The article examines Jewish 'self-images' in Swedish post-war film. Before World War II, antisemitic caricatures were prevalent in Swedish film and visual culture. Following the Holocaust, Jews as such were virtually erased from Swedish screens. Written by and starring Marie-Louise Ekman, Hallo Baby (Bergenstrahle 1976) was a rare exception, the first Swedish post-war film to explore Swedish-Jewish identity. The 2002 comedy Livet i 8 bitar (Bit by Bit) (Metzger) remains the last of only a handfid of films to fit said description. Significantly, both films draw heavily on established antisemitic tropes in their figurations of 'Jewishness'. Through historically contextualized readings of the two films, including their reception, the article thus shows how the tradition of antisemitic caricature that prevailed until World War II has continued to condition Jewish self-representation in the post-war era.

This study scans six decades of film history in search for video images, the imaginaries within which they are framed, and (taking cues from the archaeological methods of Friedrich Kittler and Michel Foucault) their technical, historical, and institutional conditions of existence. The British experimental science fiction film Anti-Clock (Jane Arden and Jack Bond, 1979) revolves around a video device with the capacity to confront subjects with their own repressed memory images. While being fictional, these “memory monitors” have real conditions of existence: the emergence of video therapy and surveillance practices, conceptions of video as a recording medium, and the video processing allowing for this imaginary medium’s cinematic treatment. Framing such films as videographic cinema, this study provides a mapping and tracking of works such as Anti-Clock. From prospective imaginaries of surveillance and control to retrospective ones concerned with memory and history, the two-part dissertation tracks an epistemic shift occurring between videographic cinema’s emergent phase conditioned by video as a medium for live transmission (1950s-1980s), and its remanent phase in which the video images and imaginaries become reconditioned by the reconception of video as a recording technology (1970s-2010s).

Chapter 1 looks at the emergence of videographic cinema through 1960s science fiction films and political thrillers in which the electronic image came to connote imminent futures of surveillance and control. Chapter 2 studies films that responded to the perceived threats of broadcast TV by imagining more or less outrageous reality TV formats. Drawing on research published by a forgotten avant-garde of psychiatrists, Chapter 3 shows how video in the 1960s gave rise to a utopian belief in self-confrontation techniques whose progressive promises were complicated by explicit overlaps between video therapy and surveillance practices. Video self-confrontation techniques also inform Chapter 4, which tracks the emergence of the videographic psyche (based on an analogy between videographic and mental images) as it was invented/discovered by 1970s artists, therapists, and filmmakers – soon to crystallise into the conception of video as a means for confronting subjects with their own repressed memories. Chapter 5 zooms out to map a larger post-millennial media landscape in which the obsolescence of analogue video granted a nostalgic appeal to its particular noisy aesthetics, fusing the cultural connotations of a certain retro “VHS style” with the material conditions of magnetic recording. Continuing the mapping of analogue video in the digital age, Chapter 6 zooms in on a selection of recent films that excavate obsolete video formats to scrutinise historical events and the media conditions of their description. Having started as an archaeology of videographic cinema, the dissertation thus ends by considering videographic cinema itself as a form of archaeology.

In 1953, the staff at Agnews State Hospital in California discovered that the installation of TV sets had rendered their mental patients more docile (Tucker et. al.). Incidentally, the same year Houston’s jail installed North America’s reportedly first CCTV system for prison surveillance (BusinessWeek). This paper traces the parallel emergence of video surveillance and video therapy between 1953 and 1970, and the technical transformations that both underwent with the coming of videotape. It shows how the institutional overlaps between the two gave rise to a movement of “video self-confrontation” practitioners and proponents, culminating with the 1970 publication of the anthology Videotape Techniques in Psychiatric Training and Treatment (edited by Milton M. Berger). A forgotten psychiatric avant-garde which thrived on two remarkable postulates: that the invention of video is as important for psychiatry as the microscope was for biology and that it is a “gift” allowing us to see ourselves as others see us.

Foucault’s failure to address the relation between mass media and modern surveillance inspired Thomas Mathiesen to introduce synopticism as a supplementary concept to panopticism. He argued that the panoptic principle of the few seeing the many was paralleled by mass media as an “enormously extensive system enabling the many to see and contemplate the few”. This paper argues that Mathiesen himself overlooked a third operative function – seeing oneself – conditioned by the media’s acquired capacity to record and instantly replay moving images. The paper thus suggests that the historical practice of video self-confrontation, premised on particular configurations of patient(s), therapist(s), and video devices, can be understood as an autoptic apparatus – one that draws on but reconfigures both panoptic and synoptic functions.

This paper proposes a new conceptual frame for the study of analogue video aesthetics in digital culture. Updating Guy Debord’s notion of a “society of the spectacle” (1994), it will argue that we have entered an age of retrospectacle whose dominant signifier is an aesthetics of “remanence”—a term that fuses the magnetic materiality of analogue video with the cultural situation in which it finds itself today.

Today, a variety of digital media objects have rendered the “VHS style” look ubiquitous. As retro fixation fixates the image of remanence decay in digital code, it raises important questions about the tension between historical authenticity and artifice. Comparing three very different works produced through processes of analogue-digital remediation, the paper will show how the aesthetics of remanence constitutes a shared visual variable of digital culture, whose relation to the concept of authenticity remains highly heterogeneous and irreducible to simulacra.

Mark Leckey’s video art work “Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore” (1999) is a “disarmingly sincere” (Higgins 2015) treatment of technostalgia; rapper Joey Bada$$’s music video “Fromdatomb$” (David M. Helman, 2012) manifests hip hop’s credo of keepin’ it realby adding traces of analogue grain to its  digital texture; and the ‘80s action pastiche Kung Fury (David Sandberg, 2015) playfully undermines both historical authenticity and medium specificity through its indiscriminate alloy of analogue and digital problems.

Pablo Larraín’s No (2012) is a semi-fictional account of the production process behind the 1988 television campaign that helped defeating Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. An estimated 30% of the film consists of archival footage, while the rest is shot on the obsolete analogue video format U-matic in order to match the archival materials. In her 2014 book The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History, Jamie Baron suggests that the insertion of archival images into films is best understood from the point of view of their effect. Archival documents “exist as ‘archival’ only insofar as the viewer […] perceives certain documents within [a] film as coming from another, previous – and primary – context of use”. It follows that any confusion regarding these temporal relations also condition the archival documents’ historiographic function. Through videographic means, No’s archive effect is almost entirely and intentionally neutralised. Ideally, the audience loses the capacity to distinguish between the two original temporalities, so that “the archive becomes fiction and what is fiction becomes archive” (Larraín). This paper discusses the technological conditions, conceptual implications, and critical reactions to Larraín’s strategy. Drawing on Jean Baudrillard’s critique of historical film, the paper concludes that No’s playful neutralisation of the archive effect finally effects what Baudrillard calls the system’s “nihilism of neutralisation”, that is to say its “power to pour everything, including what denies it, into indifference.”

This article explores the various manifestations of analogue video in digital culture. Introducing the framing concept of an aesthetics of remanence, it argues that the “society of the spectacle” (Debord) has entered an age of retrospectacle, a dominant signifier of which is the remediation and/or simulation of analogue videography. The concept of remanence connects the material conditions of magnetic tape with analogue video’s aesthetic expressions, and the cultural situation in which analogue video finds itself today. By looking at three different cases related to retro gaming, contemporary hip hop, and “old skool” rave, the article shows how the aesthetics of remanence remains highly susceptible to subcultural sensibilities—while it also functions as their shared visual variable. The short film Kung Fury (David Sandberg, 2015) is a playfully post-ironic recuperation of failed media technologies. The music video “Fromdatomb$” (David M. Helman, 2012) is a complex exploration of the idea(l) of the historical real. And the work of video art Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (Mark Leckey, 1999) is a creative treatment of nostalgia which invites us to reconsider the medical origins of the term.

This short subject studies configurations of animation and live action in contemporary Swedish documentary film. While digitization has challenged the indexical images verifying function, animation has been elevated to the level of legitimate document. The epistemological boundaries of documentary film have consequently been expanded, and now include the inner worlds of social subjects. In Gomd (Hidden) (Heilborn and Aronowitsch, 2002), animation and live action are repeatedly juxtaposed in order to visualize a refugee childs experienced Otherness. In Still Born (Sandzen, 2014), ultrasound footage is fused with digital film and animation to manifest the merging perspectives of a mourning mother and her aborted child.

The purpose of this paper is to rethink video artist Mark Leckey’s work Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999) in the light of the recent phenomenon of decades-old “old skool rave” videos posted, viewed and commented on, on YouTube. Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore fuses fragments of found footage from the 1970s Northern Soul movement to the early days of Acid House parties. Manipulating the speed of the decayed VHS tapes that constitute the source material, and creating a disjunction between the jerky images and the intrinsically disjointed sound, the video effectively evokes the malfunctioning memories of a “technostalgic” body – deeply affected by the audiovisual material yet unable to reproduce the original event.

Charlotte Higgins (2015) suggests that Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore “anticipated the YouTube generation’s easy manipulation of digital sources. It activated a painful yearning for a recent past just out of reach”. Posted on YouTube by the artist himself, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore can now also be said to constitute a part of a virtual community whose nostalgic discourse seems to clash with the very logic of the source material itself. As Simon Reynolds (2011) points out, rave culture’s ecstatic imperative of dancing into the future contradicts the nostalgic tendency that it developed nonetheless. As such, it is a powerful example of our culture’s obsession with its immediate past. In addition to discussing the videos, this paper will address the discursive laments for a “superior past” that dominate the YouTube comments, suggesting that this “retro” culture carries very specific corporeal implications.

Originally defined as a pathological condition, nostalgia has been reframed as a cultural geist. For Jean Baudrillard (2010), nostalgia for the real was precisely what fuelled its disappearance, while Fredric Jameson (1991) saw it as an affectless and depersonalised style. Digitisation has generated a specific “analog nostalgia” (Marks 2002) that has become an intrinsic component of popular culture. Laura U. Marks suggests that it expresses a “longing for analog physicality.” Paradoxically, nostalgia for bodily experience produced through the digital remediation of “old skool rave” videos is precisely what keeps the technostalgic viewer immobile in front of the screen. Engaging with these different definitions of nostalgia, the paper will thus suggest that Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore and the “old skool rave” videos produce technostalgic bodies that are stuck somewhere between a virtual Saint Vitus Dance and a veritable paralysis suggestive of a more general tendency of our culture and age.

The purpose of this paper is to engage with the problem of repetition in commodity culture, or what could be defined as "the constant reproduction of the same thing" (Adorno and Horkheimer 1979). From the Frankfurt School's critique of the "culture industry" to the postmodern nihilism of Jean Baudrillard, a discourse of cultural pessimism develops according to which the commodification of the new promises that nothing changes, we enter an era of "pseudo-cyclical time" (Debord 1983) to finally pass into a post-historical hyper-real "where things are being replayed ad infinitum" (Baudrillard 2007). Deleuze is hardly blind to the problem that the cultural pessimists formulate, but his stance is radically different towards it: he advances the thesis that difference (in) itself is life's (un)founding principle, and that the constant reproduction of the same thing is a mere surface effect. The notion of repetition is radically reformulated, becoming the profound process through which difference is made, and art is granted a crucial differentiating function. Subsequently, "there is no other aesthetic problem than that of the insertion of art into everyday life. The more our daily life appears standardised, stereotyped and subject to an accelerated reproduction of objects of consumption, the more art must be injected into it" (Deleuze 2004).

With the Wallander franchise reaching its 50th sequel and Beck about to appear in his 40th film, the "Swedish detective wonder" seems to be the realisation of the pessimists’ nightmare: Scandinavian crime fiction is a culture industry, if there ever was one. Acknowledging this (post)modern predicament, the paper will nevertheless take up on Deleuze's suggestion and investigate a curious case within this phenomenon: Måns Månssons highly idiosyncratic Hassel – The Private Investigators (2012). A roguish re-imagination of one of Swedish police fiction's most classical franchises, the film constitutes an artistic intervention into the seemingly unbreakable wave of Scandinavian crime fiction films – a covert work of conceptual art injected right into the channels of commercial distribution. Hassel is a film about replay ad infinitum, a "counter-actualisation" (Nilsson 2012) of the genre's action-driven, resolution-oriented logic. It follows a group of private investigators engaging in the endless re-enactment of historical events in order to solve the 30-year-old Palme murder. The film is packed with postmodern puns concerning the simulacral quality of their investigation and would thus seem to corroborate the pessimism of Baudrillard. The paper will nevertheless show how the aesthetic strategies taken by the filmmaker, including the choice to shoot the film on the obsolescent medium of S-VHS, push the film's mechanical repetitions to an unbearable point at which it breaks into the simultaneous expression of a seemingly insoluble problem and a potential solution to the very problem that it expresses.