Journal of Scandinavian Cinema - Volume 7, Issue 2, 2017

The aim of this article is to present the archival practice behind two extensive research projects that we have worked on during the last decade: the Stockholm Film Workshop and minor immigrant filmmaking in Sweden. Archive has become a general catchword in today’s academia that encompasses several practices of collecting, storing, distributing and displaying. We will stress in particular – partly against the idealism of digital activism – that the archive is a locus of power. The struggle for archival acknowledgement is a question of how to establish an archival artefact, an object that may be stored and repeated, and thus to affirm it as something that cannot be disregarded. This is a practice in the way that theory also constitutes a practice: a way of intervening that is case sensitive and that constantly cuts across those four principles that Giovanna Fossati famously coined as ‘film as original’, ‘film as art’, ‘film as dispositif’ and ‘film as state of the art’.

The Face of AIDS Film Archive consists of documentation of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, shot all over the world beginning in 1988 by Swedish filmmaker and journalist Staffan Hildebrand. In this article, the archive’s particular characteristic of process is discussed and examined through four different perspectives: first, as an ongoing documentation of HIV/AIDS in the contemporaneous moments when it was filmed; second, as a commission of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm; third, as the product of a director with a strong personal vision and authorial presence; and finally, as an expression of Hildebrand’s self-defined AIDS activism.

This article engages with Lars von Trier’s 1988 television adaptation of Carl Th. Dreyer’s screenplay Medea to explore the concept of the unfilmed film. Beginning with von Trier’s adoption of Dreyer’s tuxedo, the article asks how the notions of auteurship and the archive itself produce the unfilmed film as ‘unrealized’, and probes the concept of the ‘unfinished’ film. Some examples of unfilmed films, and documentaries about them, are discussed as examples of archival practices in the mediation of unfinished, unrealized and unfilmed films, sometimes by directors themselves and sometimes by their successors. Dreyer’s research materials and methodologies for his screenplay Medea, preserved in the Danish Film Institute, are discussed as an intertext to the later adaptation for Danish television by Lars von Trier.

Danish director Lars von Trier has throughout his work explored the aesthetic possibility of the film medium by pushing its technology to the limit and foregrounding its materiality. Transferring filmed material between analogue video and film, he exaggerates deterioration and decay of the moving image in Medea (1988), Riget (The Kingdom) (1994–97) and Breaking the Waves (1996). Turning to digital technology in the late 1990s, von Trier explored the new means of generating data in Idioterne (The Idiots) (1998) and Dancer in the Dark (2000). In 1994, Jacques Derrida theorized the concept of Archive Fever, a feverish desire for origins, which ultimately leads to destruction of the archival object. Applying Derrida’s concept to von Trier’s filmmaking shows how his films reveal the inherent anarchivic nature of the medium of the moving image.

Based on a case study of municipally sponsored films about the Swedish city of Gothenburg from the decades after World War II, this article contributes to the emerging scholarly field of ‘useful cinema’. It is argued that local archival materials are essential for studying this kind of useful cinema with its multiple uses, textual variations, screening contexts and both domestic and international circulation. Local archival materials are further essential for studying not only the local institutional use of cinema, but also the relationship between theatrical and non-theatrical exhibition. Moreover, the international circulation of useful cinema highlighted in the article cannot be studied solely with material from national archives. The conclusion calls for new types of digital archival milieus that capture the dynamics of this part of film history.

In 1916, Norwegian actress Aud Egede-Nissen established a film production company under her own name in Berlin: the Egede-Nissen-Film Compagnie GmbH. The company created approximately 30 star vehicles for Aud and her sisters Ada and Gerd, with Aud Egede-Nissen also working in the capacity of producer. The company existed until 1921, capitalizing on the German import ban on films during the years 1916–20. Until recently, the transnational career of Aud Egede-Nissen has left a void in the film archive and film documents collection held at the National Library of Norway, where very little material relating to the actress-producer’s success on the European continent is found. As Jane Gaines has demonstrated with the Women Film Pioneers Project, the careers of women working during the silent era have largely been left out of film histories. An important aspect of writing female film workers’ careers back into film history therefore also relies on creating archives and collecting material, ensuring that future researchers can piece the puzzle back together. This article presents the discovery of fan ephemera and promotional material sold on the online auction website eBay relating to the career of Aud Egede-Nissen.

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.

Using computational methods, digitized collections and archives can today be scrutinized in their entirety. By distant reading and topic modeling one particular collection – 4500 digitized Swedish Governmental Official Reports (SOU) from 1922 to 1991 – this article gives a new archival perspective of the history of Swedish film politics and policy-making. We examine different probabilistic topics related to film (and media) that the algorithm within the topic modeling software Mallet extracted from the immense text corpora of all these Official Reports. Topic modeling is a computational method to study themes in texts by accentuating words that tend to co-occur and together create different topics. Basically, it is a research tool for the discovery of hidden semantic structures, exploring a collection through the underlying topics that run through it. Hence, our article captures a number of film discourses and trends within the SOU material. In conclusion, we argue that topic modeling should be recognized as a method and research aid for gathering an overview of a major material; as a way to pose new and unforeseen research questions; and as a kind of computational support that makes it possible to apprehend major patterns more or less impossible to detect through a traditional archival investigation.