The Books of My Life: Swedish Cinema

 

It can be somewhat tricky writing about national cinema. On the one hand many scholars or analysts of national cinemas look for the distinctives or exceptionalisms associated with the national cinemas they are focusing on. Peter Cowie in his monograph Swedish Cinema (London: Zwemmer and New York: Barnes, 1966), for instance, argues that Swedish cinema, specifically the Swedish cinema of auteurist masterpieces, betrays a homogeneity of style and substance. For Cowie, Swedish auteurist cinema, has tended to portray humans as both beautiful and cruel, a beauty and cruelty that parallels the beauty and cruelty of the Swedish environment itself. Swedish auteurist cinema, argues Cowie, was also, thanks to its Protestant Lutheran environment, fatalistic, a cinema of psychological conflict, a cinema of conflict between asceticism, an asceticism that often became sado-masochistic, and pleasure.

On the other hand, there is a tendency among those writing on national cinemas to explore the influences on the national cinema that they are focusing on. Cowie, for instance, notes the impact of German cinematic expressionism, French cinematic poetic realism, and American cinema with its genre based mass cinema on the Swedish cinema. From a global perspective, in other words, Swedish cinema and Swedish religious culture doesn't look that exceptional when explored more broadly. After all, all the core nations of the world and particularly those of Western Europe and European settler societies like the United States have all been impacted by modernity with its individualism and its puritanical and de-puritanical tendencies.

Cowie's book is a good workmanlike introduction to Swedish cinema. It doesn't, however, address this paradox of exceptionalism and globalism in the history of cinema directly. Cowie briefly explores the history of Swedish cinema from its beginnings in the early twentieth century to the 1960s. Some may find, however, that its focus on the cinema of auteurs, on the cinema of Swedish auteurs Victor Sjostrom, Mauritz Stiller, Alf Sjoberg, and Ingmar Bergman, the section of which makes up about half of the book, and auteurist documentarists, problematic. One might, for instance, argue that such an approach gives a stilted picture of the Swedish cinema and particularly of its popular comedies and operettas, of its mass cinema, which Cowie argues, were quite prominent in the 1930s and one presumes popular afterwards given the role successful films played in funding Swedish filmmaking particularly after the 1950s. Additionally, since Cowie doesn't really tell us much about this, we can only speculate about the role the exhibition of foreign films, particularly those of Hollywood, played in the Swedish market. Finally, Cowie's focus on the distinctives of Swedish cinema, despite mentioning the foreign influences on Swedish auteurist cinema, underplays the post-World War I and post-World War II angst that fed into the cinemas of Germany, France, and the United States, an angst that would give rise to a fatalism, existentialism, the revolt against the teleologies of modernity, and the death of god movement all across the Western world, including in Sweden.