This essay focuses on UK-based Swedish filmmaker Mai Zetterling’s made-for-television documentary Of Seals and Men (1979). Zetterling is known internationally as an art film auteur, and this examination seeks to broaden her stature in the context of UK and Europe-based cinefeminsim movements of the 1970s. The authors argue that Of Seals and Men constitutes a significant and overlooked artefact also in the history of colonial Greenlandic-Danish relations, as it focuses on the controversy of the Greenlandic seal hunt, and was financed as a propaganda vehicle by the Danish government and the Greenland Trade Department. The article draws on extensive archival research and references Zetterling’s production notebooks and correspondence, as well as official communication by the Royal Greenland Trade Department. 

This article discusses intertextual relations between Ingmar Bergman films and four films from the Swedish history of late 1960s and 1970s sexploitation and pornography. Although Bergman played a significant role in the liberalization of film censorship in Sweden in the 1960s and was known for the beautiful actresses of his films, that he demonstrably inspired film-makers operating in what is usually regarded as the complete opposite of art cinema is not so widely known. In the films Jag – en oskuld/Inga (1968), Thriller – en grym film/Thriller – A Cruel Picture (1974), Justine och Juliette/Justine and Juliette (1975) and Fäbodjäntan/Come Blow the Horn (1978) there are several intertextual relations, both deliberate allusions and more implicit and unintended connections. These relations may have an impact on how we regard both the role of Bergman and the directors of sexually explicit films in the particular context of Sweden in the 1960s and 1970s.

This article analyzes a content-based market position that developed during the mid-1960s, situated in-between the pornographic and the accepted. By studying Swedish men’s magazines and sex films from the time period, the argument is made that these media products profited from both the advantages of pornography, i.e., more or less sexual explicit images, and the advantages of the accepted, i.e., common distribution channels, the possibility of having regular advertising and placards and being sold in ordinary kiosks (for magazines) and shown at ordinary cinemas (for films). For some years, this balancing act between the accepted and the pornographic was maintained, and the genre became enormously popular. From the mid-1970s onward, however, the division between pornography and accepted media became more clear-cut. The critique against pornography and the in-between media products intensified, and the uncertainty about pornography’s future role after the legalization in 1971 was followed by new ways of separating the pornographic from the accepted. While there were some differences between the two media formats, such as their degree of internationalization and the importance of advertising, they shared much in terms of content formulas and used the same female actors and models. It is argued that both formal regulations and the informal norms of gender and sexuality at the time and their change throughout the 1970s are key for understanding the development and the disappearance of the in-between genre.