Using examples from Swedish children’s films from different decades, this article studies the forms, the functions, and the implications of adopting a consistent child’s perspective in cinema for children. In the pursuit of depicting the world as perceived by a child, films such as Hugo and Josephine, The Eighth Day, and Zozo borrow aesthetics from art cinema, resulting in a narrative and cognitive ambiguity unusual for children’s cinema. For instance, without marking the shift from outer to inner reality, dreams, daydreams, imagination, and hyperbole are inserted into the story. Also, sound and image are occasionally asynchronous, highlighting thoughts and emotions in a sophisticated manner. Furthermore, the rendition of passing of time is often distorted by fragmentation and extension, portraying a child’s subjective sense of time. Taken together, the film techniques employed in these films form a cinematic mode referred to as a child’s expressive realism that emerged in Swedish children’s cinema in the late 1960s, at a time when novel notions of the child and child culture were developed. By combining the theoretical frameworks of childhood studies and cinema studies, the article argues that the rendering of a consistent child’s subjective perspective in film works well to highlight children’s subordinate position to adults in our culture. Consequently, it is argued, multifaceted and ambiguous children’s films carry a great potential to affirm children’s rights to both experience and express the whole range of possible emotions, as well as to acknowledge children as capable filmgoers. 

This article is an interdisciplinary study of the figure of the child in Ingmar Bergman’s Höstsonaten (Autumn Sonata) (1978), using theoretical perspectives from childhood studies within a cinema studies framing. By analysing the shifting roles of mother and daughter in this seldom-discussed film, the article demonstrates the on-screen child figure’s capacity to challenge society’s deep-rooted ideas of ‘child’ and ‘adult’, respectively, thereby exposing the inconstant nature of age categories. Drawing on contemporary childhood studies, I argue, using Autumn Sonata as an example, that the child figure in cinema bears a subversive potential for questioning power relations between generations as well as defying a chrono­normative notion of time and age. This reading contributes to a deepened ­awareness of the function of the on-screen child figure, not least transferable to Bergman’s cinematic work. It also sheds light on the mutable connections between fictional children and central conceptions of childhood in contemporary society.

This chapter introduces the history, ideology, and aesthetics of national children’s cinema in Sweden, where children’s films have been produced for over a century, received state support for 70 years, and been richly awarded at international film festivals throughout the years. Despite its long and rich history, though, children’s film in Sweden has notably lower status than other genres of films, and this is especially prominent within academia. 

The chapter covers the important movements of Swedish children’s cinema – including the rascal films of the 1920s, the folkhem era of the 1940s and 1950s, the groundbreaking culture for children of the late 1960s and 1970s, the nostalgic era of the 1980s, and the child-empowering films of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Some of the most important writers and directors of children’s film are introduced, and the development of domestic cinema is discussed in regards to societal change. Changing notions of children and childhood are particularly important to be able to understand the forms, functions, and the impact of children’s cinema in a nation where children’s rights have been high on the agenda ever since the well-known reformist pedagogue Ellen Key declared the 2000s to be the ‘century of the child’. The chapter also shortly discusses the long history of film education in Sweden, as well as the great difficulties that contemporary children’s film faces. 

In conclusion, the 14 chapters of the edited collection Swedish Children’s Cinema: History, Ideology and Aesthetics are introduced.

Swedish children’s cinema has a long and rich history, encompassing the ‘rascal’ films of the 1920s, the realism of the 1940s, the ambitious artistic renewal of the 1970s, and the child-empowerment films of the 1990s through the early 2000s—as well as the multiple, exceedingly popular, Astrid Lindgren adaptations across the decades. Devoted to exploring this cinematographic legacy, Swedish Children’s Cinema offers close readings across academic disciplines, probing various genres, eras, media debates, transmediations, and audience receptions. Childhood studies, with its critical comprehension of society’s changing notions of childhood, here serves as a key framework in fruitful combination with, inter alia, feminist, queer, intermedial, postcolonial, and eco-critical perspectives. This collection fills an important gap in the literature on Swedish film history as well as the distinctly Nordic tradition of children’s culture, and thereby contributes to the burgeoning field of international children’s cinema research. It is introduced with a foreword by acclaimed director Mark Cousins.

David Buckingham's Youth on Screen. Representing Young People in Film and Television tries, and to a great extent succeeds to, really get to the heart of the problem of representing young people on screen. This means that it puts into question the very concepts of the youth and representation. The youth, Buckingham soon establishes, is constructed and defined by adults and reinforced by cultural media like films and television, which implies that youth film as a genre not only is created for a young audience, it also actually creates the young audience as a specific age category with certain attributes, prerequisites and needs. 

To sum up, Youth on Screen is a rich, fertile and important read for anyone interested in children and youth, film and television, culture and society—as well as the relations and motions in between. As the author himself notes, it is a comprehensive, but far from all-encompassing, study, and there are numerous more themes, nations and film and television titles worthy of attention. 

Swedish cinema for a young audience has a strong tradition of portraying children as subjects, i. e.  round characters, with some degree of complexity and undergoing certain development. Less noticed is the tendency in many children's films to challenge the paramount idea of childhood as a period of life characterized by innocence. This is carried out through several thematic and aesthetic ways, of which the depiction of the subversive child is the most apparent. 

This paper identifies this figure as someone who challenges our society's strict division between childhood and adulthood, often referred to as the generational order. It focuses upon child figures that transgress the norms of childhood in different ways. For example, in The War Game (2017), Malte behaves like a military strategist inspired by John Nash, and in The Girl, the Mother, and the Demons (2016), Ti acts like a parent to her mother. By hereby suggesting that children have a huge potential, they both address the unstable and fluid quality of age. And thus, they also, indirectly, challenge the power relations that is the foundation of the generational order.

The theoretical framework of this paper is interdisciplinary, deriving from cinema studies as well as childhood studies. By intercrossing these research fields, children's film is illuminated as a potentially subversive arena, where not only the innocence of childhood, but the very concept of childhood, might be called into question. 

Antologin bygger på föreläsningar, presentationer och samtal under Centrum för barnkulturforsknings årliga tredagarssymposium våren 2020. Här ingår texter om berättelsens oväntade och vinlande vägar genom konstformer och mediesystem - om versioner, adaptioner, transformationer och kulturekologi - samt om barnens användning av dem i olika miljöer såsom hemma, på förskolan, skolgården, konsthallen och biblioteket.

Texten reflekterar kring frågor som Hur kan vi förstå barns kultur- och medievanor i dag? Varför tycker vuxna så ofta att de ungas fritid ägnas åt "fel" saker? Vad är sig likt och olikt från tidigare generationer? Och varför återkommer ständigt vissa figurer och motiv i barnkulturen?

Artikeln ifrågasätter vedertagna "sanningar" om barns relationer till medier och visar hur den offentliga debatten och inte minst traditionella medier ger en förenklad och missvisande bild av barns medieanvändning. Texten utgår ifrån aktuell forskning och barnkonventionens artikel 17 om barns rätt till information.