This article aims to make sense of My Son Hunter (The Unreported Story Society and Breitbart News, 2022; dir. Robert Davi). The first part of the analysis discusses My Son Hunter as an example of right-wing counter-cinema that tries to simultaneously tap into the cultural prestige associated with feature filmmaking and provide niche audiences with “paracinematic” pleasures. The second part of the analysis explores cinematic form and filmmaking techniques in My Son Hunter, demonstrating how the movie extends a promise of “truth” via an affective bombardment that draws on melodrama and paranoid fiction, as well as the flexible modes of docudramatic approximation. The overall effect is to make logic and argumentation superfluous, which is indicative of how the film can be regarded as both symptomatic and productive of a “post-truth” condition.

This article is a reflection on its author’s experiences in teaching American media at the Swedish Institute for American studies from 2015 to 2021. By way of concrete descriptions of classes taught and topics raised, Frykholm makes a case for an approach to popular media that looks beyond both an all-too-limited focus on “mass media” and the text-centric, hermeneutically based discussions about media representations that have otherwise been the most common way of engaging with media in American studies. The article also dis-cusses challenges of interdisciplinarity that are a key concern not only when teaching media, but for the field of American studies more broadly. © 2024, University Press of Southern Denmark. All rights reserved.

Focusing on the introduction of a new government film policy in 2017, this article explores how the audience for Swedish cinema – little-watched art films in particular – is conceptualized in the context of film policy and as a topic of debate within the Swedish film industry. The analysis shows that the new film policy contributes – against its own explicit aims – to reproducing a deep-seated distinction between ‘wide’ and ‘narrow’ films. In addition, Swedish film policy has yet to adapt to the conditions of today’s digital screen culture. As a result, ‘narrow films’ are subject to low audience expectations and a de facto lack of performance accountability. This, the article argues, could be more a blessing than a curse, suggesting a need to rethink the notion of ‘failure’ and to further explore the prospects of ‘failure studies’ in the context of Swedish cinema.

The editorial outlines our main reasons for bringing scholarly attention to the theme of Scandinavian art cinema and screen cultures in transition at this moment. It provides brief summaries of the issue’s five feature articles and presents some suggestions for further research on the topic. We stress the importance of taking gender into account in future studies and call for a closer dialogue and more mutual engagement between scholars of art cinema and scholars of digital media.

This article explores the discourse on gender, sexuality, and the modern woman in Hon, den enda (She, the Only One), a film released by Isepa, a subsidiary to AB Svensk Filmindustri (SF), in November 1926 with high hopes of revitalizing Swedish cinema. Well-received at the time, but quickly forgotten and little-known today, Hon, den enda offers an intriguing entry point into Swedish cinema's transformation in the late silent era, and into the ways in which modernity - the notion of the modern woman in particular - was articulated in Swedish cinema at that historical juncture. The article analyzes how qualities associated with the modern woman are distributed across Hon den enda's female characters, and how the film's ambiguous representation of the modern woman was part of a larger cultural negotiation concerning normative modern femininity that also informed the contexts of production, circulation, promotion, and reception.

This article explores how American cinema's global dominance during the silent era affected Sweden's film culture and industry. It focuses on the heated public debate about American movies that culminated in a 1926 parliamentary bill that called for an investigation into the allegedly detrimental impact of American cinema. The article analyzes the bill and the US government's response to it, as traced through diplomatic correspondence between the American legation in Stockholm and the State Department and the Department of Commerce in Washington, DC—all in an effort to uncover previously unexplored dimensions of Swedish film culture of the 1920s.

The raison d’être of the humanities is widely held to reside in its unique ability to generate critical thinking and critical thinkers. But what is “critical thinking?” Is it a generalized mode of reasoning or a form of political critique? How does it relate to discipline-specific practices of scholarly pursuit? How does it relate to discourses of “post-truth” and “alternative facts”? How is it best taught? This essay explores these issues via a case study of conceptualizations of critical thinking among cinema scholars at Stockholm University, whose views are interpreted against the backdrop of (a) debates about the value of the humanities; (b) higher education scholarship on critical thinking; and (c) the legacy of certain disciplinary traditions within cinema studies, especially the paradigms of “post-theory” and “political modernism.” The interviews attest to the persistence of critical thinking as a fundamental, yet highly elusive, concept to higher education in the arts and humanities.

This essay explores discourses on American quality serial television in Sweden’s leading newspapers, and how a gradual discursive repositioning of quality TV – from the extraordinary to the everyday – is linked to Swedish television’s transition into a screen culture increasingly dominated by commercial streaming services. The analysis of the newspaper material shows that the campaign to legitimate quality serial television as respectable art subsided after 2012, to give way to a wider set of conceptualizations of the program form and its role in Swedish television culture. Although the newspaper press includes a range of perspectives, from celebratory approaches to on-demand culture to concerns over audience atomization and diminishing artistic distinction, it is also possible to discern a more general reversal of terms – from originality to sameness, from scarcity to plentitude, and from distinction to mediocrity – that discursively relocates American quality serial TV from the sphere of extraordinary art to the sphere of everyday commercial mass culture. This discursive shift reflects a redefined field for cultural criticism, but also reads as an index of a transformation of television culture in Sweden in the wake of the breakthrough of commercial streaming around 2012.

In this article, I explore the reception of American "quality" serial television in Sweden from 1999 to the mid-2010s. My analysis includes how cultural critics and journalists writing for Sweden’s leading newspapers conceptualised American serial television as a "quality TV" and as legitimate "art", and it charts the ways in which these discourses relate to the reconfiguration of Swedish television from public service monopoly to niche-oriented multichannel system. The analysis uncovers a process of cultural consecration that was based on comparisons with already consecrated art forms, applications of authorship discourses that promote certain individuals as genius television auteurs, and deployment of critical protocols borrowed from literary criticism – all in service of pre-established cultural hierarchy and "good taste". This article also highlights the ubiquity of American quality serial television across the Swedish television landscape, which suggests that such programmes represent both a niche product and a mass phenomenon with extensive reach and multidimensional appeal.

Isepa AB was a short-lived subsidiary to Svensk Filmindustri set up in 1926 to produce a series of internationally co-produced films with a cosmopolitan appeal, all for the purpose of revitalizing the dwindling Swedish national cinema. What concept of national cinema did Isepa articulate? How did the project fit into the larger context of transnational film culture? And what does a reception history of the Isepa films – from enthusiasm to neglect and derision to rediscovery and reevaluation – reveal about biases and blind spots in the historiography of Swedish silent cinema?