Journal of Scandinavian Cinema - Volume 5, Issue 3, 2015

Unlike several of his contemporaries, Swedish film-maker Hasse Ekman has never been celebrated abroad and remains relatively unknown outside his native land. As part of an effort to change that, I curated a retrospective at MoMA in New York, which took place in September 2015.

In 2015 the British Film Institute released the most celebrated Danish films of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s career on Blu-ray discs. This short subject assesses the quality of both the technical presentation of the films and the heterogeneous supplemental material included in the collection. It also draws readers’ attention to other Dreyer films available for home viewing.

Carl Th. Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932) has been praised as an avant-garde masterpiece that creates a sense of horror by strategically denying the spectator visual access to key turning points in the plot, including most notably the gruesome vampire attacks. Previous scholarship has treated the visual impediments in the film as deriving primarily from a conscious aesthetic strategy on Dreyer’s part to enhance the sense of mystery and terror by undermining the spectatorial gaze. This article links the visual obfuscation in the film instead to Vampyr’s status as a post-synchronized, multilingual sound film, which motivated Dreyer to deny the spectator a view of the actors’ moving lips. I argue that Dreyer turned a production limitation into an artistic virtue by discursively framing the denial of vision as an overall aesthetic strategy, thus effectively ‘masking’ what could otherwise have been viewed as an embarrassing concession to financial constraints.

Arts television has attracted scholarly attention because of its practice of re-representation, combined with an educational policy that aspired to teach ‘good taste’ to a broader audience. During the 1950s and the early 1960s, the educational and aesthetic merit of ‘art films’ was broadly recognized in Sweden, where a striking number of television programmes were dedicated to visual art. In 1956 an official state report described television as ‘to date [the] most promising tool for art propaganda’. Unlike related productions in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, the presentation of art films in Sweden also depended on a strong concern with film art. In addition to special programmes on art history and individual artists, broadcasts included experimental cinema and amateur competitions. This article accounts for the hybrid aesthetics and the intermedial and transnational appearance of the art film for public television, with special attention to those produced by the Swedish Film Unit. Here, ‘style’ is not only invoked as a matter of form and signature but also as an aesthetic ideal reflecting the educational directions and cultural doxa of early television programming. As a historical case study on media convergence, documentary form and modes of address in early public television, the example of the Swedish Film Unit illuminates a media history that upsets any simple boundary between film and television, recalling the important historical context of film art, documentary media cultures and broadcasting history.

This article discusses the various narrative, performative and cinematic strategies of Swedish comedy team Hans Alfredson and Tage Danielsson (aka Hasse&Tage) as they moved from stage to screen through an analysis of their second film, Att angöra en brygga/Docking the Boat (Danielsson, 1965). The theoretical point of departure is the question of the relationship between classical narrative structure and plots based on a series of gags. Through a combination of formal analysis of film style and mise-en-scène in select film sequences and a general discussion of popular cultural references, gags, acting style and visual framing, the article reveals that gags in the film usually serve a narrative purpose. The sophisticated appropriation of central themes representative of New Wave aesthetics demonstrates that Docking the Boat is only partially derivative of Hasse&Tage’s ventures as stage comedians. The article concludes with a suggestion that previous experiences from a variety of media platforms had a strong impact on their ability to develop a unique and highly cinematic visual and intellectually sophisticated film style.