The Cultural Practice of Immigrant Filmmaking

John Sundholm, Lars Gustaf Andersson

Description

Based on a research project funded by the Swedish Research Council, this book analyses 40 years of post-war independent immigrant filmmaking in Sweden. John Sundholm and Lars Gustaf Andersson consider the creativity that lies in the state of exile, offering analyses of over 50 rarely seen immigrant films that would otherwise remain invisible and unarchived. They shed light on the complex web of personal, economic and cultural circumstances around migrant filmmaking, and discuss associations that became important sites of self-organization for exiled filmmakers: The Independent Film Group, The Stockholm Film Workshop, Cineco, Kaleidoscope and Tensta Film Association.

Using an innovative combination of key film theory, The Cultural Practice of Immigrant Filmmaking studies immigrant filmmaking in a transnational context, exploring how immigrant filmmakers use film to find a place in a new cultural situation.

The e-book of this work is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND. To view a copy of the licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Open Access PDF of this title is available from OAPEN, at this link - The Cultural Practice of Immigrant Filmmaking. 

Introduction: The Cultural Practice of Immigrant Filmmaking

Film and Theory

Minor cinemas, the public sphere and the production of locality

Migration and diaspora: Notes on recent research

Outline of the book                      

Chapter 1: Migrants’ Minor Cinemas: Beyond Accented and Exilic Cinema

Accented cinema          

Minor cinema

Beyond textual models of the accented and exilic         

Chapter 2: Conditions of Production: Immigrant’s Associations and Workshops in Sweden   

Immigration and culture in post-war Sweden

Establishing experimental film culture: The Independent Film Group 

Immigrant film as cultural policy: The Stockholm Film Workshop

The momentary agency: Cineco (Cinecooperativo)

To be or not to be a filmmaker: Kaledioscope

Do it yourself: The Tensta Film Association

The production of film, the production of experience and the public

Chapter 3: From Avant-garde to Communion: Ten Films by Immigrant Filmmakers in Sweden             

Fabulations in the minor key                                           

Study 1 (Awakening) by Peter Weiss (1952)                                  

Alone by the Tensta Film Association (1974)                               

Do You Want to Join Me, Martha? by the Tensta Film Association (1980)

Interference by Maureen Paley (1977)                                         

The Earthman by Muammer Özer (1980)                         

The Mirage by Guillermo Álvarez/Cineco (1981)                         

The Sea is Far Away by Reza Bagher (1983)                                

The Promise by Menelaos Carayannis (1984)                               

The Waiting by Myriam Braniff (1989)                                        

Five Minutes for the Souls of America by César Galindo (1992)                

Projecting a public, creating a context                                          

Chapter 4: The Cultural Practice of Minor Immigrant Cinema Archiving

The archival life of cinema

The archival trajectories of the immigrant films             

The Stockholm Film Workshop and immigrant filmmaking 

Performing accidental archives 

Dispostif in the making, palimpsests of minor histories and the politics of recognition                  

Conclusion: Immigrant Filmmaking as Minor Cinema Practice                    

Sujets

• Genres
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Película fotográfica
• General officer
• Library
• History of Europe
• Documentary film
• General
• Cultural Studies
• Migration
• ART
• Film
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 30 avril 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781789380606
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2019 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2019 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library.
Copy editor: MPS Technologies
Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas
Cover image: Kaleidoscope. Poster for short film programme, 1983. Courtesy of Muammer Özer
Production manager: Amy Rollason
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978–1–78320–986–6
ePDF ISBN: 978–1–78938–053–8
ePUB ISBN: 978–1–78938–060–6
Printed and bound by Short Run Press, UK.
This is a peer-reviewed publication.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) Licence. To view a copy of the licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Contents

Foreword
David E. James
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Cultural Practice of Immigrant Filmmaking
Film and theory
Minor cinemas, the public sphere and the production of locality
Migration and diaspora: Notes on recent research
Outline of the book
Chapter 1: Migrants’ Minor Cinemas: Beyond Accented and Exilic Cinema
Accented cinema
Minor cinema
Beyond textual models of the accented and exilic
Chapter 2: Conditions of Production: Immigrant’s Associations and Workshops in Sweden
Immigration and culture in post-war Sweden
Establishing experimental film culture: The Independent Film Group
Immigrant film as cultural policy: The Stockholm Film Workshop
The momentary agency: Cineco (Cinecooperativo)
To be or not to be a filmmaker: Kaleidoscope
Do it yourself: The Tensta Film Association
The production of film, the production of experience and the public
Chapter 3: From Avant-Garde to Communion: Ten Films by Immigrant Filmmakers in Sweden
Fabulations in the minor key
Studie 1 (Uppvaknandet) by Peter Weiss (1952)
Monos by the Tensta Film Association (1974)
Vill du följa med mig Martha? by the Tensta Film Association (1980)
Interference by Maureen Paley (1977)
Jordmannen by Muammer Özer (1980)
Hägringen by Guillermo Álvarez (1981)
Havet är långt borta by Reza Bagher (1983)
Löftet by Menelaos Carayannis (1984)
La espera by Myriam Braniff (1989)
Fem minuter för Amerikas döda/Pichqa minutukuna ilaqtanchispi wanuqkunamanta by César Galindo (1992)
Projecting a public, creating a context
Chapter 4: The Cultural Practice of Minor Immigrant Cinema Archiving
The archival life of cinema
The archival trajectories of the immigrant films
The Stockholm Film Workshop and immigrant filmmaking
Performing accidental archives
Dispositif in the making, palimpsests of minor histories and the politics of recognition
Conclusion: Immigrant Filmmaking as Minor Cinema Practice
Bibliography
Filmography
Names Index
Film Index
Subject Index
Foreword

David E. James
Beginning soon after the birth of the seventh art, a series of acclaimed Swedish directors, actors and cinematographers worked in an arresting and immediately recognizable landscape to create one of the world’s most prominent national cinemas. Its global influence was promoted by the emigration of many illustrious artists to other countries in Europe and to the United States. Before the Second World War, Victor Sjöström’s and Greta Garbo’s work in Hollywood paved the way for the post-war international reputation of Ingmar Bergman, Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson and Sven Nykvist in one register and Vilgot Sjöman and Bo Widerberg in another. More recently, the success of Män som hatar kvinnor ( The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo ) and subsequent adaptations of Stieg Larsson’s ‘Millennium’ series of novels again prove Sweden to be a seminal cinematic wellspring. For several generations of cinephiles across the world, ‘Svensk Filmindustri’ has been one of the best known and best loved logos on the silver screen.
But overshadowed by this cultural dissemination and largely unknown outside Sweden have been cultural passages in the opposite direction: the work of immigrants who, finding more or less secure refuge there, used cinema to envision their lives as newcomers in a foreign land. Subtending this history has been the country and its people’s unusually generous and humane treatment of the foreign dispossessed. Escapees from Nazi Germany were followed by European migrant workers and political refugees in 1950s and 1960s; and in the present century asylum seekers from the Middle East have been admitted in large numbers that, according to some accounts, have given Sweden more political refugees per capita than any other European country. The history of this immigration and attempts to integrate the foreign-born have not always been entirely successful or peaceful; but nevertheless within it a substantial number of settlers have used film to comprehend and realize new lived experiences of both arrival and estrangement. Retrospectively, their films may be seen within longstanding, if less recognized, traditions of Swedish avant-garde, non-commodity cinema, substantially independent of the globally acclaimed feature film industry. These have recently been comprehensively documented in a definitive account of the interactions between a national avant-garde and its international context in the book, A History of Swedish Experimental Film Culture: From Early Animation to Video Art , by Lars Gustaf Andersson, John Sundholm and Astrid Söderbergh Widding (2010).
It is within the context of this seminal historical recovery that The Cultural Practice of Immigrant Filmmaking by Andersson and Sundholm finds its own location. It is historiographically groundbreaking, for both native and immigrant Swedes and for the wider international readership that it undoubtedly merits. Its core is an account of five of the film workshops used by immigrants over a period of forty years from the early 1950s to the early 1990s, along with reference to more than fifty films and their makers and close readings of ten significant films made by immigrants.
Its introduction of a cinema all but entirely unknown, except to its immediate practitioners, is not only subtended by meticulous empirical research, but also framed within theoretical innovations that extend well beyond the immediate subject matter. Accordingly, the book begins by surveying its received methodological context, the mostly Anglophone theories of minority and immigrant filmmaking. Returning to Zuzana M. Pick’s work on émigré Chilean cinema, it proposes that the diverse stylistic features of films made by immigrants must be understood in relation to the various conditions of their production, which, in the Swedish case, span the gamut from amateur to fully professional. As its title indicates, it takes as the object of its study not only those film texts made by immigrants, but the totality of immigrant cinemas and their contexts: the inter-articulated network of historically determinate institutions that enabled the films’ production, distribution, reception and even theorization. In this, The Cultural Practice of Immigrant Filmmaking transcends the problematical hypostatization of a universalized ‘exilic’ cinema and the understanding of displaced artists as determined by the contexts lost to them. Rather, the authors emphasize their re-placement : the new places they have found and with them the cultural practices in which they have to a greater or lesser degree found themselves.
Acknowledgements

This book is the result of the research project, ‘The Cultural Practice of Immigrant Filmmaking’, funded by the Swedish Research Council. During the years we worked on the project, we benefitted from the generous help and assistance of many people and institutions. The National Library agreed to make first-hand digital scans of the films that we had collected, and in those cases when these scans were not fast enough we could always count on Mats Lundell, the master projectionist and technician, who constitutes a minor cinema institution in himself. Filmform, the Swedish Archive of Film and Video, has been another important partner for this project. The collaboration with the Swedish Film Institute in its various capacities – the film archive, the library and the cinematheque – has been instrumental for both the research and the output. When we reached the stage in which we began to screen and programme the films, we found many new as well as unexpected partners: the Göteborg International Film Festival, Konsthall C, Film i samtidskonsten and the Nordic Film Days (Lübeck). Thanks to Anna-Karin Larsson at Filmform, some of the films have already been granted an archival and digital afterlife. Thanks to Bart van der Gaag, films not yet digitized came to life and images captured, and our colleague Miguel Fernández Labayen has always been there with swift responses when we needed help with material in Spanish. But the most important collaborators are of course the filmmakers themselves who kindly agreed to be interviewed and who provided us with prints, paper-clippings, invaluable information, anecdotes, translations and, above all, intriguing and precious conversations. Thank you to Babis Tsokas, César Galindo, Guillermo Álvarez, Maureen Paley, Menelaos Carayannis, Muammer Özer, Reza Bagher, Sergio Castilla and Synnöve Özer. Unfortunately, Myriam Braniff is no longer with us, but her son Felipe Braniff generously provided us with information. Without these filmmakers – driven by passion, self-will and belief incinema – the films would never have been made, and therefore our book would not exist.
Parts and versions of the material in this book have been published in various journals during the research process, in particular the following co-written articles: ‘Spaces of becoming: The Stockholm Film Workshop as a transnational site of film production’ (2015); ‘Accented cine