Cinema memory: National identity as expressed by Swedish elders in an oral history project

This article is a contribution to the ‘new cinema history’ vein of media studies concerning the experience of American films in foreign, local contexts. It explores the cinema memory discourse of senior citizens living in a post-industrial mining region in central Sweden. The informants offer a variety of narrative strategies of cinema memory that can be related to social differences within the group based on class, membership in social societies and local geopolitics. The informants also take care to mention Swedish films and actors in more or less equal proportion and with similar enthusiasm compared to American ones, yet Swedish film has only had a limited amount of screen time throughout the age of cinema. The elderly informants’ cinema memories are constructed in dual terms: on the one hand acknowledging traits of cinema culture in terms of glamour, sincerity and novelty tied to the dominant Hollywood fare and on the other hand taking care to anchor the experience of cinema-going in a strong sense of national community. The contention is that the informants are evoking a cinema-going culture that caters to a deeply felt human need of belonging, and this belonging is identified with the prosperous Swedish post-war nation state.