Immigrant Film Co-Operatives in Sweden - The Most Typical Avant-Garde

• The subtitle of this essay echoes the title of David E. James’s book The Most Typical Avant-Garde, which makes the claim that the various minor cinemas of Los Angeles (amateur, immigrant, artists’ etc.) constitute the most distinctive avant-garde “on behalf of cultural practices that are commonly supposed not to even have existed”. The heterogeneous Swedish avant-garde scene has definitely been conditioned by migrational and transnational practices; however, this essay deals with a specific forgotten aspect of Swedish avant-garde film history: the immigrant film-makers and their co-operatives and organisations. Our aim is to show that they have existed and why they should be considered as part of “the most typical avant-garde”. We focus on the description and analysis of three films by three different organisations that became cohorts of multilingual and collective film-making, ranging from purely organisational structures (Kaleidoscope, in the 1980s) to collective youth recreation work in the suburbs (Tensta filmförening, in the 1970s and 1980s) and to a co-op for self-organised and self-financed film-making (Cineco, in the late 1970s and early 1980s).

• An account for three production nodes for immigrant film workers in Sweden, Kaleidoscope, Tensta Filmförening and Cineco, as well as an analysis of some of their films.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Konst -- Filmvetenskap (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Arts -- Studies on Film (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

avantgarde

immigrantfilm

filmkooperativ

Cinema Studies

Publikations- och innehållstyp

kap (ämneskategori)

ref (ämneskategori)