisibility and first wave feminism Ingrid Stigsdotter 4. Queering the archive 97 Amateur films and LGBT+ memory Dagmar Brunow ii women, film and agency in the 1970s and 1980s 5. Activism, ideals and film criticism in 1970s Sweden 121 Tytti Soila 6. Freedom to choose 139 Reproduction and women’s agency in three Swedish films of the 1980s Elisabet Björklund 7. An elevated feminist ahead of her time? 159 Mai Zetterling’s non-fiction shorts in the 1970s and 1980s Ingrid Ryberg Contributors 183 Foreword Jannike Åhlund Who coined the phrase ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’? Was it the ancient Greeks, the British poet John Lyly, William Shakespeare, Benjamin Franklin—or in fact a long-forgotten British writer by the name of Margaret Wolfe Hungerford, writing under the nom de plume ‘The Duchess’, in whose novel Molly Bawn (1878) the phrase first appears in print? ‘History is in the eye of the historian’ is maybe a trite paraphrase, but it does spring to mind when reading this anthology about women in early and recent film history. The existing accounts of film history are remarkably one-eyed, as the contributors to this volume demonstrate. The literature’s cyclopean vision has resulted in women’s exclusion from film history. Women who owned or ran cinemas, women musicians who played in early cinemas—and even to a certain measure canonized women filmmakers like Mai Zetterling have, from a historical perspective, had their unfair share of oblivion, omission and neglect. Not even the women’s movement in the 1970s succeeded in putting the issue of women’s film-making on the agenda in a game-changing way. These examples make it obvious that previous generations of film historians in many instances, in the words of Ingrid Stigsdotter, ‘have tended to take for granted that women … represented just an attractive front/surface, or were running the errands of a male manager’ or director, that women’s contributions did not merit the attention of a chronicler assessing things past. In other words, the women’s appearance and activities in various professional fields were simply if not outright un-natural, decidedly not the norm, and hence could be disregarded. This collection draws attention to a number of startling examples 7 making the invisible visible of women who have been omitted from film history, examples that appear symptomatic of how women have been downplayed, overseen or simply excluded from film historical accounts. Why? Ignorance? Low esteem? Male canonization? All those factors variously apply, although the context may differ, but the recurring bottom line is the low value attributed to women’s contributions—in any context. As Stigsdotter’s citation from the media scholar Erin Hill puts it: ‘Women were never absent from film history; they often simply weren’t documented as part of it because they did “women’s work”’.1 So, is this just the habitual feminist ranting about the ever-present absence of women, reflecting an urge to shift history to herstory? The binary coupling of absence–presence and invisibility– visibility is now a key consideration when (re)writing women’s film history, as introduced in Eirik Frisvold Hanssen’s contribution, ‘Visible absence, invisible presence: Feminist film theory, the database and the archive’. The National Library of Norway (where Hanssen is Head of the Film and Broadcasting Section) has, as part of the ‘Women’s Film History Network’ initiative, become a partner in the website project Nordic Women in Film, which has brought a number of practical and methodological issues to the fore.2 It deals with inclusion, emphasis, the relationship between history and contemporary culture, goals, and, not least, how the film archive in itself can be activated in writing the history of women’s role in film history. (These are, incidentally, issues that I, as editor of the aforementioned website, ponder on an almost daily basis.) The binary pair invisibility–visibility deals primarily with how film history is written—who’s in and who’s out—while absence– presence emphasizes how the film industry works, with a focus on current absences and the lack of women in certain ‘key functions’. The central question in this context is ‘How do we make absence and presence visible at the same time?’3 On the heels of this question comes another, and it is one of vital importance. Can the mission to rewrite history be combined with predefined goals and official gender policies? The work of institu- tions such as the Swedish Film Institute is policy-driven, working for example towards gender equality in film production. In this 8 foreword context, this book also highlights the risk of ‘aligning historical research with too specific, predefined, instrumental goals—to know a little too well in advance what one is looking for’.4 Indeed, history and research should provide the possibility of surprise, as Hanssen writes. And as is manifest in the contributions to this anthology, the research and the archival excavations do offer a number of surprises as to the extent of both absence and invisibility. Gender policies and political aims do not always make com- fortable companions, but here they are brought together with their not-so-distant relatives in the rhetorical context of the Nordic Women in Film site. The common ground shared by academia and institutions in the broader context of linking historiography and present-day conditions for women working in the film business (if we regard it as such) is rethinking, along the lines of what Hanssen proposes: auteurship, professional categories, inclusion–exclusion, archival absences (‘Why?’ instead of ‘Who?’), and the use of archives as alternative sources. How archives are assembled, organized, and made accessible is crucial, as is how we collect, circulate, and contextualize mate- rial—and how we use and interpret it. Setting the record straight can be laborious when source material is scarce. What needs to be done in order for women to ‘reclaim’ (with or without scare quotes) their place in film history? More research! seems to be the answer. A paramount consideration, as Ingrid Ryberg points out, is that the emphasis and celebration of forgotten ‘pioneering’ achievements and overseen aesthetic subversiveness invokes a notion of the woman filmmaker as independent oppositional creative agent, hence disregarding the specific historical terms, conditions and interplays on which film-making depends.5 It is these kinds of specific historical terms and conditions that come to light in this anthology. And as Dagmar Brunow writes in ‘Queering the archive: Amateur films and LGBT+ memory’, ‘Everyone needs memories to create their identities.’6 9 making the invisible visible Notes 1 Erin Hill, Never Done: A History of Women’s Work in Media Production (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016): 5, cited by Ingrid Stigsdotter else- where in this volume. 2 http://www.nordicwomeninfilm.com/ 3 Eirik Frisvold Hanssen elsewhere in this volume. 4 Ibid. 5 Ingrid Ryberg elsewhere in this volume. 6 Dagmar Brunow elsewhere in this volume. 10 Acknowledgements I would like to thank Tytti Soila who set things in motion by recruit- ing me to Stockholm University in 2014 in order to work on the first collaboration between Stockholm University and the Swedish Film Institute relating to the ‘Nordic Women in Film’ project.1 Tytti also encouraged me to embark on this anthology project following the symposium that we co-organized at the end of that project, and that bore almost the same title as the present book. Some of those who took part in the symposium ‘Making the Invisible Visible in a Digital Age’ in Stockholm in October 2014 are among the authors included in this volume, but my gratitude extends to those whose contributed indirectly to this book by participating in the symposium discussion. The same goes for the panellists and attendants of the follow-up symposium, ‘Transnordic Trajectories: Past, Present and Future Film History through Nordic Women in Film’ in 2017. This was co-organized with the Swedish Film Institute, where my main collaborator was Jannike Åhlund, whose energetic spirit and formidable communication skills have been crucial to all of our joint ventures.