| 1. |
- Janson, Malena, 1972-
(författare)
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Bio för barnens bästa? : Svensk barnfilm som fostran och fritidsnöje under 60 år
- 2007
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The main aim of this dissertation is to examine the different childhood discourses permeating Swedish children’s cinema. This is done through close readings of three films that, each in their own way, play an important role in the history of this tradition: THE CHILDREN OF FROSTED MOUNTAIN (Rolf Husberg, 1945), THE CHILDREN OF BULLERBY VILLAGE (Olle Hellbom, 1960) and ELVIS! ELVIS! (Kay Pollak, 1977). Other subjects analysed are media debates about children’s film from the periods in which the films were produced, as well as official reports on the same subject. Taken as a whole, these elements form a significant body of material, describing the notions of children and childhood, as well as ideas around children’s film as medium, that predominated in Swedish society at three given moments in the 20th century. The study shows, that the most striking characteristic is that ever since 1945, when the first film specifically made for children was produced in Sweden, such films have been created with the intention of ‘benefiting’ the young audience. This ‘cinema of best intentions’, in turn, contains a number of attributes that are not always as unequivocally positive as they might initially seem. One of the main starting points for this exploration comes from modern childhood studies, according to which every given time and culture has its own complex of ideas, understandings and representations of children and childhood. Another central theoretical source is Michel Foucault. His ideas of power and knowledge, discipline and oppression, as well as his methodology, permeate this study. From this point of view, there is an aspect of ‘best intentions’ children’s cinema that can be seen as imposing ‘the oppression of benevolence.’ The closing discussion shows how the Swedish children’s film, today as always, is inhibited by factors such as faithfulness to the written original, fear of upsetting the young audience and commercial demands.
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| 2. |
- Tofighian, Nadi, 1977-
(författare)
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Blurring the Colonial Binary : Turn-of-the-Century Transnational Entertainment in Southeast Asia
- 2013
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation examines and writes the early history of distribution and exhibition of moving images in Southeast Asia by observing the intersection of transnational itinerant entertainment and colonialism. It is a cultural history of turn-of-the-century Southeast Asia, and focuses on the movement of films, people, and amusements across oceans and national borders. The starting point is two simultaneous and interrelated processes in the late 1800s, to which cinema contributed. One process, colonialism and imperialism, separated people into different classes of people, ruler and ruled, white and non-white, thereby creating and widening a colonial binary. The other process was bringing the world closer, through technology, trade, and migration, and compressing the notions of time and space.The study assesses the development of cinema in a colonial setting and how its development disrupted notions of racial hierarchies. The first decade of cinema in Southeast Asia, particularly in Singapore, is used as a point of reference from where issues such as imperialism, colonial discourse, nation-building, ethnicity, gender, and race is discussed. The development of film exhibition and distribution in Southeast Asia is tracked from travelling film exhibitors and agents to the opening of a regional Pathé Frères office and permanent film venues. By having a transnational perspective the interconnectedness of Southeast Asia is demonstrated, as well as its constructed national borders.Cinematic venues throughout Southeast Asia negotiated segregated, colonial racial politics by creating a common social space where people from different ethnic and social backgrounds gathered. Furthermore, this study analyses what kind of worldview the exhibited pictures had and how audiences reproduced their meanings.
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| 3. |
- Andersson, Therése, 1974-
(författare)
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Beauty Box : Filmstjärnor och skönhetskultur i det tidiga 1900-talets Sverige
- 2006
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The object of this dissertation is the relationship between film, fashion and beauty concerning different understandings of femininity, with reference to the establishment of the star system and the making of celebrity culture, and how these were expressed through magazines and commercial ads in early 20th century Sweden. The period of time framing the discussion, from fin-de-siècle and onwards with specific focus on the 1920s and 1930s, corresponds to the course of publication of the Swedish magazine Filmjournalen. Star studies and reception studies make up the theoretical framework, offering an understanding of the popular press both as a source of knowledge for and as an intermediary of fashion and style, creating a wider network of texts and images and providing a context for how films were presented for Swedish, mainly female, audiences. Spectatorship is therefore considered from the viewpoint of address, in line with Miriam Hansen’s angle, analysing how a network of texts and images, exceeding the particular film, constitutes the positions of spectators. Film stars are understood as embodying different ideas; represented, negotiated, and incorporated in already existing lines of thoughts, drawing attention to questions of media presentation, and to the ideas appearing behind the beauty ideals and the aesthetics. The discussion on stars is narrowed down to concern three particular themes - consumerism, emancipation and physiognomy - when presupposing femininity as defined by appearance; considering cosmetics and fashion as providing practical, next-to-the-skin tools in this making, while film and journalism are working on a social, discursive level. Judith Butler’s account of performance and Teresa de Lauretis’ understanding of technologies of the self are significant for this study, as well as Richard Dyer’s approach, considering film stars as articulating the business of being an individual when representing familiar ways of feeling and thinking.
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| 4. |
- Bachmann, Anne, 1976-
(författare)
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Locating Inter-Scandinavian Silent Film Culture : Connections, Contentions, Configurations
- 2013
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The thesis revisits film and film-culture history in Sweden, Denmark and Norway with a view to discourses and practices of the inter- and trans-Scandinavian in the silent era. Excluding the earliest films, but including the transition to synchronised sound, it covers the period of the 1900s to 1930 with emphasis on the 1910s and 1920s. The thesis identifies notions about the relations between the Scandinavian and the national by means of a number of case studies based on textual historical sources. As a consistent Scandinavian perspective on this period is new, the investigation substantially supplements and revises the individual national film histories of these countries. It adds missing context to national developments and makes visible border phenomena such as transnational collaborations and co-producing practices.The thesis finds that film production in Scandinavia in the silent era was orientated towards one of two poles, at times combined or in a state of negotiation: international economic ambitions or national cultural aspirations. The latter was frequently conceptualised as northern, Nordic and Scandinavian. ‘Scandinaviannesses’ performed when drawing on nature, folklore, literature and heritage, not least that of Norway, were employed for use in and out of Scandinavia by means of strategies of ‘double-entry book-keeping’. During the period, the notion of location underwent changes from an illusory, theatrical device to an inherently meaningful entity carrying identities infused with the Scandinavian. Examining the effects of shared comprehension of language and a shared recent history of Scandinavist ideas, the thesis identifies instrumental notions of kindredness and senses of cultural proprietorship extending to the output of the neighbouring countries. These notions were mobilised selectively within film culture and motivated practical transnational collaboration from the side of the authorities as well as in trade organisations.
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| 5. |
- Bull, Sofia, 1981-
(författare)
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A Post-genomic Forensic Crime Drama : CSI: Crime Scene Investigation as Cultural Forum on Science
- 2012
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis examines how the first 10 seasons of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (CBS, 2000–) engage with discourses on science. Investigating CSI’s representation of scientific practices and knowledge, it explicitly attempts to look beyond the generic assumption that forensic crime dramas simply ‘celebrate’ science.The material is analysed at three different levels, studying CSI’s wider cultural discursive context, genre linkages, and audio-visual form. In order to fully account for the series’ specificity, the thesis undertakes comparative analyses of earlier forensic crime dramas and other relevant audio-visual material. Close textual readings of certain thematic tropes, narrative devices and visual imagery in CSI are thus supplemented by historical studies of their extended generic backgrounds.This textual-historical approach generates a general argument that CSI dramatizes and evokes a number of different, and often contradictory, scientific ideas, perspectives and discursive shifts. The thesis concludes that CSI stages a transnational cultural forum, simultaneously engaging with residual, dominant and emergent discourses on science. Throughout, close attention is paid to the multiple perspectives and viewpoints that allow the series to appeal to a wide and heterogeneous global audience.Furthermore, the thesis asserts that CSI specifically articulates a post-genomic structure of feeling, which begins to express the wider cultural implications of an emergent discursive shift whereby the instrumentalisation of molecular science seemingly offers more possibilities for human intervention into biological processes. Thus, the study demonstrates how CSI’s discourse on science treats recent scientific developments as engendering a cultural process of redefinition, questioning foundational concepts such as truth, identity, body, kinship and emotions.
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| 6. |
- Frisvold Hanssen, Eirik, 1975-
(författare)
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Early Discourses on Colour and Cinema : Origins, Functions, Meanings
- 2006
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation is a historical and theoretical study of a number of discourses examining colour and cinema during the period 1909 to 1935 (trade press, film reviews, publications on film technology, manuals, catalogues and theoretical texts from the era). In this study, colour in cinema is considered as producing a number of aesthetic and representational questions which are contextualised historically; problems and qualities specifically associated with colour film are examined in terms of an interrelationship between historical, technical, industrial, and stylistic factors, as well as specific contemporary conceptions of cinema.The first chapter examines notions concerning the technical, material, as well as perceptual, origins of colour in cinema, and questions concerning indexicality, iconicity, and colour reproduction, through focusing on the relationship between the photographic colour process Kinemacolor, as well as other similar processes, and the established non-photographic colour methods during the early 1910s, with an in-depth analysis of the Catalogue of Kinemacolor Film Subjects, published in 1912.The second chapter examines notions concerning the stylistic, formal and narrative functions of colour in cinema, featuring a survey of the recurring comparisons between colour and sound, found in the writing of film history, in discourses concerning early Technicolor sound films, film technology, experimental films and experiments on synaesthesia during the 1920s, as well as Eisenstein’s notions of the functions of colour in sound film montage.The third chapter examines the question of colour and meaning in cinema through considering the relationship between colours and objects in colour film images (polychrome and monochrome, photographic and non-photographic) during the time frame of this study.
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| 7. |
- Frykholm, Joel, 1977-
(författare)
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Framing the Feature Film : Multi-Reel Feature Film and American Film Culture in the 1910s
- 2009
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation addresses the breakthrough of the multi-reel feature film in the United States, and the significance of this process within the wider context of the American film industry and culture in the 1910s. The purpose is to provide a new, and more comprehensive analytical framing of the topic, and to enhance our understanding of how a new central commodity, i.e. the multi-reel feature film, changed the conditions for film exhibition and reception. The introduction links the breakthrough of the multi-reel feature film to an array of film-historical transformations unfolding in the US around the same time. A critical assessment of previous scholarly work dealing with the early feature is also provided. Part I analyzes how the breakthrough of the multi-reel feature film was negotiated within the trade and by contemporary commentators. The result is a multi-perspective framing of the topic that highlights the complexity of these cultural negotiations and the uncertainty over cinema’s possible futures. Part II shifts attention to film culture and film exhibition in Philadelphia around 1914. The objective of this case study, largely based on newspaper sources, is to examine how the increasingly common multi-reel feature film was integrated into and/or changed the existing film culture in the city. The main conclusion is that experimentation and diversity rather than smooth transitions characterized the local response to the emergence of features. Part III deepens the investigation of local diversity by offering a case study of one particular film: The Spoilers (Selig Polyscope Co., 1914). The conditions of the film’s historical reception are outlined, and particular attention is given to the film’s role in the Americanization of the feature film market.
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| 8. |
- Gustafsson, Henrik, 1973-
(författare)
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Out of Site : Landscape and Cultural Reflexivity in New Hollywood Cinema 1969-1974
- 2007
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation examines landscape as a concept for analysis and interpretation in film studies by considering the New Hollywood cinema in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Contextualized within the contested notion of nationhood at the time as well as the concern among filmmakers to probe the properties, practices and traditions of American cinema, this was also a period when landscape underwent widespread redefinition as a field of artistic and academic practice. From the outset an aesthetic and pictorial concept, landscape is understood as consisting of a number of interacting ideas and systems of representation which are addressed in terms of intermedial relations. Not something to be encountered or discovered and fixed on canvas or film, landscape involves an ongoing process of construction, appropriation and transformation. Departing from a discussion of the historical role landscape has played in cultural practices of self-representation and self-definition, this study is concerned with how it can be turned against itself and used as a point of departure for adversary and antagonistic views of national myths and media. The organization is roughly chronological, based around a series of reconsiderations of key films, mainly focusing on road movies and genre-revisionist work of the period. Rather than a repository of stable identities and values, each chapter shows how landscape can be advanced in a process of reflecting on attempts to impose meaning, order and linearity. Taken together, Out of Site argues that an engagement with the surfaces and depths of landscape enables new perspectives on the interrelations between the highbrow and the popular, aesthetics and ideology. Bringing attention to how story patterns and audience expectations are displaced, landscape is examined for the questions it raises regarding representational and narrative strategies, the formation of identity and memory, and our own habits of reading.
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| 9. |
- Hansson, Karl, 1973-
(författare)
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Det figurala och den rörliga bilden : Om estetik, materialitet och medieteknologi hos Jean Epstein, Bill Viola och Artintact
- 2006
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation is a comparative study of the concept of the figural in relation to moving images with three case studies on filmmaker and writer Jean Epstein (1897-1953), video artist Bill Viola (1951-) and the cd-rom art magazine Artintact 1-5 (1994-1999). The conceptually focused case studies also enable a comparison between the different media technologies of film, video and new digital media. The figural is a concept originally used by Jean-François Lyotard and has resurfaced in the works of Jacques Aumont, Philippe Dubois, Nicole Brenez and D. N. Rodowick. Building on ideas expressed by these writers I show how the figural is a concept describing a border zone between abstraction and representation, where focus is on the image as event and process, and various effects due to image manipulation. I argue that a figural approach enables a more nuanced understanding of visual materiality as well as of new relationships between image and text. I also show how the figural can be understood as part of a ”new aestheticism”, where the relationship between viewer and image is emphasised. On a conceptual level the figural is put in relation to the concept of a ”haptic visuality” and the so-called ”post-medium condition”. In the reading of Jean Epstein the figural is used to foreground aspects of ”thinking with images”, and of a ”temporal perspective” as a new visual matter. In the case of Bill Viola the figural is to be found for example in his frequent use of slow motion as an embodied visuality. In the case of Artintact the figural is used to show how digital media is not as immaterial as often claimed, on the contrary the digital brings a new importance for visual materiality. Taken together these aspects introduce the figural as an important element for our understanding of visual culture.
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| 10. |
- Hockenjos, Vreni, 1972-
(författare)
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Picturing Dissolving Views : August Strindberg and the Visual Media of His Age
- 2007
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The subject of this study is August Strindberg’s interaction with the visual media of his day. Its dual aim is to examine Strindberg’s work in the light of media history and to allow Strindberg’s work in turn to illuminate the media history of the fin de siècle. Taking its cue from the commonplace scholarly observation that Strindberg’s drama, particularly that of his later phase, is strikingly “cinematic”, it asks: What do such comparisons really tell us about Strindberg’s art and what, if anything, do they tell us about cinema?The thesis of this study is that the putatively “cinematic” style of Strindberg’s writings can only be understood against the backdrop of a mass culture, oriented towards the visual sense, which was undergoing rapid expansion at the turn of the last century. In devising his “dream play techniques”, it argues, Strindberg both drew on and reacted against various image-based modes of representation that had become extremely widespread in the late nineteenth century. The loss of reality that is so prominent a feature of works such as To Damascus (1898) or A Dream Play (1901) should in this sense be regarded as marked by an experience of mediatization, that is, the steady incorporation of all aspects of daily life by mass media technologies. Shifting the spotlight away from cinema, a critical encounter with Strindberg’s work can cast light on largely overlooked media practices such as magic lantern or Sciopticon exhibition, panoramic entertainments, instantaneous photography, and the introduction of the halftone process in printing. At the same time as it unsettles received notions of Strindberg’s drama as “cinematic”, the study seeks to show how the writings of this revolutionary artist can provide fresh material for a reassessment of life in a media-saturated age.
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