Welcome Home Mr Swanson by Ann-Kristin Wallengren

Author:Ann-Kristin Wallengren
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789187675133
Publisher: Nordic Academic Press
Published: 2014-09-08T00:00:00+00:00

Heritage films

Even when they were writing about feature films rather than Sweden films, the newspapers concentrated on the accounts of Sweden’s nature, folklore, festivities, and times gone by instead of a film’s plot or production values. This was at its most obvious when it came to the films of Sweden’s cinematic golden age, but it remained true long after. For that reason it seems appropriate to call them ‘heritage films’, although Per Olov Qvist argues that they could equally well be called ‘rural films’.76 Heritage films are part of the film culture of most nations, and as a genre have been discussed at length by Andrew Higson.77 Such films are made in order to participate in the creation of a common national heritage—‘a genre of film which reinvents and reproduces, and in some cases simply invents, a national heritage for the screen’—and are often based on literary works that are already accepted in the national canon.78 The landscape is a frequent stylistic element in a heritage film: ‘One central representational strategy of the heritage film is the reproduction of literary texts, artefacts, and landscapes which already have a privileged status within the accepted definition of the national heritage.’79 Britain’s heritage films, which usually have an aristocratic setting, first took off in 1910s, and were later essential for the British film renaissance of the 1980s and 1990s—think only of A Room With A View (James Ivory, 1985) and Howards End (James Ivory, 1992). It was the same in France during this period, with Jean de Florette (Claude Berri, 1986) perhaps the prime example.80 This sort of nostalgic film was very popular in France for exactly the same reasons that rural films had once been popular in Sweden—concerns about modernization and major industrial change, and a wish to recreate a lost era. For Swedish Americans in the US, the heritage films of the 1920s became an important factor in how they remembered Sweden and, crucially, how they wanted to build their new identity.

The first time a Swedish feature film was screened for Swedish Americans in the US was in February 1919, when Victor Sjöström’s Tösen från Stormyrtorpet was shown in the Aryan Grotto Temple in Chicago.81 It was screened several times over the course of a week, each time with performances by a Swedish vocal trio and accompanied by Meck’s Orchestra. At this time, the advertisements for Swedish film showings in the Swedish American press were often large, with considerable amounts of text and pictures. The advertisement for Tösen från Stormyrtorpet accentuated both its local and Swedish flavour; the title alone breathed nostalgia. Having noted that the film was shot in Dalarna—the local element—it continued ‘Come and see a genuine Swedish spectacle. Come and see the most beautiful scenery in our old homeland. Come see the simple hut in the wilderness and the affluent farmer’s grand farm. Come see a poignant scene in a Swedish courtroom. Come and see the bridal party in their wedding finery, their boats decorated with leafy branches, and the wedding feast.

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