Björklund Elisabet - Swedish cinema and the sexual revolution: critical essays

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina

e-ISBN: 978-1-4766-2501-0

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2016 Elisabet Bjrklund and Mariah Larsson. All rights reserved

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Front cover: Harriet Andersson in the title role from the 1953 film Sommaren med Monika (Summer with Monika) (Hallmark Productions/Photofest)

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A book such as this one cannot be made without the efforts of many. First of all, we would like to thank our contributors, who were patient when the process was slow and quick to respond when haste was necessary, and whose work has resulted in this volume. In addition, we are extremely grateful to Stefan Nyln at Studio S, Rickard Gramfors at Klubb Super 8, and Krister Collin at the Swedish Film Institute who aided us in tracking down images and transferring them into digital copies, and Leif Furhammar, who visited our workshop in Stockholm in December 2013 to talk about Harry Schein and Swedish film censorship.

We have had two workshops during this process, one at Stockholm University with the Swedish contributors, and another at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in February 2014, with the American contributors. These workshops were financed by the Strategic Funding of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Stockholm University. We would like to thank Anna Stenport for helping us arrange the workshop at University of Illinois.

The Wahlgren Foundation granted a generous scholarship to Elisabet Bjrklund for her work on the volume. Funding for the transfer of images into digital copies as well as various permissions was granted by Holger and Thyra Lauritzens Foundation for Film Historical Research.

Finally, and as always, our deepest love and gratitude go to our families: Lasse and little Naima, and Olle, Albert, Martha, and Kinsey the dog.

ELISABET BJRKLUND and MARIAH LARSSON

Several Swedish films and television series idealize the Swedish summer. The iconography is closely associated with nature: forests, rural landscapes, the archipelagos of Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Blekinge, lakes surrounded by trees and covered with water lilies, the warm sunlight that lasts late into evenings, patches of wild strawberries, birdsong, midsummer celebrations, fish angling, and so on. This is a long-standing trope that stretches back to Swedish silent cinema, continues through the provincial comedies and farces of the 1930s and through films depicting agrarian communities in the 1940s and 1950s; becomes even further romanticized in a string of childrens film and television productions in the 1960s and 1970s and continues to this day.

The warmth and light of late spring and summer are also closely linked to a sense of eroticism. It is often said that March 22nine months after Midsummeris the day when most Swedes are born, but in fact, this varies from year to year. They also represented a sexuality that played well not only within national borders but also abroad, something which quickly caught on and became a subject of parody in the film I rk och dans lu smoke and dance (Yngve Gamlin and Bengt Blomgren) from 1954, in which two people take a nude swim and a subtitle comes up stating for export. The joy with which Swedish people have embraced this stereotype of themselves even further testifies to how strong the sentiments are regarding summer in Sweden.

In this way, Swedish summers became symbolic, connoting a nature that encompasses more than striking landscapes and a celebration of warmth and light, that included the (sexual) bodies in that landscape. Sweden, sexuality, and cinema is a triad that has had a particular resonance abroad, and that still shows up frequently in popular culture and imagination.

With this book, we have gone beyond the iconic Swedish summer as well as the symbolic summer with the objective to further explore the reasons, the effects, the influences, and the reception of sexuality in Swedish cinema and, among other things, its implications for genre, gender, and nationality. The scholars contributing to this volume bring their particular areas of expertise to analyses of key films, but they have also found new archival material, made interviews, and gone behind the scenes of the Swedish Film Institute, which played a significant, albeit ambiguous, role during these years in attempting to bring down Swedish film censorship.

There was a relaxation of Swedish film censorship in the 1960s that had to do with a general liberalization in societywhat has sometimes been termed the sexual revolutionbut also with a few very specific films which broke through the sex barrier. Featuring female masturbation, casual intercourse, and hinted lesbian incest, Ingmar Bergmans Tystnaden/The Silence (1963) challenged the limits of censorship. Although The Silence was released with no cuts, the Bergman disciple Vilgot Sjman caused a prolonged censorship process with his adaptation of Lars Grlings 491 (1964). Here, bestiality, homosexuality, and various sexual forms of abuse were portrayed with a raw intensity that proved too much for the Board, which disallowed the film for public screening. The decision was appealed to the government which settled on the compromise that the film would be released but with some alterations. That the government proved more liberal in relation to sex and sexual violence than the National Board of Film Censors (Statens biografbyr) would set a precedent for the coming years, and may be regarded in the light of the close connections between Social Democracy and the Swedish Film Institute.

In 1965, the Danish-Swedish production Jegen kvinde/Jagen kvinna/I, a Woman, directed by the skilled Mac Ahlberg and with Essy Persson in the lead, was released with no cuts. I, a Woman contained scenes of masturbation, semi-nudity, and discreetly simulated intercourse which firmly place it within a sexploitation/softcore framework. It had no apparent social commentary (as in 491) and no artistic justification (as in the Bergman films). In 1967, Vilgot Sjman released the first installment of the Jag r nyfiken/I Am Curiousfilms; in 1968, Dom kallar oss mods/They Call Us Misfits (Stefan Jarl and Jan Lindqvist) was allowed to show an authentic intercourse and the American sexploitation director Joe Sarnos first Sweden-produced film Jag, en oskuld/Inga premiered; and in 1969, Ur krlekens sprk/Language of Love, the first in a string of sex educational films directed by Torgny Wickman, screened the first close-ups of genitals and intercourse in a Swedish, theatrically distributed film. The process that can be said to have started already in the 1950s culminates with the removal of the obscenity clause in the penal code in 1971, in effect legalizing pornography. During the 1970s, Swedish film censorship concerned itself mainly with images of violence, which became more common in the wake of the Vietnam War, the changes in the U.S. from Production Code to rating system, and the European trash/mondo/horror wave. Explicit images of sex were censored only if they were connected to violence, and even this was to a certain extent dependent of the context of the film. Pornography was more regularly censored than mainstream film, and well-known directors were allowed greater freedom.