Sex, politics and Swedish silent film: Mauritz Stiller's feminism comedies of the 1910s

In the 1910s, the Finnish-Swedish film-maker Mauritz Stiller directed a series of comedies that took up suffrage, women in the workplace, eugenics, dress reform and womanliness as masquerade. I argue that these films, and Thomas Graal�s Best Child in particular, used comedy to contest the melodramatic tenor of these debates by modelling a light-hearted, cosmopolitan attitude towards social change.