Paris Looks to the North: Swedish Silent Film and the Emergence of Cinephilia

This chapter explores how the films of Swedish filmmakers Mauritz Stiller and Victor Sjöström were central to the efforts of 1920s French film critics to elevate the status of film to the level of high or modernist art. French audiences passionate about their film taste resisted the changes to their cinema-going habits and were very vocal about their preference for popular cinema. These moments of protest reveal powerful alternative strains of popular film culture amidst which the French First Wave critic-­‐filmmakers were trying to win over audiences and educate the general public using the example of Sweden as a model for “true film art.” This chapter provides an account of the violent rejection of several Swedish films by contemporary French audiences as passionate in their resistance to “artistic” films as they were in their defense of the familiar faces of Hollywood imports and French popular cinema.

Victor Sjöström in Wild Strawberries

A discussion of Victor Sjöström in Wild Strawberries

Slasher in the Snow: The Rise of the Low-Budget Nordic Horror Film

Arguably, the horror film is the most frowned upon film genre, perhaps only surpassed by the porn film. Historically, the horror film has often been seen by Nordic film critics and film censors since the 1930s as something foreign or as yet another sign of unlawful Americanisation. Although the production of genre films has been prominent among all Nordic film industries ever since the silent film period, these genre films have mostly consisted of comedies and, especially in recent years, crime and detective films. The Nordic horror film in all its shapes and forms has been an anomaly in the Nordic countries, and this argument does not include the somewhat anachronistic genre labelling of films such as The Phantom Chariot (Körkarlen, Victor Sjostrom, 1921) and The Vampire (Vampyr, Carl Theodore Dreyer, 1932).