In the aftermath of the MeToo movement, during an ongoing pandemic, and in the midst of repeated demands for a 50/50 split between men and women in above-the-line positions, this book analyzes and interrogates the politics of gender focusing on the Swedish film industry, often considered to be the most "gender equal" film industry worldwide. While this gender equality (with a considerable proportion of women behind the camera) is much due to policies carried out of the state funded Swedish Film Institute, women filmmakers in Sweden still struggle with the same problems as do women in other national film industries. These problems entail having smaller production and distribution budgets than men and working in an environment involving recurring scandals of gender discrimination and sexual harassment.

This open access book looks behind the statistics and explores the often complex cultural, legal, and political conditions under which women have entered a male-dominated industry and discusses women’s strategies and efforts to promote change while providing evidence on how women’s presence has challenged the industry by provoking critical reactions and introducing new ways to portray women on screen. Using a wide range of different sources (e.g. archival material, laws, contracts, films, biographical materials, and interviews), the book tells the history of the rise of gender equality efforts undertaken by the Swedish Film Institute and investigates women’s possibilities to manage the rights to their work. It offers compelling portraits of pioneering women who have worked in or in relation to the industry and looks at the experiences of women currently working in the film industry

Biografi över skådespelaren och revyartisten Åke Söderblom.

The film begins with an image of a map, a common feature in the 40s cinematic storytelling. It, anda shrunken head spooking in the lives of the main characters stand as a kind of metaphor for therelationship between the colonized continent and the ruling powers. The head may also beunderstood as a symbol for the secrets harbored by the leading female character, Lady Henrietta Flusky, played by Ingrid Bergman. It, namely might be understood as a Dorian Greyish portrait ofher life. When Lady Henrietta appears in the picture for the first time, she wears a flower in her hair,and the similar kind of flower is attached to the shrunken head. Also, in several pivotal scenes theskull and lady Henrietta’s head are juxtaposed close to each other as in a mirror. But the distortedskull may be even perceived as a theatre mask – a sign for a persona performed – and the characterdevelopment may be understood as a reflection on acting, disguise and performance.Below, my aim is to discuss the acting style of Ingrid Bergman as it appears in UnderCapricorn. In the many stories wrapped around Bergman’s public persona, a distinguishing featureis one-liners such as “It is not whether you really cry. It’s whether the audience thinks you arecrying”, or stories of how she was told to keep a blank face when insecure of how to express certainfeelings. In order to understand her interpretation of the role and the method to achieve it, a walkthrough the early Swedish theatre and cinema history might be of help. 

Following Miriam Hansen’s writings about the popular cinema, this study presents a hypothesis that the new medium of television in 1960s Sweden may be a form of ‘cultural horizon’ that enables multiple understandings and thus contributes to the popularity of the medium. The study focuses on a number of programmes where one of the most popular Swedish artists of the period, the jazz singer Monica Zetterlund, appears in performance. When these programmes are juxtaposed, contradictory features emerge that I suggest are pieces of a cultural horizon described by Hansen ‐ high/low, modern/traditional and international/vernacular ‐ that contributed to the evolution of Swedish television.

En översikt av Ingrid Bergmans inhemska och internationella karriär.

Birgit Tengroth var en beundrad skådespelerska som i slutet av 1940-talet sadlade om och blev  en skandalomsusad författare av självutlämnande böcker. Filmregissören Ingmar Bergman bearbetade hennes novellsamling Törst till en film som väckte debatt men blev föga uppskattad som konstnärlig produkt. 

Artikeln studerar mot bakgrund av två länders (Finland och Sverige) kulturella kontext ett filmexperiment där man utifrån exakt samma manuskript producerade två olika spelfilmer.