The press cutting, film studies and the digital age

Unlike the scrapbook, the humble press cutting has never quite broken the surface in the theoretical and methodological discourses of historiography, whether for film or other kinds of histories. In today’s radically changed archive-scape where old volumes of printed media are digitized by the shelf-load, the blessings and curses of the curated collection may rapidly fade from short-term memory. At the same time, this novel sense of distance towards them can prove useful for discussing the impact of the collections’ provenance and bias. In tracing the press-cuttings collection in Swedish press discourse during the twentieth century, the article argues that its meaning has shifted over time, most clearly signalling status, progress and knowledge optimism in the 1940s to 1960s. Lastly, the article maps the discourse and history of cuttings at the Swedish Film Institute and suggests that the press-cutting archive is now more interesting in its entirety as collection than by virtue of its individual scraps and pieces.