This paper relates to an archive project where I try to map and to contextualize the appearance, in the Swedish television of the sixties and seventies, of international solidarity films and in-house productions made to sympathize with political movements and resistance to war and imperialism all around the world.[1] The Swedish case belongs to a transnational media history of committed documentaries, distributed for and beyond television during the period of 1965-75. In terms of national TV history, the radical broadcasting culture asks for special attention, because here the activist scene and the public, regulated sphere of television did overlap in fascinating ways.

"I would like to make ”solidarity”, in the sense of a unifying purpose, the point of departure and to do so in concert with a more general reflection on the crucial combine of agency and affect in solidarity films, and the challenges of both filmmakers and scholars engaged in projects to commemorate a political past, to represent, re-enact, narrate past events, and to imagine moments of collective resistance and uprisings. In a TV-interview for the Swedish Radio, filmed at the Venice Film Festival in 1966, Gillo Pontecorvo reflects on the revolutionary event and the imaginative and symbolical aspect of its political enactment in cinema:

We live in times of change and in a moment that witness the birth of new nations. Everything is possible. A social movement may develop and grow underground, it may be defeated and everything, but in the moment it really gets started, it is like a river that may flow and apparently disappear but which eventually, no matter what, it will reach the ocean. This is actually the rational subject of the film. The emotional theme of the film is this moving, shared direction towards one specific goal. This collective passion, the hope and the despair – this I found to be the most fascinating.

In 1967, the film was, together with solidarity films such as Far From Vietnam, of great importance for the Vietnam movement in Sweden and elsewhere. In March 1972, it was typically part of the films selected and programmed for the second, recently opened, TV channel of the Swedish Radio. Reviewers acknowledged the film in terms of its “notable documentary style”, “its brutal power and invoked authenticity which makes it one of the most important political-historical re-enactments ever.”

The years of 1967 and 1972, here symbolically introduced by the release and transmission of The Battle of Algiers, will in the following be singled out as historical nodes of specific importance for an account of war witnessing, agency, and regulation in the Swedish context of solidarity programming.