Overview

Sweden’s early film industry was dominated by Swedish Biograph (Svenska Biografteatern), home to star directors like Victor SjÖstrÖm and Mauritz Stiller. It is nostalgically remembered as the generative site of a nascent national artform, encapsulating a quintessentially Nordic aesthetic—the epicenter of Sweden’s cinematic Golden Age. In The Life and Afterlife of Swedish Biograph, veteran film scholar Jan Olsson takes a hard look at this established, romanticized narrative and offers a far more complete, complex, and nuanced story. Nearly all of the studio’s original negatives were destroyed in an explosion in 1941, but Olsson’s comprehensive archival research shows how the company operated in a commercial, international arena, and how it was influenced not just by Nordic aesthetics or individual genius but also by foreign audiences’ expectations, technological demands, Hollywood innovations, and the gritty back-and-forth between economic pressures, government interference, and artistic desires. Olsson’s focus is wide, encompassing the studio’s production practices, business affairs, and cinematographic conventions, as well as the latter-day archival efforts that both preserved and obscured parts of Swedish Biograph’s story, helping construct the company’s rosy legacy. The result is a necessary rewrite to Swedish film historiography and a far fuller picture of a canonical film studio.

Full Product Details

Author:   Jan Olsson
Publisher:   University of Wisconsin Press
Imprint:   University of Wisconsin Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.40cm , Height: 2.20cm , Length: 22.80cm
Weight:   0.262kg
ISBN:  

9780299339906

ISBN 10:   0299339904
Pages:   312
Publication Date:   30 December 2022
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Out of stock  
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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Concepts and Considerations: An Introduction 1 Business and Economics 2 Starting Up the LidingÖ Studio 3 Novel Production Practices: 1913 4 Productions and Alliances: 1914–1916 5 Conceptual Indicators of Changes in Film Style 6 From “Nonsense to Film Art: Historiographic Negotiations 7 Critical Recognition and Commercial Misgivings: Responses from Key Markets 8 Crossroads: From LidingÖ to Berlin via Dalecarlia and London 9 Archival Practices: From the Swedish Film Society and First-Generation Scholarship to the Swedish Film Institute Conclusion Appendix 1. Intertitles and Other Indications of Temporal Shifts Between Reels in Films from 1912 to 1916 Appendix 2. Svensk Filmindustri’s Educational Department Catalogs Appendix 3. Directors at the SB Studio (Apart from SjÖstrÖm and Stiller) Notes Selected Bibliography Index

Reviews

Recovers and explores a canonical period of silent-era Swedish film history that has previously been woefully neglected. Jan Olsson does a magisterial job of contextualizing and triangulating lost materials and treasures through deep research and analysis. An invaluable contribution. --Arne Lunde, author of Nordic Exposures: Scandinavian Identities in Classical Hollywood Cinema Fusing together archival digging, business history, film politics, and film and cultural analysis, Jan Olsson offers a rich exploration of how Sweden's Golden Age of silent cinema came to be. Anyone with an interest in film history will want to read The Life and Afterlife of Swedish Biograph, the first full-length work of English-language scholarship to tackle the subject. --Andrew Nestingen, author of The Cinema of Aki Kaurismaki: Contrarian Stories

Author Information

Jan Olsson is professor emeritus of cinema studies at Stockholm University. The author of Hitchcock à la Carte and the founding editor of Aura: Film Studies Journal, he has published widely on multiple aspects of film and media studies.

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