Women’s Film Histories in Scandinavia: Historiography, Screenwriting and Costume explores the role of women in Scandinavian cinema from the silent-film era to the present day. Whereas film scholarship has traditionally focused on directors or actors, this collection examines other contributors to film production, offering fresh perspectives on women’s creative work in the industry. The book centers on two professions in which women have been notably active throughout film history: costume design and screenwriting. These roles occupy different positions in film culture and production, and by bringing them together, the collection highlights women’s significance in film history in both distinct and complementary ways. Screenwriters have at times enjoyed relatively high status and, in certain historical contexts, have even been regarded as the primary creators of a film. Costume designers, by contrast, often belong to the more invisible members of a production team—classified as “below the line.” In addition to discussions on costume work and screenwriting, the book includes a section addressing historiographical questions concerning women’s place in film history. Many of the women examined here are previously unknown or understudied figures, but the analysis also sheds new light on more familiar names such as Asta Nielsen and Astrid Lindgren. By illuminating women’s contributions beyond the conventional focus on directors and actors, Women’s Film Histories in Scandinavia presents women’s film history as an alternative way of writing the history of cinema.

On Stina Bergman's contribution to Swedish Industry in the 1940s.  

Women’s Film Histories in Scandinavia: Historiography, Screenwriting and Costume explores the role of women in Scandinavian cinema from the silent-film era to the present day. Whereas film scholarship has traditionally focused on directors or actors, this collection examines other contributors to film production, offering fresh perspectives on women’s creative work in the industry. The book centers on two professions in which women have been notably active throughout film history: costume design and screenwriting. These roles occupy different positions in film culture and production, and by bringing them together, the collection highlights women’s significance in film history in both distinct and complementary ways. Screenwriters have at times enjoyed relatively high status and, in certain historical contexts, have even been regarded as the primary creators of a film. Costume designers, by contrast, often belong to the more invisible members of a production team—classified as “below the line.” In addition to discussions on costume work and screenwriting, the book includes a section addressing historiographical questions concerning women’s place in film history. Many of the women examined here are previously unknown or understudied figures, but the analysis also sheds new light on more familiar names such as Asta Nielsen and Astrid Lindgren. By illuminating women’s contributions beyond the conventional focus on directors and actors, Women’s Film Histories in Scandinavia presents women’s film history as an alternative way of writing the history of cinema.

The small Swedish island of Fårö in the Baltic Sea, where Ingmar Bergman lived for part of his life and shot several important films, has over the past decade become a place of cinematic tourism based around the heritage of the director. With Bergman tourism as a case in point, this chapter reflects on the memory of the famed auteur and art cinema history in a contemporary context of film-related tourism. By focusing on a particular, famous case of art house cinema tourism, the chapter adds to new and alternative perspectives not only on Bergman as auteur but also on cinematic tourism at large, a field mainly preoccupied with more overtly commercial, typically Hollywood-related, movie culture. Bergman's modernist nature and landscape aesthetics, far beyond classical touristic landscapes, is reflected in how his characters perceive the environment.

This study examines film adaptation practices in Swedish classical cinema from the 1930s to the 1960s, drawing primarily on data from the archives of the Swedish Film Institute. It focuses on transcultural adaptations, defined as adaptations based on source materials originating from a different cultural context than the adaptation. The analysis explores the prevalence of transcultural adaptations compared to those based on domestic originals, provides an overview of the linguistic or cultural spheres that the originals derive from, and outlines the extent to which the stories are adjusted to the Swedish context in the adaptation process. The aim is to examine underexplored aspects of transculturalism in a smaller European film industry, which has typically been studied in terms of national identity and its relationship to a national literary tradition.

Astrid Lindgren is primarily regarded as a literary author, yet this overshadows the fact that her stories were-and continue to be-produced in continuous transformation between art and media forms. Her characters and stories migrate between radio, theater, comics, novels, and picture books and in most cases Lindgren herself-in collaboration with illustrators, songwriters, film directors, etc.-is the main author of all these various adaptations. This study discusses the movement across media in Lindgren’s work with a particular focus on the film medium. The point of departure are the early film productions from the mid-1950s, namely, Rasmus and the Vagabond (Luffaren och Rasmus 1955), Rasmus, Pontus and Toker (Rasmus, Pontus och Toker 1956), and The Master Detective Lives Dangerously (Mästerdetektiven lever farligt 1957). These three films were initially made for radio, which provides an entry point into the relationship between film and audio media in Lindgren’s filmmaking and storytelling, a relationship that continues to define her work throughout her career. The material is approached from a perspective of transmedia storytelling in which the media versions of the story are regarded as an expansion of a larger fictional universe across multiple platforms without having an origin in any of them. In contrast to most adaptations and transmedia studies, the material of this analysis is not limited to the finished media products but also includes the drafts and notes of the early phases of the filmmaking process.

Ingress: Karin Boye lika mycket på utbildningsfilmernas inverkan på folkhemmet som på fascismens framväxt när hon skrev Kallocain? Anna Sofia Rossholm har läst Johan Klingborgs Verkar film: 1930-talslitteraturen i det svenska filmnätverket, en avhandling som ger en ny bild av hur filmen präglade den tidens litterära sfär. 

Klimatförändringen väcker frågor om vilka möjligheter vi egentligen har att gestalta en planetär verklighet bortom det mänskliga.

Through a case study analysis, this article suggests that women’s screen-writing in Sweden in the 1940s eluci-dates important aspects of cinematic authorship in relation to cultural hierarchies and gender. The analysis consists of a contextualized reading of the 1942 film Fallet Ingegerd Bremssen (‘The Ingegerd Bremssen case’), based on Dagmar Edqvist’s psychological novel about a rape and its after-effects, with a screenplay writ-ten by the author herself. A textual adaptation analysis – focusing on the screenwriting style and how the woman’s perspective and experience in the novel is transformed in the adaptation – is contextualized against the historical backdrop of the changes in screenwriting practices during this period as well as of the critical reception of the film.