This paper presents the Swedish history of the legendary documentary Finally Got the News (1970), a collaboration between Newsreel and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in Detroit. Through an analysis of the re-edited print made by Swedish TV in 1971 and archival research on the League member Glanton Dowdell, who distributed the film in Sweden, the paper sets out to both correct some of the previous research and reveal how racism was a blind spot in Sweden, which at that time appeared to be the model of a politically progressive country that engaged with the American Black Power movement. 

The New American Cinema Group (NACG) organized various tours across Europe throughout the 1960s. Known as the New American Cinema Expositions, these became instrumental in the conceptualization of the NAC and would lay foundations for emerging historiographies of experimental film. Applying historian Allan Megill’s three concepts of historiography—affirmative, critical, and didactic—we argue that most of experimental film history has been either affirmative or didactic. Hence, based on extensive archival research, this article sets out to accomplish a critical historiography. We discuss the organization, presentation, development, and reception of three stops of the NAC expositions—the Festival dei Due Mondi (Festival of Two Worlds) in Spoleto, Italy (1961), Moderna Museet in Stockholm (1964), and the Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek in West Berlin (1967). Our analysis highlights the discrepancies and differences among the shows and permits us to question and problematize the narrative and historiography of the NAC.

This essay is a presentation and study of the Swedish-American avant-garde film-maker Gunvor Nelson’s remarkable production of five diverse animation films from the years 1983 to 1990. The films were produced during the final breakthrough of video art and the decline of American avant-garde film. At the time Nelson was an American citizen, but most of her actual work on the films took place in her native country, Sweden. Nevertheless, the primary culture and context of the work was the United States.

The essay claims that Nelson’s collage films of the 1980s challenge not only some principles of avant-garde film but also the status of the avant-garde film institution as the films coincide with the transformation of avant-garde film into video art and thus the emergence of a new institutional apparatus. The significance of her films as avant-garde acts lies in their status as film-based media and their transgressive aesthetics. Thus they challenge an art world marked by the commercialisation of digital video.

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).