A History of Swedish Experimental Film Culture: from Early Animation to Video Art
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A History of Swedish Experimental Film Culture: From Early Animation to Video Art 1 Lars Gustaf Andersson John Sundholm Astrid Söderbergh Widding NATIONAL LIBRARY OF SWEDEN / P. O. BOX 5039 / 102 41 STOCKHOLM / SWEDEN 2 ©THE AUTHORS & NATIONAL LIBRARY OF SWEDEN 2010 DESIGNED BY JENS ANDERSSON / PRINTED IN SWEDEN BY FÄLTH & HÄSSLER, 2010 ISSN: 1654-6601 / ISBN: 978-0-86196-699-8 A History of Swedish Experimental Film Culture: From Early Animation to Video Art 3 MEDIEHISTORISKT ARKIV 17 Contents 4 Acknowledgements – 8 The Writing of a History of Swedish Experimental Film – 10 Minor Histories of Minor Cinemas – 11 Minor Cinemas and Experimental Film – 11 Discourse Analysis and Historiography – 13 New Film History and Emergent Film Histories – 14 Practices of Closure: Culture and Memory – 16 Experimental Film and Intermediality – 19 National or International Cinema? – 23 Swedish Experimental Film until the 1950s: The Pre-History from Cartoon to Feature Film – 28 Film Culture and Experimental Cinema – 29 The European Context and the Swedish Condition – 30 Animation Culture: Victor Bergdahl and Early Animation – 31 Reluctant Modernism: The Swedish Artists and the European Modernist Movement – 34 Viking Eggeling and the Quest for Universal Language – 36 The Lost Arabesques of Reinhold Holtermann – 41 Early Film Criticism and Theory – 43 Young Writers, Early Cinephilia and the Cinema – 45 The Film Society Movement and the Film Journals – 51 “Experimental Film is Dead, Long Live Experimental Film!” – 55 Gerd Osten: Interlude with Dance – 57 Gösta Werner: Cinephilia and the Art of the Craft – 59 Arne Sucksdorff: Documentarist in a Poetic Mode – 61 Rune Hagberg: Film Noir and Post-War Angst – 63 The Aporias of Early Experimental Film Culture in Sweden – 66 5 The Emergence of Experimental Film – 68 Arbetsgruppen för fi lm/The Independent Film Group – 69 Eivor Burbeck and Råland Häggbom: Early Film Production at The Independent Film Group – 73 The Discourse on Amateur and Experimental Film – 75 Peter Weiss: Resistance and Underground – 79 Kinetic Art and Moderna Museet – 87 Pontus Hultén and his Companions: Chance and Play – 91 A New Venue for Film: The Opening of Moderna Museet – 98 The Art Movements of the 1960s: Film and the Art Scene – 100 Billy Klüver and the New Art of the 1960s – 101 Venues of the Avant-garde: Fylkingen, Pistolteatern and Marionetteatern – 102 Regional Avant-garde and Beyond – 104 Carl Slättne and the Poetry of Politics and Place – 106 Music and Film: Jan W. Morthenson and Ralph Lundsten – 108 Lennart Ehrenborg and Eric M. Nilsson: The Creative Producer and his Director – 113 The Expanded Field of Experimental Film – 115 Jan Håfström and Claes Söderquist: Matter and Memory – 117 The Extension of Independent Film Production – 122 A New Form of Support: State Funding and the Swedish Film Institute – 123 Leo Reis and Optical Architecture – 124 Bo Jonsson and His Contemporaries at the Film School – 125 Multimedia and Performance Art: Åke Karlung, Öyvind Fahlström – 129 Pre- and post-1968: Peter Kylberg and the Making of Experimental Features – 137 6 The Swedish Reception of New American Cinema – 142 The Changing Landscape of Independent Film Production – 145 FilmCentrum/Film Centre: A Political Avant-garde – 146 The (Re)Turn to Documentary – 153 Filmverkstan/The Film Workshop: Film as Public Sphere – 154 Films and Filmmakers at the Film Workshop – 158 The Rise of Animation – 160 Experimental Animation and the Aesthetics of Immersion: Olle Hedman – 162 Gunvor Nelson and the Unboundedness of the Moving Image – 167 The Expanded Field of the Experimental Moving Image – 178 The Emergence of Video Art – 179 Institutional Frames for a New Art Form – 182 From Documenting Technique to Art Form – 187 Ann-Sofi Sidén: Explorations into the History of Mentality – 190 Returns and Openings – 194 Bibliography – 198 Endnotes – 212 Name Index – 236 Film Index – 244 7 This book is the result of a research project funded by the Swedish Research Council during the years 2006 to 2008. The planning of the project was possible due to grants from Karlstad University and Riksbankens jubileumsfond in 2004. The grant applications would never have been written without the inspiring confer- ences on experimental fi lm arranged by Film Studies at Karlstad University since 2002, funded by Karlstad University, the Swedish Research Council, the Regional Film Centre of Värmland and Filmform foundation. The research, out of which this book is just a part, has been enabled by numerous people, institutions and settings. Out of all those we want in particular to express our gratitude to the following: Pelle Snickars and Agneta Sjöborg at the unit for audiovisual media at the National Library of Sweden, Ola Törjas and Martin Sundin at the library of the Swedish Film Institute, Jon Wengström and Johan Ericsson at the fi lm archive of the Swedish Film Institute. The Filmform foundation has been indispensable throughout, especially Anna-Karin Larsson and Claes Söderquist. The versatile technician and avant-garde/ underground cinephile Mats Lundell has not only 8 helped and assisted us, his input has been so crucial that he has often been the fourth member of the research team. When the research project was inaugurated a seminar on historiographical questions was arranged at Central Saint Martins in London where we received valuable comments from David Curtis, Malcolm Le Grice and A. L. Rees. As the research progressed we received useful input from colleagues at the fi lm studies departments’ research seminars in Lund and Stockholm, as well as from participants at the SCMS conferences. David E. James, Michael Zryd and Mats Lundell have read different drafts of the manuscript and provided important feedback. Elaine King has not only corrected our version of English but also edited the text into coherent scholarly writing, and Mike Jarmon illustrated the book with great skill and dedication. Our fi nal and warmest thanks go to all those fi lm- makers and fi lm workers who have agreed on being interviewed, helped us fi nd fi lms and fi les, and who have convinced us that there are several histories 9 that still need to be written. The Writing of a History of Swedish Experimental Film 10 Minor Histories of Minor Cinemas On 11 November 1956, the Swedish Broadcasting Corporation, SR, devoted one hour to amateur and substandard gauge fi lm or, ‘narrow fi lm’ as it was called in Swedish.1 The programme was hosted by the art critic, Ulf Hård af Segerstad, who chose to show both amateur and experimental work by estab- lished artists. Hård af Segerstad had promoted amateur and experimental fi lm for a couple of years writing art criticism in one of Sweden’s leading news- papers, Svenska Dagbladet;2 his arguments and visions were made in a vein similar to that of Maya Deren and, later, Stan Brakhage.3 According to Hård af Segerstad history had shown that the true explorer of the art of photography had been the amateur, thus the amateur fi lmmaker was an essential fi gure in the evolution of fi lm art as well. Besides that the amateur was characterized by his or her disinterest for fi lm as business, as he or she was driven by the sheer passion for the medium and, therefore, could experiment unreservedly. Thus, according to Hård af Segerstad, the amateur was in many ways the true artist of this modern and transient medium. Also, however, the production side had its own interests and visions. Arne Lindgren, a dentist by profession and the secretary and leading fi gure of The Independent Film Group, Sweden’s fi rst organized fi lm workshop, wrote a letter to Hård af Segerstad days before the programme was to be broadcasted in order to clarify a few points.4 Lindgren’s actual intention of the letter was to make clear to Hård af Segerstad that the workshop had nothing to do with either amateur or substandard gauge fi lmmaking. According to Lindgren the only common denominator was that due to economical reasons the fi lmmakers at the workshop used the same format. Thus the right name for the work produced at the workshop was ‘free fi lm’ as the fi lms were non-commercial and made without any consideration of profi t making. Hence, the fi lms produced were – following Lindgren – neither amateur fi lms nor experimental ones. Peter Weiss, who at the time had not yet made his international breakthrough as a writer, was an exception according to Lindgren; Weiss was the only real experimental fi lmmaker at the workshop. Yet Lindgren added another characteristic as well because he was obviously not comfortable with a purely materialistic defi nition of their practice: the fi lms produced at The Independent Film Group were to be characterized by the intention to make fi lms that were artistic and personal. Minor Cinemas and Experimental Film The letter to Hård af Segerstad from Lindgren aptly displays the problems with defi ning the practice and the products of what David E. James has coined 11 “minor cinemas”, a term that he suggests as an “expanded summary term” for THE WRITING OF A HISTORY OF SWEDISH EXPERIMENTAL FILM “experimental, poetic, underground, ethnic, amateur, counter, noncommod- ity, working-class, critical, artists, orphan, and so on”.5 The term ‘minor cin- emas’ was originally introduced into fi lm studies by Tom Gunning who used it as a denominator for those experimental fi lmmakers who in the late 1980s criticised both Stan Brakhage’s monumental position and structural fi lm for having become the metonym for avant-garde fi lm (this despite the fact that Brakhage and structural fi lm were distinctively