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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 cinema and beyond: Latin American minor cinemas in Sweden 1970–1990’ (2016); and ‘The cultural practice of minor cinema archiving: The case of immigrant filmmakers in Sweden’ (2017).

Introduction

The Cultural Practice of Immigrant Filmmaking

Film has usually been approached as an object, a finalized artefact. It is, however, an abstraction to consider the film as a stable object and not as yet another point in the cultural process of cinema altogether. To approach film as a process implies not only that you are writing a particular film’s history by tracing its trajectory from production to public, but also that the film in question is considered as a part of an ongoing practice, and not just as an end result. Film is thus seen as a way of acting in the world, hence the name of this book, The Cultural Practice of Immigrant Filmmaking.

During our research it has become evident that for the newly arrived immigrant filmmaker – amateur, professional or semi-professional – film constituted a doubly marginalized and exceptional production. In Sweden there was a lack of understanding of the cultural and political dimensions of being in exile and living in a diasporic situation. This partly explains why immigrant filmmaking seldom received appropriate resources for making films that would fit into one of the two categories that divided Swedish state film policy from the 1960s until the 1980s: to either provide art or constitute commerce (see Andersson and Sundholm 2011). And, because immigrant cinema was foremost a form of filmmaking in which mission mattered the most, the established film critics struggled with the works.

That film critics were not prepared to encounter immigrant films and immigrant filmmaking can be seen from the reception of the feature film Consuelo (1988). The film was directed and written by exilic Chilean filmmaker Luis R. Vera, who arrived in Sweden in 1980 after graduating from film school in Bucharest. Vera’s trajectory was common at the time – many filmmakers from Latin America or African countries went to film schools in the Eastern Bloc (and Cuba) during the Cold War.

Consuelo was a film that aspired to be part of the established Swedish film culture and Vera received almost all the resources needed for making a full feature film. It was shot on 35 mm and was co-funded by up to seven different companies and organizations, among them the Swedish Film Institute (SFI) and Swedish Public Television (SVT). The storyline is archetypal for exilic cinema and tells of Manuel, a refugee from Chile who is trying to find a place for himself in Stockholm. Eventually he falls in love, but the day he reads in a newspaper that political amnesty is granted in Chile he starts to long to return, and it turns out that he has left a fiancée behind in Valparaiso. Gradually, Manuel drifts away in his thoughts and his Swedish girlfriend gets tired of him being mentally absent, displaced, and always longing for Chile. Eventually Manuel leaves, only to learn that he is now a foreigner in Chile too.

Figure 1: Luis R. Vera, Consuelo, 1988. 35 mm. Courtesy of Swedish Film Institute.

Consuelo received mostly negative reviews from leading Swedish film critics. One critic began his review with the ambivalent remark that the subject of the film was perhaps not as marginal as one might think, because 20,000 Chilean refugees actually do reside in Sweden (Schiller 1988).[1] Another critic wrote that a project like Vera’s is without doubt praiseworthy but fails in depicting the true ideological similarities between Chile and Sweden, namely the current and pervasive commercialization of society (Hjertén 1988). A third opinion held that the depiction of Chile was lively, whereas the representation of Sweden was superficial (Kindblom 1988). Hence, critics were not able to accept an outsider’s perspective on their own context and country, but did not hesitate to have opinions about how Valparaiso in Chile was depicted. Vera’s feature film exemplifies that, if the production of immigrant films was minor and marginal due to a lack of appropriate resources, it was also minor and marginal in content due to a lack of an appropriate context. Consuelo confirms this, paradoxically, as it is a film that constitutes an exception because of its funding (having almost a normal, appropriate budget) and format (being feature film length). It looked like a proper film, but had the wrong mission.[2]

One of the main assumptions behind this book is that film and filmmaking constitute a cultural practice, and are ways for the immigrants to find a context for themselves. Film is a language that is beyond national languages. With film you are able to negotiate and articulate who you are and where you are, and to address an audience struggling with similar questions. Another basic assumption concerns film theory, namely the work we do when we do film theory. We will argue that film theory should be considered provisional and interventional. Film theory is thus neither method nor hypothesis, but a language established in order to make sense of things and to participate and act. Thus, our aim with this book is to intervene in national film historiography with the intention to highlight transnational strands, to give credit to those immigrant filmmakers who made films in Sweden under demanding conditions, and to establish a language that is able to give the immigrant filmmakers, the films, and their work significance. These assumptions and our principal aim imply a new way of looking at the corpus of films that we are studying and thus create a new context for understanding, as well as framework for approaching and analysing immigrant filmmaking and immigrant film. The archival findings and the empirical material that are presented in this book have hitherto not been collected and assembled as objects of scholarly attention.

The book contains a study of five workshops or associations that became instrumental for the immigrant filmmakers in Sweden: Arbetsgruppen för film (The Independent Film Group, 1950–72), Filmverkstan (The Stockholm Film Workshop, 1973–2001), Cineco (Cinecooperativo, 1976–83), Kaleidoscope (1981–88), and Tensta filmförening (Tensta Film Association, 1974–88). We have collected all material available in connection to these workshops and associations: minutes, paper-clippings, films, reviews, as well as interviewed the filmmakers and other collaborators. In some cases the films were lost; sometimes the only available copy was a poor U-matic transfer or digital copy. Some of the filmmakers had passed away or disappeared; the diverse and exceptional condition of the material reflected the actual position of the minor film culture in question. We have used this material to write the history – or rather the histories – of the five workshops and associations, trying to provide answers to questions such as: why were these organizations formed? by whom? what types of films were made? where were they shown? how was the reception? As the material was limited, but so rich when it came to film aesthetics and questions regarding cultural policy and organization, it became important for us to approach these production sites as examples of a cultural practice as such. The five workshops and associations posed fundamental questions about film theory and film historiography: questions of how migrant and immigrant filmmaking had been approached, of film aesthetics, and of how these constituted the politics of film archiving and film programming. The material indicated that immigrant filmmaking was far more than just the films and thus the research output also had to be larger than what usually comprises academic dissemination. A cultural practice indeed.

Of the five organizations that we have studied, the Stockholm Film Workshop had the greatest resources. The workshop was founded by SFI and SVT and worked as a body outside the established organizations, which anyone who wanted to make a film that was not aimed directly for trade could approach.[3] The Stockholm Film Workshop became one of the most important institutions for independent, substandard (16 mm) short-film production in Sweden, and in particular for women and immigrant filmmakers. The Independent Film Group was established as an association for producing and promoting experimental film. Today, the association still exists as Filmform, a national archive and distributor of artists’ films and video. Cineco and Tensta Film Association, on the other hand, were both organizations for producing film. Cineco produced only two finished films, both shot on 16 mm and with Colombian Guillermo Álvarez as the driving force. The Tensta Film Association grew out of a project at a youth recreation centre in the neighbourhood of Tensta, located in northern Stockholm, a suburb with a large proportion of immigrants. The driving force behind this association was the Greek immigrant Charalampos (Babis) Tsokas, who later made the Tensta Film Association into his own production hub.

Among our five associations and workshops, Kaleidoscope was the one that had an organization that was based exclusively on the idea of helping and promoting immigrant filmmakers. Kaleidoscope arranged festivals for immigrant filmmakers, provided them with help to produce films, and acted as an organized interest group towards the influential public institutions for filmmaking in Sweden. The most influential ones among the public bodies were the two giants that funded the Stockholm Film Workshop: the aforementioned SFI and SVT. It was the Turkish filmmaker Muammer Özer who was the driving force and central person behind Kaleidoscope. Özer made his first short films in Sweden with subsidies from the Stockholm Film Workshop.

Our study of the abovementioned organizations implies that we cover about forty years of post-war independent immigrant filmmaking in Sweden, and more than fifty individual films and their makers. Many of these have remained invisible because some of the films have not been archived due to their status as minor cinema artefacts produced outside established circuits, and in addition, sometimes also shot in foreign languages and even with unfamiliar aesthetics.

Film and theory

In his preface to Projecting a Camera: Language-Games in Film Theory, Edward Branigan quotes Gilles Deleuze’s well-known last page of Cinema 2: The Time-Image: ‘A theory of cinema is not “about” cinema, but about the concepts that cinema gives rise to and which are themselves related to other concepts corresponding to other practices’ (Branigan 2006: xiii). Thus, what film scholars usually call film theory is an encounter between film and theoretical discourse. Rather, out of convenience film and theory have been sutured into a seemingly seamless whole.

Film and theory give rise to discourses that are at best provisional and suggestive ways of participating in something that is ongoing, a world in the making. Branigan sketches a six-point programme for such an approach to film theory in Projecting a Camera. Film theory should be: (1) grammatical (constituting an ensemble of words); (2) intersubjective (tied to social practices and values); (3) fragmentary (partial and provisional); (4) figurative (metaphors based on experience and action); (5) connected (following a lateral logic, contrary to a vertical one); and (6) impure (not aim for a pure theory of film or medium specificity) (2006: 19–20). The first principle, to constitute an ensemble of words, ties in with the notion of a ‘connected’ film theory. It implies that a film theory must establish a language around the phenomenon one is approaching, a language that is rather not stipulated according to what words and concepts signify, but according to how they connect with other words and concepts. The second principle, ‘intersubjectivity’, is associated with the idea that theory is ‘fragmentary’. Thus, a language for a film theory is established to participate and intervene, and consequently lasts as long as the intervention is needed and new meanings are created. The implication of the four principles mentioned – grammatical, intersubjectivity, connectivity, and fragmentary – is that language is considered as ‘figurative’, a way to talk about something, not as an instrument for making definitive definitions. Hence, an ‘impure’ approach (which is the sixth principle in Branigan’s protocol) that never strives for universality, in the sense that it would claim to overcome historical and social boundaries and contexts.

All of the above may seem self-evident, and our aim is not to claim any originality in our approach to film theory. Rather, the aim is to speak for a theoretical approach to film that is grounded in practice and which has the capacity to be useful and meaningful in relation to a project in order to cover not only the whole range of film practices (from production to product and publics), but also the practice of film research. The latter implies not only the study of the research material in question and performing traditional dissemination (of articles and books), but also extending the research into archival practices and screening activities. Not only showing the work that has been done, but also performing the archive and the material itself in order to make it present.

Minor cinemas, the public sphere and the production of locality

The most central concept in our vocabulary is that of ‘minor cinemas’ and the way it has been used by David E. James in his account of avant-garde film history in Los Angeles, The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles (2005). The concept originates in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s influential book on Kafka, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975), and has been widely used in cinema studies during the last two decades (for a recent overview, see Brown 2013).

Deleuze and Guattari name three characteristics of a minor literature: (1) the deterritorialization of language, (2) the connection of the individual to a political immediacy and (3) the collective assemblage of enunciation (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 18). These characteristics have been interpreted and applied in different ways by a range of different film scholars addressing women’s cinema (Butler 2002), postcolonial cinema (Rodowick 1997), queer cinema (White 2008) and exilic cinema (Naficy 2001), to name only a few.[4] In general, the focus has been on the minor, thus stressing an opposition between major and minor and, as Meaghan Morris has criticized, leading to a ‘romantic use to celebrate marginality’ (Morris 1998: xviii). According to Morris, such an application and understanding of the concept is partially a misinterpretation of Deleuze and Guattari; a minor literature does not imply that one glorifies the marginal by default – ‘it is what a minority constructs in a major language’ (Morris 1998: xvii, original emphasis). Hence, the marginal or the minor is not necessarily antagonistic.

Transferred to film practice and film language (i.e. film language in a metaphorical sense), the deterritorialization of the means of expression implies that a minor cinema is the new cinematic culture that a minority creates in order to express itself; hence the analogy to consider queer cinema or women’s cinema as constituting a minor cinema. Deleuze and Guattari, however, use mostly major authors as their examples – Kafka, Beckett and Joyce – stressing that these authors deterritorialize a major language from within, and thereby create a new literature, a minor literature. This literature has radical or transformative potential because it also creates a new audience, addressing people who ‘live in a language that is not their own’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 19). Thus, Deleuze and Guattari claim that the creation of the minor is not only a political act but also a collective enunciation; a member of a minority is always speaking for a community.

The main objective of James’s elaboration is to both criticize the established canon of American avant-garde history and pave the way for a more dynamic approach that can include not only amateur filmmaking but also trajectories between non-commercial and commercial institutions and structures.[5] James suggests ‘minor cinemas’ in the plural as an ‘expanded summary term’ – ‘a rainbow coalition of demotic cinemas: experimental, poetic, underground, ethnic, amateur, counter, non-commercial, working-class, critical, artists, orphan, and so on’ (2005: 13). Originally, Tom Gunning used the term in film studies to single out some contemporary avant-garde filmmakers who seemed to follow no given agenda – and therefore no teleological trajectory – but who made films simply for the sake of making films (Gunning 1990). Gunning’s initial appropriation of the term from Deleuze and Guattari was done with the intent of criticizing the established historiography in order to stress the moment of cultural production in a minority situation of minor avant-garde film practice in relation to the established (male-dominated) canon. The films that Gunning presents in his essay are works that affirm their own marginality, but not because they have an antagonistic position. The minor cinema that Gunning detects does not aspire to become major but is rather truthful to its own cause. In other words, Gunning is stressing how every film of minor cinemas has to reinvent the production situation.

James rightly points out that there is no sense in calling Kafka ‘minor literature’ in the common usage, but, as a relational concept signifying minor in its marginal position vis-à-vis the dominant, the term makes sense (2005: 446). James stresses, in particular, how this dialectical relation – a minority practice that both affirms and negates its other – characterizes the ways minor cinemas are organized, expressed, and distributed, as well as where they take place. They are simply marginal; they are not necessarily antagonistic. Thus, James is studying the geography of Hollywood, the way that the minor exists within the dominant, partly creating its own culture but partly making use of the dominant culture as well – the infrastructure and the material resources that spill over wherever there is major film production. An anecdotal British example is the London filmmakers’ co-op of the 1960s that was based in Soho, where the major studios also were. Given this geography, in which major and minor shared the same district, co-op filmmakers like Malcolm Le Grice realized that it was worth checking the dustbins of the studios because they usually contained discarded footage; thus, many of the co-op’s first films were found-footage work.

In his adoption of the concept of minor cinema, James establishes the term as an ensemble of words, emphasizing that his usage of the concept does not appropriate Deleuze and Guattari’s three criteria as restrictive ones. In James’s appropriation, the three characteristics are: (1) that minor cinemas are created by minorities who are minor because they are not part of the current hegemony; (2) that minor cinemas are connected immediately to politics because from a minority position there cannot be a divide between the individual and the social in which the surrounding environment would form a backdrop to the individual; and (3) thus, no possibility for an individual enunciation that could be separated from a collective enunciation (2005: 446–47).

An important aspect in Deleuze and Guattari’s initial proposal is the approach to a theory of cultural production in a minority situation. It poses key questions regarding how to speak to a public that is still in the making and how to appropriate and use a language that is both foreign and major. However, as Ali Behdad – echoing Morris’s critique – has pointed out in relation to postcolonial studies, many appropriations and uses of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory place too much emphasis on the oppositional and the political as an affirmative marginalization and become both ‘general and generalizing’ (Behdad 2005: 224). Behdad therefore calls for ‘a more situated and historicized approach’ and it is our ambition, through studying five associations from specific time periods, to contribute to a more nuanced and situated analysis.[6]

James emphasizes in The Most Typical Avant-Garde the importance for minor cinemas to organize themselves, although this has sometimes been done with hesitation and through their dependence on institutions such as film schools and universities. The institutional dimensions of minor cinemas raises another key concept in our research – that of the public sphere. Today, the concept has two foremost meanings in English: it is either used as a synonym for ‘public’ (foremost the media and the press), or in Jürgen Habermas’s sense according to his seminal work from 1962, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft.[7] The first meaning – public and the public media – is closely connected with the ethos that decisions and facts shall be open to civil society, whereas Habermas’s initial intention was to both implement a normative concept and perform a historical analysis. Thus, the second meaning of the concept of the public sphere originates in Habermas’s early work signifying the open and rational space of the sincere communication of a public.

In eighteenth-century authoritarian Germany the bourgeois public gathered at cafes, clubs and theatres because it was here that the powerless bourgeoisie class was able to exchange views and discuss a wide range of different pressing issues. However, with its rise to power, the public sphere eventually fell back to what had preceded it – the feudal stage – in which the bourgeoisie represented itself before the people. As the public sphere as a civic and political community had thus lost its meaning, it became divided into a specialist publicity on the one hand, and a public sphere controlled by the market on the other. If the public sphere had been a social space for mobilizing people it now became reduced to a culture-consuming audience where the public was split into a minority of publicly reasoning specialists and a broad mass audience of receiving consumers. According to Habermas, this resulted in a polarization between the private and the public in which the public turned into a space for political representation (feudal publicity), whereas the domain of the citizens becomes private, and therefore the public escape into their own subjectivity. In such a situation, culture is merely a means for private expression without any real social relevance.

Habermas’s version of the decline of the public sphere was an expression of concern about the disappearance of a democratic dialogue; a public exchange in which people were listened to and where critical perspectives could be expressed. Ten years after the publication of Habermas’s astute analysis of a political and cultural community in crisis, Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge published Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung as a direct response to Habermas.[8] Negt and Kluge’s main points were affected by the expansion of the mass media society, the dimensions of which Habermas could hardly have imagined a decade earlier, and inspired by the various grassroots movements that began to emerge after 1968, claiming that Habermas’s vision of a united public sphere being not only too normative but outdated. According to Negt and Kluge, what characterized a working public sphere was that it arose spontaneously and its value and meaningfulness consisted in how well it corresponded to that real-life situation out of which it emerged. One should not judge the quality of the public sphere according to how well it matched with a normative category, but according to what it achieved. Hence, the public sphere was to be found in its use value, as ‘the organization of collective experience’ (Negt and Kluge 1993: 1). Thus, Negt and Kluge emphasized the public as a form of self-organization and that the public was always concrete, formed by actual people and their needs. The public sphere had its origin in experience and became public out of the need to articulate that experience and the requirement that it was also in the public interest. Thus, real, organic, and working public spheres emerged and died, driven as they were by genuine interests and interest groups. Public spheres lasted as long as they had a mission.

Miriam Hansen, who was the film studies scholar who most consistently approached film with theories of the public sphere, did point out that the important point in Negt and Kluge is how they emphasize the German concept of experience, Erfahrung (Hansen 1991, 1993, 2012). Its connotations in German open up the interplay between empiricism and empathy, the interaction between knowledge and (emotional) experience in the sense of trying out, praxis or learning from actual encounters. This, in turn, implies that the important issue from a perspective of the theory of the public sphere is how much the subjects themselves experience that they are in control of their organizations – how they constitute a public with self-determination – and that they can raise their voices and be heard as individuals. Thus, Negt and Kluge claim that a true public sphere is based on an actual social context, or Lebenszusammenhang (living context), as they call it, with the aim of giving voice and providing opportunities for minority groups to be heard (Negt and Kluge 1993: 6). A publicity with use value, a meaningful public sphere, is thus not so much a rational one (in pursuit of its normative goals), but an empathetic social space (responding to personal and social needs). Negt and Kluge’s interpretation of the public sphere as a space for the practice of the people was developed further in the sprawling and innovative three-volume Geschichte und Eigensinn (1981), in which Negt and Kluge made the public sphere into a noun in plural – public spheres – and which came to include all forms of human interaction and gathering together.[9]

These are, in general, given through Negt and Kluge’s romantic traits, but what is of importance is that they propose a theory for self-organization that is of relevance for an analysis of minor cinema institutions and organizations. James has divided these into three categories: (1) ‘those that facilitate production’; (2) ‘those that enable consumption’; and (3) ‘ideological apparatuses’, such as publications and pedagogical activities (James 2005: 204). Several of our associations and organizations cut across these activities. The Independent Film Group was initiated with the purpose of enabling experimental film production, but the Film Group also organized screenings and launched a journal. The Stockholm Film Workshop was predominantly production oriented but organized pedagogical workshops as well. Cineco was inaugurated only for film production, whereas Kaleidoscope worked with all aspects of film culture in order to promote and support immigrant filmmakers and filmmaking. The Tensta Film Association was set up with production in mind, but also worked with distribution within its own neighbourhood. The character of the filmmaking of Tensta Film was pedagogically oriented in the beginning, and hence also an ideological apparatus of film production. The heterogeneity of these immigrant associations is an indication of the strength in the theoretical vocabulary of Negt and Kluge. The public sphere and experience cut across the various activities and become not restricted to distribution or the showing of the films. Films and experience are produced, shared and lived through.

The last concept in our vocabulary for studying independent immigrant cinemas in the making, i.e. films made by newly arrived and first-generation immigrants, is that of ‘production of locality’. Arjun Appadurai coins the term in his influential book Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996). He conceptualizes the production of locality as part of a theory of contemporary culture in which a ‘break’ or a ‘rupture’ has taken place due to globalization (Appadurai 1996: 9). This has resulted in flows of migration and diverse everyday practices of media use that are disconnected from traditional settings such as the nation state, creating ‘translocalities’ and ‘diasporic public spheres’ (Appadurai 1996: 192, 4). This implies not that the local is substituted by the global, but that place and locality have to be reconstructed by the immigrants. This is even turned into an imperative, hence the thesis of ‘modernity at large’, the call for self-realization that according to the philosopher Michael Theunissen is the essence of modernity (Theunissen 1981).

Appadurai’s theory of locality proposes that we consider locality as a figure – not an actual place but as an open space for renegotiation in which subjects and communities are producers, forced to find a place from which to negotiate new contexts for themselves. Appadurai’s book is foremost a study of electronic media and modernity, how the media of today create new social spaces in which different localities are connected. This new open space for negotiation and production (the ‘scapes’) enables new identities and selves to be created. Although our study is focused on analogue film, we consider the ‘production of locality’ as a useful concept for stressing and analysing how immigrant filmmaking – as process and product – both creates new public spaces and becomes a way for immigrants to find a context. Thus, the associations and organizations that we present are examples of minor cinemas that constitute public spheres, rising from the immigrant filmmakers’ actual conditions and which become sites for the production of locality, for self-realization and finding a place for themselves. Such an approach is original in both a Swedish and general context of film studies. We hope that our approach and this particular study will have further implications for research not only on immigrant and migrant cultures, but also on film studies in general when it comes to questions of film theory, archival practices, cultural politics, agency, and film scholarly practices and activism.

Migration and diaspora: Notes on recent research

The fields of diaspora and migration have been in constant flux and expansion for some decades; the literature is vast, even immense. Within film studies the agenda-setting contribution seems to be Hamid Naficy’s An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (2001). After Naficy, there have been several noteworthy works, e.g. Katarzyna Marciniak’s Alienhood: Citizenship, Exile and the Logic of Difference (2006), Isolina Ballesteros’s Immigration Cinema in the New Europe (2015), and Nilgûn Bayraktar’s Mobility and Migration in Film and Moving-Image Art (2016), to mention just a few with diverse profiles. Concepts like diaspora, migration and exile, as well as the questions of transnational cinema have, from the last decade, been recurrent in textbooks, conference presentations and research projects not only within film studies proper, but also in wider circles, in social and political studies, arts and the humanities. The political, social and cultural implications of the fields have been interpreted in seminal works from Abdul R. JanMohamed and David Lloyd’s anthology The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse (1990) to Steven Vertovec’s Transnationalism (2009), and the terms have been adapted to film and media studies in case studies, research anthologies and historical surveys like Minor Transnationalism edited by Francois Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih (2005), World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives edited by Natasa Durovicova and Kathleen Newman (2010) and Jessica Stites Mor’s study Transition Cinema (2012). Other significant works, the point of departure for which is national cinema or the ‘local’, but also includes transnational perspectives are The Cinema of Small Nations, edited by Mette Hjort and Duncan Petrie (2007), as well as Cinema at the Periphery (2010), edited by Dina Iordanova, David Martin-Jones and Belén Vidal.

The dynamics of the discourses implied relate to historical conditions – new geopolitical frameworks for society and cinema – and developments of new theoretical understandings of these discourses and their materiality. Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg have made the hitherto most complete overview of the European situation in their anthology European Cinema in Motion: Migrant and Diasporic Film in Contemporary Europe (2010), concluding that ‘[m]igrant and diasporic cinema addresses questions of identity formation, challenges national and ethnocentric myths, and revisits and revises traditional historical narratives’ (Berghahn and Sternberg 2010: 2). Also scholars of Swedish cinema have addressed questions of migration and ethnicity. A pioneer work when it comes to representation of ethnicity is Rochelle Wright’s The Visible Wall: Jews and other Ethnic Outsiders in Swedish Film (1998); other noteworthy Swedish contributions that, however, also focus on representation are Carina Tigervall’s Tigerns avklippta morrhår: vi och de andra i den nya svenska filmen anno 2000 (2003) and Folkhemsk film med ‘invandraren’ i rollen som den sympatiske Andre (2005), and Hynek Pallas’s Vithet i svensk spelfilm 1989–2000 (2011). Amanda Doxtater has studied ethnicity in recent Swedish films (Doxtater 2006), and the anthology A Companion to Nordic Cinema, edited by Mette Hjort and Ursula Lindquist (2016) offers not only new perspectives on the relation between the national and the global, but stresses the importance of the migration of film workers as well.

It is noticeable that the concern of film studies when researching migrational and exilic films – in an international context as well as limited to Swedish conditions – is primarily to be found in questions of representation. Berghahn and Sternberg point out that: ‘Representations of migrant and diasporic experiences and cross-cultural encounters have assumed a prominent position in cinematic narratives’ (2010: 2).

In our understanding of immigrant filmmakers in Sweden and immigrant film in general, we must of course include questions of representation and aesthetics, but our focus is mainly in the cultural practices of filmmaking. It is not so much the representation of the Other that we are addressing, as what the Other has to achieve in order to represent something at all. We are studying practices not yet defined, directed towards audiences in becoming. The immigrant film and the exilic situation are in the making. This view sometimes collides with the more conventional understanding within current film studies where categories appear to be stable and consistent over time. The film Consuelo by Luis R. Vera, mentioned earlier, is typical in this respect; the reviewers were not in rhythm with the film and its context, the critical reception was syncopated. That filmmaking is an ongoing practice, an action in the world, is one of the most fundamental assumptions that has been governing our work.

Our focus on production and practice resonates with Laura U. Marks’s influential book The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (2000) as well as with ethnographic and anthropological work by Kevin Smets or Birgit Bräuchler and John Postill, among others (Bräuchler and Postill 2010; Smets 2013). However, there are significant differences. Marks’s work, which is inspired by both Naficy and Deleuze and Guattari has its focus on textual readings of intercultural cinema. These are done from a largely phenomenological perspective and the films that are chosen are mostly made by established filmmakers or artists. Although Marks stresses that intercultural cinema is characterized by the making and becoming of a public, the perspective is tightly bound to film as representation, i.e. the primary object of study being the single film that is then analysed. Our material, on the other hand, are made by newly arrived immigrants who lack any kind of network and context, a situation in which filmmaking merges with questions of practice as agency in which the actual film is just one part in a cultural process of creating locality, a future context.

Ethnographic work, on the other hand, is very valuable as it concentrates upon the hybridity of practices among diasporic audiences and is therefore much in spirit of our project. However, these studies focus on reception and audiences whereas a key perspective in our study is on premises of production and self-organization within the apparatus of analogue filmmaking. Hence, the call for practice that scholars such as Nick Couldry has requested for, also falls out of our perspective (Couldry 2004). Our material is often too ordinary for textual perspectives such as that of Marks; many of our filmmakers are non-established ones who make humble work in their production of locality. But, the material is on the other hand too exclusive for ethnographic research and social theory because the filmmakers are working with analogue film and often with the intention to be able to devote a future life to filmmaking.

We consistently use the term ‘immigrant’ when addressing the filmmakers in question because we see immigration as an undisputed fact concerning each and every filmmaker; as individuals they have moved from one geopolitical and cultural sphere to another, from one country to another. Another reason for choosing the term ‘immigrant’ is that the material that we are analysing covers the 1950s to the early 1990s, a period during which these migrants were called immigrants, and also called themselves immigrants, invandrare in Swedish. This is how they named themselves in the statutes of Kaleidoscope, and when they arranged a bi-annual international immigrant film festival (Kaleidoscope 1986).

On the other hand, the filmmakers presented in this book are not merely immigrants, but also parts of migration as a larger phenomenon, and they can also find themselves to be in exile and/or diaspora. Their cultural identity can be assumed as being nomadic, and when moving from one national context and border to another they are also part of a transnational negotiation. All these terms are applicable to some extent. At some point it can of course be more useful and analytically consistent to use a term like ‘exile’ or ‘diaspora’ – it has to do with the individual trajectory of each and every filmmaker, and the sociocultural context.

John Durham Peters has related the terms of ‘exile’, ‘diaspora’ and ‘nomadism’ to the question of mobility in general. One of his points is that the western canon seems to rely on the mobility of others: ‘otherness wanders through its center’ (Peters 1999: 17). He explains exile as ‘a painful or punitive banishment from one’s homeland’ (1999: 19), while diaspora emphasizes the relations between the dispersed: ‘Exile suggests pining for home; diaspora suggests networks among compatriots. Exile may be solitary, but diaspora is always collective’ (1999: 20). Nomadism, in turn, does not relate to the idea of a fixed home at all. In nomadism, Peters argues, ‘home is already there, without any hope or dream of a homeland. Nomadism sunders the notion of home from a specific site or territory; being homeless and home-full at once’ (1999: 21). It is obvious that these concepts are not fixed. It is quite possible to find an immigrant who is exiled but who later turns out to identify with the conditions of diaspora, due to existential and social changes, and then even turn nomadic. The concepts have to be understood in connection with each and every individual case; thus our use of the more neutral and historical, although nowadays also contested, term ‘immigrant’, stating a fact that can then be interpreted and contextualized.

Outline of the book

This study, although covering the 1950s–90s, is not a historical project as such (for example, the 1960s have been left out due to the fact that during that decade there existed no association that became important for the immigrant filmmakers). Our aim is thus not to write the history of Swedish immigrant filmmaking per se, but to analyse some key organizations for immigrant filmmakers since the Second World War. In turn, this is a historiographical project since, through our analysis of the many histories, we are questioning the concept of one solid, monolithic history and national film historiography.

Geographically, the study is focused on Sweden in order to limit the material of the study, and also because one of our aims is to challenge a methodological nationalism, i.e. showing that ‘other’ film cultures have existed in Sweden, which nevertheless have been excluded from established film histories and national archives. Accordingly, the aim of the project is more theoretical than historical, to argue for key concepts for studying immigrant filmmaking and for a particular take on film theory as being impure and provisional.

After this introductory chapter follows a survey of the concepts of minor and exilic cinemas: ‘Migrant’s Minor Cinemas: Beyond Accented and Exilic Cinema’. We will discuss how the concept of minor literature has migrated into film studies and how it has been applied to the fields of accented and exilic cinema, as well as the avant-garde. The study of the avant-garde implies a more descriptive use of the concept in which the minor stands in a dialectical – and not necessarily oppositional – relation to the major. We will claim that for the immigrant the minor is a site of production out of which a context is created in relation to the major. Thus, Naficy’s seminal work is criticized for being too normative and generalizing – of being in favour of experimental and auteur readings of individual films. However, Naficy’s text-based approach of reading exilic work is significant and accurate as one aspect of exilic/accented cinema, and therefore his interpretation is complemented with Zuzana M. Pick’s more empirical and producer-oriented approach to accented/exilic cinema (Pick 1987, 1989). Pick’s standpoint is that ‘each film-maker has to re-define his/her practice in regard to the political priorities of a specific conjuncture and specific conditions available within a country of residence’ (Pick 1987b: 43). Thus, immigrant cinema is not per definition accented or exilic (hence the subtitle of the chapter: ‘Beyond Accented and Exilic Cinema’).

The next chapter, ‘Conditions of Production: Immigrants’ Associations and Workshops in Sweden’, contains a presentation of the five associations and workshops that became instrumental for the immigrant filmmakers: The Independent Film Group (1950–72), The Stockholm Film Workshop (1973–2001), Cineco (1976–83), Kaleidoscope (1981–88) and the Tensta Film Association (1974–88). Theoretically, the producer-oriented models of Deleuze and Guattari and Pick are explored and complemented with Negt and Kluge’s post-Habermasian theories of the public sphere. This chapter also presents the sociocultural and film-historical framework for the immigrant filmmakers in Sweden, from the exilic communities formed after the war, to the present. In a way, this chapter can partly be seen as a corrective to existing accounts of Swedish film history, not only challenging the norms of national film culture but also presenting a hitherto invisible and unknown context, consisting of individuals, organizations, and institutions.

The following section, ‘From Avant-Garde to Communion’, presents ten readings and interpretations of individual films, including notes on their production and reception. The interpretation of the films will in particular draw upon D. N. Rodowick’s elaboration of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of minor cinema in which the hybrid character of the films (fiction/documentation) and their politics of an audience in the making are stressed. The title, ‘From Avant-Garde to Communion’, is meant to summarize the different genres of the films that are being analysed: from the avant-gardism of Peter Weiss and Maureen Paley to the communion of the Tensta Film Association and its collective working practices. The films are Studie 1 – Uppvaknandet (Study 1 – Awakening) (1952) by Peter Weiss (Germany); Monos (Alone) (1974) and Vill du följa med mig Martha? (Do You Want to Join Me, Martha?) (1980) by Babis (Charalampos) Tsokas (Greece), together with his crew in Tensta; Interference (1977) by Maureen Paley (United States); Jordmannen or Toprak Adam (The Earthman) (1980) by Muammer Özer in collaboration with Synnöve Özer (Turkey and Finland); Hägringen (The Mirage) (1981) by Guillermo Álvarez (Colombia); Havet är långt borta (The Sea is Far Away) (1983) by Reza Bagher (Iran); Löftet (The Promise) (1984) by Menelaos Carayannis (Greece); La espera (The Waiting) (1989) by Myriam Braniff (Chile); and Fem minuter för Amerikas döda/Pichqa minutukuna ilaqtanchispi wanuqkunamanta (Five Minutes for the Souls of America) (1992) by César Galindo (Peru). From this list, it is clear that the filmmakers represent different nationalities as well as language communities, all of them contributing in a significant way to Swedish culture during the post-war period. More important than their native origins is that the filmmakers also represent different registers of genre and style. They take diverse professional as well as political positions, and are thus incarnating the different strands and aspects of minor cinemas.

The interpretations of the films are not meant to present and reproduce intra-textual readings of the aesthetics of representation on a narrative or semiotic level; instead, they are supposed to shed light on the complex web of personal, institutional, and cultural circumstances that constitute the ground conditions for minor cinema filmmaking: always a practice, always a process, never a closed circuit.

The next chapter, ‘The Cultural Practice of Minor Immigrant Cinema Archiving’, serves two objectives: it is a meta-reflection on what has been presented so far, and a presentation of the different aspects of the cultural practice of archiving minor cinemas. What Jean-Paul Sartre stated about literature (that a book which is not read does not exist) also applies to film (Sartre 1967). Thus, the immigrant films have to be restored, archived and screened, and therefore the cultural practice of immigrant filmmaking also encompasses the ‘afterlife’ of the films, an integrated archival practice (Fossati 2009). The question is even more urgent for minor cinemas – while being minor implies that this body of work has rarely been archived – and due to being immigrant and transnational films they have fallen in between the stools of nationalist archival practices.

In the chapter on the politics of the archive we also describe how we have collected and screened the films and made it possible to have them included in national archives. In this way, the films may be upgraded to cultural and historical artefacts with a national and/or local significance. The archiving and academic analysis of the films are also parts of the minor cinema culture.

The last entry of the book, ‘Conclusion: Immigrant Filmmaking as Minor Cinema Practice’, sums up the points that have been made throughout the book, how minor cinemas is a concept that enables an integrated analysis of production, product and publics, and how immigrant cinema as a cultural practice always goes beyond that of merely constituting a filmic text for interpretation, and is also a way of acting in the world, which in turn also encompasses a politics of the archive. Here, we also argue for a scholarly approach that makes academic film studies and film theory a practice, with practical consequences.

Notes

1 The actual figure was 50 per cent higher.

2 Another case in point is the film Hägring (Mirage) (1984), by the Iranian filmmaker Saeed Assadi. It was self-financed and shot in 16 mm. The film tells about an Iranian refugee’s unhappy life in Sweden, and the critics accused Assadi of depicting welfare Sweden as an inferno. The anonymous review in Svenska Dagbladet was the most dismissive:

[The film] is essentially a one-man work and possibly also a film that emerged from bitter experiences of the self-conscious artist’s difficulties in being recognized and, therefore, without self-criticism, is attacking the society that contributes to his financial support. In the 1960s, such a situation used to be explained by the repressive tolerance of society, but Assadi never seems to have reached such an analysis. Instead, his protagonist despises all Swedish people who do not consider themselves victims of an international imperialist and capitalist conspiracy. Because they do not realize the situation, they become drug addicts, alcoholics, suicides or prostitutes. Had a Swedish in Tehran made a film with a similar analysis, he would have been accused of racism, but the Swedish world conscience can only agree.

(30 April 1984)

3 The workshop is presented and discussed at length (in Swedish), in Andersson and Sundholm (2014). The public service television company was first called SR (Sveriges Radio), but in 1979 changed to SVT (Sveriges Television). The latter acronym will be used throughout this survey.

4 Minor cinema has also been used as a common denominator for the various national cinemas of smaller countries such as Belgium, Denmark, Iceland, and Lithuania. See Hjort and Petrie (2007); Blankenship and Nagl (2015).

5 David E. James criticizes the historiography of American avant-garde film for being ‘constructed outside Los Angeles and around the concept of an aesthetically autonomous, formalist avant-garde, entirely distinct from the Hollywood industry’ (2005: 11).

6 One example is Jean Fisher’s elaborate essay on the Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC), in which she uses Deleuzian perspectives in order to show how the innovative stylistic choices of BAFC expresses the search for a new language, a belonging and the quest to be ‘at home in a language of […] meaningful existence’ (2007: 17).

7 The book became a key work in Scandinavian media and communication research and was translated into Norwegian in 1971, Danish in 1974 and Swedish in 1984. The first translation into English appeared in 1989 as Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. The Norwegian subtitle stressed the decline of the public sphere, the Danish version the analysis of the organization of society and the Swedish edition the categories of the public and the private.

8 Translated into English in 1993 with a comprehensive foreword by Miriam Hansen.

9 The book was not translated into English until 2014 when MIT Press published it as History and Obstinacy in a shortened version, edited by Devin Fore.

Chapter 1

Migrants’ Minor Cinemas: Beyond Accented and Exilic Cinema

As mentioned in the introduction, migration and immigration, and migrant and diasporic cinemas, are recurrent themes and subjects in contemporary film studies. A common denominator for many contributions is that they refer to Hamid Naficy’s seminal book An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Therefore, it is helpful to conduct a genealogy of how the concept has developed throughout Naficy’s research, not least because a typical feature of contemporary studies on migrant and diasporic cinemas is that they tend to emphasize different characteristics of Naficy’s theory of an accented cinema.

Accented cinema

Naficy’s aspiration with the concept is to establish a general theory of exilic and diasporic filmmaking as accented cinema, and what lies at the heart in his book is the argument that accented cinema forms a group style. Therefore, Naficy presents a list of different stylistic markers that occupies four pages of An Accented Cinema in a separate appendix. This comprehensive mapping is condensed into one extensive paragraph in the introduction:

open form and closed-form visual style; fragmented, multilingual, epistolary, self-reflexive, and critically juxtaposed narrative structure; amphibolic, doubled, crossed, and lost characters; subject matter and themes that involve journeying, historicity, identity, and displacement; dysphoric, euphoric, nostalgic, synaesthetic, liminal, and politicized structures of feeling, interstitial and collective modes of production; and inscription of the biographical, social, and cinematic (dis)location of the filmmakers.

(Naficy 2001: 4)

It is obvious that such a broad description fits other modes of filmmaking as well, in particular existential, experimental, autobiographical or essayistic filmmaking. The extensive definition is an invitation to a broad range of interpretations and approaches.

One of the first scholars to pick up the notion in a book-length study was Katarzyna Marciniak with Alienhood: Citizenship, Exile, and the Logic of Difference. She stresses the condition of production in her appropriation of Naficy and defines accented cinema by quoting Naficy regarding the: ‘displacement of the filmmakers and their artisanal production codes’ (Naficy 2001, in Marciniak 2006: 132). Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg, on the other hand, emphasize an auteur aesthetic paradigm in the book European Cinema in Motion: Migrant and Diasporic Film in Contemporary Europe. They define accented cinema as ‘an aesthetic response to the experience of displacement through exile, migration and diaspora, which results in the filmmakers’ “liminal subjectivity and interstitial location in society and the film industry”’ (2010: 24). Nilgün Bayraktar, in turn underlines the filmic objects in her study on feature film and video art. Thus, what constitutes an accented cinema is ‘films made since the 1960s in western countries by exilic, diasporic, and postcolonial directors’ (Bayraktar 2016: 24). Yosefa Loshitzky emphasizes accented cinema as a group style in her book Screening Strangers: Migration and Diaspora in Contemporary European Cinema. Accented cinema, according to Loshitzky, is

a style of cinema typical of diasporic filmmakers, a majority of whom are from third world and postcolonial countries ‘who since the 1960s have relocated to northern cosmopolitan centers where they exist in a state of tension and dissension with both their original and their current homes’.

(2010: 174)

It is in the richness and diversity but voluminous vagueness of Naficy’s approach that the differing interpretations are summarized in hybrid sentences that partly quote Naficy’s influential book. The sprawling structure of An Accented Cinema thus creates a lateral logic that fosters a figurative and connective approach, concentrating on finding new ideas and paths rather than defining and summarizing. This creative vein of An Accented Cinema has undoubtedly inspired many scholars in a diverse body of studies.

Accordingly, Naficy’s approach may be described as an intersubjective and impure film theory that has the intention to highlight a specific group of filmmakers and their films. However, Naficy’s actual film theoretical aspirations with An Accented Cinema remain partly unclear, because he also makes a claim to universality, in that accented cinema is ‘situated but universal’ (2001: 10). It is never made clear if the primary aim is to acknowledge and evaluate certain films and filmmakers, or to aspire on general validity.[1] The vast selection of different films and filmmakers tend to flow over the category of accented cinema because the filmmakers not only have diverse backgrounds but also represent different modes and styles. Among Naficy’s sample and examples are: Atom Egoyan, Mira Nair, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Mona Hatoum, Chantal Akerman, Andrei Tarkovsky, Jonas Mekas and Emir Kusturica, to name a few. That the empirical material for Naficy’s study is made up of such a heterogeneous group of highly established filmmakers and different types of films is yet another reason for the divergent interpretations of accented cinema among scholars. A further reason for the confusion is that Naficy tends to treat exile, diaspora and deterritorialization as synonyms, therefore creating uncertainty regarding who counts as an accented, or deterritorialized, filmmaker. It is telling that the most lucid definition of accented cinema is a misplaced and transformed quote by Isolina Ballesteros in her book Immigration Cinema in the New Europe: ‘the cinematographic work of exiled or diasporic directors, whose productions share formal traits and narratives, themes, questions of identity and modes of production’ (2015: 13). Actually, the definition draws upon an early essay by Naficy in which he suggests that ‘independent transnational cinema’ constitutes a genre (1994: 1).[2]

It is with the essay on Atom Egoyan, ‘The accented style of the independent transnational cinema: A conversation with Atom Egoyan’ (1997) that Naficy came to abandon the initial aspirations to define independent transnational cinema as a genre and shifted to the notion of accented cinema. In that essay, Naficy introduces the concept of accented cinema and moves away from a theory of genre, although he still uses the notion of independent transnational cinema. The notion is finally omitted from An Accented Cinema, in which he proposes that accented cinema is a group style.

The early work of Naficy, besides the comprehensive study on Iranian television in Los Angeles, was a way of drawing attention to independent transnational cinema or the work of particular filmmakers such as Atom Egoyan (Naficy 1993). With An Accented Cinema, Naficy set out to establish a general theory of exilic, diasporic and ethnic filmmaking. Thus, Naficy states in the introduction to his book that the accented filmmakers are ‘situated but universal’, and that the group style is an ‘emergent form, awaiting recognition’ (2001: 10, 21). When introducing the notion of accented cinema in 1997 in the essay on Egoyan, Naficy wrote:

Accented style does not confirm to the classic Hollywood style, the national cinema styles of any particular country, the style of any specific film movement, or the style of any film auteur, although it is influenced by them all. It is, rather, a style that is developed by individual filmmaking authors who inhabit certain culturally transnational and exilic locations. As such, accented style inscribes the specificity of the filmmaker’s authorial vision, his ethnic and cultural location and sensibilities, and the generic stylistics of postmodern transnationality.

(1997: 182)

The transition from genre to group style is significant, while genre, in John Frow’s words, is essentially a ‘form of symbolic action’, and not being ‘merely “stylistic” devices and genres creates effects of reality and truth, authority and plausibility’ (Frow 2006: 2). In Naficy’s early efforts to establish transnational cinema as a genre he also acknowledges that ‘[g]enre cinema thus rests on the existence of an implied contract among four parties: filmmakers/authors, film texts, individual spectators and interpretative communities’ (1994: 5). Accordingly, a genre approach to accented cinema would imply that one considers accented cinema as constituting a world of its own that one can enter and share in order to experience and negotiate the meanings of being ‘accented’. Whereas genre is a form of institutionalized intersubjectivity that produces a reality, a group style is a matter of claiming coherence between samples of texts that share a mode of production and stylistic features. Group style is thus rather a production paradigm, a coherent industrial or artisanal mode of practice.

Naficy’s mapping in An Accented Cinema has the ambition to form a sort of counterpart to David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson’s groundbreaking study on the classical Hollywood film, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960 (1985). But whereas Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson primarily use an unbiased sample of films in order to stress the collective making behind the style of every individual film, Naficy chooses a number of representative filmmakers and films for his study and never abandons an auteur approach.[3] In other words, Naficy’s method is also partly interventional and normative, stipulated with the purpose of highlighting some of the best exponents of an accented cinema, the individual films and videos, and the individual auteurs. However, he holds on to claims of universality and it is the exilic, diasporic or deterritorialized situation that is the collective situation and mode that constitutes the common denominator for his theory. Naficy replaces the industrial mode of production of the studio system with an existential mode of production. Because he chooses to emphasize the cultural and existential situation of the filmmaker and not the collective mode per se, he neither stresses Raymond Williams’s notion of cultural practice, as Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson did in their study, but instead refers to Williams’s much debated concept of the structure of feeling (Naficy 2001: 26). All this allows for an approach that takes in general claims and a more normative, impure and interventionist approach. So, Naficy states in the beginning of An Accented Cinema that it is his aim to ‘identify and analyze the common features of the cinematic productions of a number of filmmakers’, and ‘that although there is nothing in common about exile and diaspora, deterritorialized peoples and their films share certain features, which in today’s climate of lethal ethnic difference need to be considered, even emphasized’ (2001: 3).

Naficy’s approach has also often been hailed as a truly transnational and boundary crossing theory, as it foregrounds a cinema that ‘cuts across previously defined geographic, national, cultural, cinematic, and metacinematic boundaries’ (Bayraktar 2016: 8; Loshitzky 2010: 15). However, the presumption of a transnational accented cinema, of a counterhegemonic cinema that stands in opposition to a dominant one, requires the latter to be localized or territorialized. Hence, it is problematic to stipulate that ‘[i]f the dominant cinema is considered universal and without accent, the films that diasporic and exilic subjects make are accented […] the accent emanates not so much from the accented speech of the diegetic characters as from the displacement of the filmmakers and their artisanal production modes’ (Naficy 2001: 4). Such a statement is made from a North American perspective (seen as constituting the universal), and is problematic when applied to, for example, a Scandinavian welfare state such as Sweden in which almost every film production is partly state funded and often produced according to an artisanal mode, unless one considers every film production from Sweden to constitute an accented cinema (which is sometimes the case from the perspective of major North American cinema institutions). In fact, in many small countries it is rather the rule, as Arezou Zalipour has pointed out regarding interstitial and collective filmmaking in New Zealand, that ‘[i]t is a complex process of articulation in the interstices of an industry and society in which the passion to tell stories has created multiple filmmaking practices across several disjunctures’ (2016: 107). It is symptomatic that most of the critiques of Naficy’s elaboration have come from minor countries or non-western scholars. Thus, Eva Bakøy from Norway makes the remark that Naficy’s concept of accented cinema is so general ‘that almost any film that breaks with the conventions of Hollywood filmmaking can fit the description’, and that Norwegian immigrant cinema has more in common with its mainstream national production than with accented cinema (2011: 149). Turkish scholar Asuman Suner has pointed out how the style of accented cinema is actually typical for contemporary national ‘world cinema’ that more often than not deals with issues of belonging and identity (2006: 364–65). In other words, the style of accented cinema is characteristic of much of mainstream national cinemas of welfare states, or of existentialist auteur art cinema that focus on boundary situation stories, a typical trait of the modern novel according to Horst Ruthrof (1981).

It is because of the above-mentioned different evaluative definitions of accented cinema, which all tend to simplify the premises of cultural production, that David E. James’s notion of minor cinemas, as a descriptive and spatial concept, is so useful. First, it makes the point that minor does not necessarily stand in opposition to major. Second, it highlights that major/minor is a question of geography and not only because it is a relational concept, and since both minor and major have to be localized you have to provide answers to both the questions: minor in relation to what, and, minor in relation to where? Indeed, the transnational has a geography and locality, and implies a crossing of boundaries, but not that you move beyond boundaries. A polyglot, multilingual cinema overcomes certain boundaries but does not remove them. As we have learnt from our archival cultural practice, the immigrant films need to be subtitled in order to reach new audiences and produce new localities. They need to be contextualized again and again.

In accordance with our programme for a film theory, which emphasizes film theory as an action and a cultural practice, we will understand accented cinema as one particular mode of immigrant filmmaking, while at the same time insisting on the importance of not reducing independent immigrant filmmaking into accented cinema as such. Due to the criticism that we have raised against Naficy’s theory of accented cinema, we claim that the concept of minor cinemas is a preferable notion as it is more inclusive and production-oriented than accented cinema. Minor cinemas include all marginal cinemas, out of which immigrant cinemas are often one distinct form, but not necessarily so (it may also be major), whereas accented cinema is one possible mode of immigrant cinemas.

Minor cinema

Minor cinema has an even more convoluted genealogy than accented cinema. Naficy, like so many other film scholars, invokes Deleuze and Guattari as part of his theory of accented cinema. Naficy interprets the three characteristics – (1) the deterritorialization of language, (2) the connection of the individual to a political immediacy and (3) the collective assemblage of enunciation presented – in the following ways: (1) the deterritorialization of language is defined from both a productional and textual perspective, as ‘deterritorialized style […] smallness, imperfection, amateurishness, and lack of cinematic gloss’ and ‘textual richness and narrative inventiveness’, (2) political immediacy is defined according to production: accented cinema being political per se due to the ‘accented mode of production’ and (3) collective enunciation is considered as ‘working collaboratively’ and constituting communities, conjoining ‘filmmakers and audiences […] by their membership in communities of address that consists of émigrés, exiles, ethnicized, and otherwise otherized subjects’ (Naficy 2001: 45). In accordance with his theory of accented cinema, Naficy thus makes minor cinemas into an empathetic notion, blending textual categories with production-oriented ones.[4]

As we have remarked in the introduction, Naficy is not the only one to award a specific mission to minor cinema as a concept. William Brown points out, in his comprehensive introduction to the concept, how Deleuze and Guattari assign a ‘revolutionary potential’ to minor literature due to its capacity to ‘upset the major language’ (2013: 290). However, the concept has had its greatest impact in film studies on how suppressed and marginal groups, and minor modes of filmmaking, can be recognized and valorized. Many of these studies are conducted with an empathetic approach, leading to an opposed dualism that, as we pointed out in the introduction, scholars like Ali Behdad and Meaghan Morris have criticized.

Alison Butler is one of the heirs to Morris’s claim that minor does not imply an antagonistic position. In her book Women’s Cinema: The Contested Screen she discusses women’s cinema as minor cinema and claims that ‘[w]omen’s cinema now seems ‘minor’ rather than oppositional’ (2002: 19). With this, Butler stresses that minor cinema is a descriptive notion of a cinema of a minority or a marginalized group, and that ‘[t]o call women’s cinema a minor cinema, then, is to free it from the binarisms (popular/elitist, avant-garde/mainstream, positive/negative) which result from imagining it as a parallel or oppositional cinema’ (2002: 21–22). Thereby another point is made as well, namely that the deterritorialization of language is not primarily a question of aesthetics, of ‘textual richness and narrative inventiveness’, but of the conditions of production (Naficy 2001: 45). These cinemas are minor because minority people produce them in the margins.

The urge to interpret deterritorialization foremost in aesthetic terms is understandable as this goes back to the strong tradition of textual analysis in film. Thus, Patricia White, in her essay on ‘Lesbian minor cinema’, analyses the work of Chantal Akerman and Sadie Benning, and defines minor cinema ‘as making use of limited resources in a politicized way’, and stresses minor as ‘experimentation’ and a ‘creative act of becoming’ (White 2008: 413). Tom Gunning, who was one of the first to apply Deleuze and Guattari’s notion in film studies, used minor cinema to single out some contemporary avant-garde filmmakers who seemed to follow no given agenda – and therefore no teleological trajectory – but who made films simply for the sake of making films. Gunning’s initial appropriation of the term was done with the intent of criticizing the established historiography in order to stress the moment of cultural production in a minority situation, of minor avant-garde film practice in relation to the established (male-dominated) canon. The films and filmmakers (Lewis Klahr, Phil Solomon and Mark Lapore) that Gunning presents in his essay on minor cinema are works and artists that affirm their own marginality, but not because they have an antagonistic position. What these new films and filmmakers did, according to Gunning, was to affirm their marginality and non-professionalism. Moreover, they lacked any aspiration to hegemony: ‘[t]hey share […] a concern for the expressivity of images and a moment in history’ (1990: 5). The minor cinema that Gunning detects does not aspire to be major but is rather truthful to its own cause.

Gunning’s highlighting of the particularity of the new films and filmmakers is important because it puts the focus on cultural production, affirming that each film grows out of its specific cultural situation and is not made according to any given programmatic reason. It is due to their production mode and factual marginality that they receive a programmatic mission. This ‘collective politics of minor cinema’, as Brown has called it, is an essential part of the definition and a way to theorize how such a cinema addresses an audience that is emerging (2013: 291). Butler has made a useful summary along similar lines:

the notion of a minor literature as involved in the projection of a community rather than its expression is especially useful to the argument that the existence of a women’s cinema need not be premised on an essentialist understanding of the category ‘women’. The communities imagined by women’s cinema are as many and varied as the films it comprises, and each is involved in its own historical moment.

(2002: 21, original emphasis)

In this ‘projection’, where the film constitutes its audience, the term ‘fabulation’ is one of the key concepts and has been most fully theorized by D. N. Rodowick, who devotes one full chapter of his book Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine to minor cinema (1997).[5]

According to Rodowick, fabulation defines both minor cinema as a concept and ‘its forms of collective enunciation’ (1997: 156). Like other scholars in their uses of the concept minor cinema has pointed out, that being minor implies that you have to invent your own language and constitute a new audience (Fisher 2007). Both are becoming, as it were, and cannot be built on established models. In order to make such a becoming possible you have to overcome the fixed categories of the language of the major, for example the division between documentary (fact) and fiction, as these are based on pre-established categories and worldviews. That is what Deleuze, according to Rodowick, means by stating that ‘the people are missing’ (1997: 158). For the immigrant filmmaker, this is one of the key questions. You are in an interstitial space, in-between languages and cultures, and have to address both yourself and your audience in a new way in order to be able to act in your novel situation. In the immigrant films that we are analysing, this takes place on both a film stylistic level and in a more literal sense. Some films are multilingual, and the characters often speak Swedish with an accent.

Whereas Rodowick interprets this interstitial situation of the minority according to the ‘revolutionary potential’, as described by Brown, we will not fully adhere to Rodowick’s perspective. The immigrant filmmakers we study used film in order to find out where they were, and because of their minority position this was by necessity a social act as well. But, as we will show, not all films used an aesthetic strategy of ‘fabulation’, or belong to the accented mode. Rather, these were options that could be, and often were, chosen. As described in the introduction, we will follow James’s more descriptive definition in contrast to Naficy’s evaluative approach and Rodowick’s refined interpretations. Thus, deterritorialization in our vocabulary simply means that minor cinemas are minor because the producers and the products are in the margins. Political immediacy means that because of the position as minor there is no possible separation between the individual and the social – you are forced into a semiotic system where you are always approached according to a metonymic logic, and thus every utterance and act of signification becomes collective. You are always seen as speaking for a group, not as an individual. Hence, there are no implications that minor cinemas – as in Naficy’s notion of accented cinema – always result in narrative inventiveness or textual richness.

Applying the perspective of minor cinemas implies that it is the mode of production that is the common denominator for the analysis. Therefore, we have chosen our five production hubs as the starting point for our study. As will be shown, the outlook of the films and the premises for actual production vary. Consequently, although Naficy stresses upon mode of production, his concept of accented cinema is foremost a textual model of film analysis. This can also be seen in how his notion has been picked up by other film scholars. Most of them perform textual and interpretational approaches to film studies and are not focusing on conditions of production. This is because accented cinema as a concept does not enable an analysis that considers the complexities of film production in an exilic and diasporic situation, as the complexity is on the textual level only. After all, the key problem for the immigrant filmmaker is not so much the question how the Other is to be represented, but how your position as the Other may become a productive starting point for self-organization and filmmaking as a cultural intervention; as a way of producing a new context and even affirming one’s otherness; and how these new practices are renegotiated because of established structures and conditions.

In conclusion, Naficy’s notion of accented cinema is foremost a normative analytical tool for the textual analysis of film. Its objective is to establish a frame of analysis to ‘read and reread’ a particular body of films, to highlight a particular aesthetics and to claim that it emerges from exile and the diaspora experience (Naficy 1994: 3). As we see it, the theory of accented cinema is too dependent on the tradition of textual analysis, and, despite efforts to consider premises of production and context, it often falls back into an existential mode, stressing the existential situation of being in exile, and in which the accented becomes a general and generalizing situation. Accented is simply one possible mode of immigrant filmmaking, and fabulation one possible aesthetic strategy.

Beyond textual models of the accented and exilic

Due to the overwhelming impact of Naficy’s writing, previous studies on exilic filmmaking have been ignored. We would, in particular, like to draw attention to Zuzana M. Pick’s work and her two essays, ‘Chilean cinema in exile 1973–1986’ and ‘The dialectical wanderings of exile’, which have been overshadowed by Naficy’s work and to which he merely refers to in An Accented Cinema without presenting Pick’s actual arguments (see Pick 1987b, 1989).

Pick analyses Chilean cinema in exile in her essays from the 1980s in order to criticize an approach that considers ‘the situation of exile as a monolithic response to a specific political event’ (1987b: 56).[6] Instead, Pick stresses that each filmmaker had to renegotiate their position and place in order to be able to act. These renegotiations also changed over time, and therefore the actual outcome (i.e. the individual films) was diverse and multifaceted. Thus, claims Pick, ‘[t]he development of a Chilean cinema in exile is due mostly to efforts of individuals working within diverse social, cultural, historical and institutional formations and independent from an established programme of action which could have imposed limitations and constraints’ (1987b: 42). Pick’s dynamic model, where the premises of production are the starting point, is better able to account for the diversity of the films, the shifting sociopolitical conditions of film production and the transnational transgressions. Such a point of departure and approach also better corresponds with the actual materials of minor cinemas that are rather characterized by individual efforts and networks than by industrial approaches and investments. Minor cinemas are characterized by contingency and diversity, not by genre demarcations and the striving for feature filmmaking.

One of Pick’s key claims is that the concept of exile must be understood as dynamic and subjective and that this fact affects the categories of analysis as well. ‘Far from operating in secure unanimity’, she writes in an analysis of the work of Fernando Solanas and Raúl Ruiz, ‘national identity in exile can perform in the embattled ground of ideology as its belligerent and inventive other’ (1989: 64). Her point is that the subjectivity of exile is re-inventing itself. And, likewise, representation is rearticulated and reconstituted. This leads to what she has called ‘the privilege of exile’ and ‘the subjective paradox of exile’ (1987b: 42, 56). The exilic is thus a situation but not a place with an established essence; it is rather a situation that challenges one to act, to renegotiate one’s past and intervene in the present. This condition of the exilic also explains, according to Pick, why a filmmaker like Solanas transitioned from third cinema to the mode of European auteurism (1989: 60).[7] Pick’s way of articulating the exile thus allows one to see the diversity and heterogeneity of the exilic as a production context and, hence, its productivity, but also the dialectic relationship between history and future, between conditions and possibilities.

In her critique of Naficy’s definition of accented cinema, Suner calls for an expanded notion, ‘an unbounded understanding of the concept’, an ‘accented cinema at large’, as she calls it (2006: 379). Her argument is that any cinema that relates to a ‘critical positionality vis-á-vis the questions of belonging’ constitutes an accented cinema (2006: 365). Whereas our aim is to get beyond Naficy’s definition of an accented cinema, we do not however suggest that the concept should encompass a larger validity, but that exile and diasporic filmmaking is more than accented filmmaking. The exilic, diasporic and immigrant situation forces one to rearticulate and reconsider who you are. As Pick has pointed out in her work, what characterizes the situation of the exilic (and the immigrant filmmaker, we would add) is that they are made aware that they have to redefine their practice, ‘to reassess cultural practice’ (Pick 1987b: 54).

A case in point is the filmmaker Sergio Castilla, who happened to be in Sweden the fall of 1973 when the coup took place in Chile. Castilla, who had graduated from IDHEC in Paris, held a teaching position in Chile and divided his time between Paris, Santiago de Chile and Stockholm, while he was married to a Swedish woman. Castilla had shot a narrative feature in 35 mm, La historia (The History, or The Way of Lovers) (1973), in Chile and travelled to Sweden in order to finalize the film.[8] Due to the coup by Augusto Pinochet, Castilla was forced to stay in Sweden.

At the time, Sweden experienced significant immigration from Latin America. The peak years were the 1970s and 1980s, and according to latest available statistics Sweden is today the European country with the largest Chilean population.[9] As the case of Castilla shows, the reason for the influx of Latin Americans was the coup of 1973. When Salvador Allende came to power in 1970, there were already bonds between Sweden and Chile. The Swedish social-democratic government, in particular their rising star, the late Olof Palme, who was appointed Prime Minister in 1969, became an ardent supporter of Allende. This continued after the coup with party officials of the Social Democrats giving large sums of money directly to People’s Unity representatives in exile (Padilla 2011: 44).

Chile had been a haven for Latin American refugees since the Christian-Democratic government (1964–70) and especially after Allende’s Unidad Popular (People’s Unity) during the years 1970–73. When Allende and his government were overthrown in September 1973, many Chileans fled to Sweden. Because Chile under Allende had welcomed people who fled from oppressive conditions in other Latin American countries, the wave of immigration to Sweden from Chile encompassed people from different countries of the continent. As the Swedish government’s reputation as one of the fiercest critics of Pinochet’s Chile increased throughout the 1970s, the country continued to attract people from Latin America, and from Chile in particular. This is thus why there were so many Chilean and Latin American filmmakers in Sweden.

Sweden had indeed made several spectacular interventions. The Swedish Embassy in Santiago had assigned their facilities to political refugees after the coup, and it is estimated that, due to the help of Swedish state officials, about one thousand were rescued from Chile during the early months of Pinochet’s takeover (Padilla 2011: 54). State officials gave money directly to both Allende’s wife, Hortensia Bussi, as well as his daughter Beatriz in order for them to carry on with the resistance movement (Padilla 2011: 44).[10] The footage that Patricio Guzmán shot for his famous La battalla de Chile (The Battle of Chile) (1972–79) was not only smuggled out via the Swedish Embassy while Guzmán was held at the infamous National Stadium of Chile in September 1973, but was also co-financed by the Swedish state. Later, Guzmán would receive money directly from Pierre Schori, a close assistant of Prime Minister Palme and the international secretary of the Swedish Social Democratic Party, who had particular responsibility for Latin America and the Mediterranean countries.

Thus, someone like Castilla was welcomed and received a given context in Sweden at the time. His first feature, La historia, was in line with contemporary Latin American political cinema, being an allegory of Spanish and American colonialism. The story is told through the eyes of a number of Chilean children, and because the film is from the point of view of children, Castilla was directed to the department for children’s programmes at SVT. The department provided Castilla with editing facilities and paid for the post-production. Eventually, Castilla followed up La historia with two animated short films in 16 mm based on drawings by Chilean children in exile: Pinochet: Fascista, asesino, traidor, agente del imperialismo (Pinochet: Fascist, Murderer, Traitor, Imperialist Agent) (1974) and Quisiera tener un hijo (I Wish I Had a Son) (1974). These were produced by SFI and the latter partly funded by SIDA, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency. In addition, he made a short film for SVT, En chilensk flicka i Sverige (A Girl from Chile in Sweden) (1975), which is both a portrait of a 12-year-old girl whose family must flee the military regime, and a political documentary about the situation in Chile, addressing Swedish children of the same age.

Castilla was an exilic filmmaker par excellence. He could not return to his country and his work, and he was severely affected by his exilic situation. However, despite his accented position and exilic situation, he chose to make political films, not accented ones. Castilla’s most experimental work, and accented in that sense, is La historia, which he shot in Chile. The allegory of Latin American history was made in an experimental style and does not follow the rules of narrative coherence and linearity. Being told from the point of view of children who comment upon the action adds another defamiliarizing trait to the film. When Castilla showed La historia at two private screenings in Stockholm and Paris, the audiences were baffled. After receiving similar reactions at two festivals, Castilla decided to withdraw the film. The films that followed were in fact made in, and out of, an exilic situation. However, these were overtly political, marked by that reassessment of cultural practice that Pick claims characterizes the exilic situation.

Figure 2: Sergio Castilla, Pinochet: Fascista, asesino, traidor, agente del imperialismo (Pinochet: Fascist, Murderer, Traitor, Imperialist Agent), 1974. 16 mm. Courtesy of Sergio Castilla.

In 1974 Castilla, with Quisiera tener un hijo, participated in the International Leipzig Documentary and Short Film Week for Cinema and Television, which took place in East Germany. That year, Jane Fonda also visited the festival in order to promote Haskell Wexler’s documentary about the Fonda family’s journey to Vietnam, Introduction to the Enemy (1974). Swedish reporter Magnus Roselius made a television documentary about that year’s festival, Film som vapen (Film as Weapon) (1975), in which he interviews Castilla. Castilla notes that he has reached the conclusion that due to the situation in Chile, and because of being in exile, his only choice is to fight for the Chilean resistance and to make militant films – ‘shooting documents’. Hence, an exilic position does not necessarily lead to an accented style, but to a reconsideration of your practice and yourself in relation to your filmmaking and your new context. In Castilla’s case he found his context in a political environment that supported his political filmmaking, but where his more accented style, as it were, was not met with any understanding. The given context was the plain political one. Accordingly, with a critical understanding and apprehension of Nacify’s contribution to the study of immigrant filmmaking, and by highlighting contributions by other scholars, in particular that of Pick, we hope to gain a more fair view of immigrant filmmaking as cultural practice.

Notes

1 Fran Martin’s comment in a review of the book for Screening the Past is apt and worth quoting at length:

On the one hand, Naficy concedes that the filmmakers are all differently situated, and are located in varying social formations at different points on the globe – which in the light of his generally historical-materialist framework would imply differences that should matter for the films they produce. While on the other hand, Naficy seeks a style that will encompass common characteristics, cut through differences, and be explicable in terms of what now appears as a generalized fact of ‘shared’ displacement and deterritorialization.

(Martin 2002: n.pag., original emphasis)

2 First published in East-West Film Journal in 1994 and later reprinted in two influential anthologies: Wilson and Dissanayake (1996) and Shohat and Stam (2004).

3 For Bordwell’s afterthoughts on the methodological aspects of the book, see his blog entry on The Classical Hollywood Cinema on davidbordwell.net: http://davidbordwell.net/essays/classical.php.

4 Adam Szymanski provides an initiated overview of the concept minor cinema in his Ph.D. thesis ‘Minor cinemas of melancholy and therapy’ where he also argues that Félix Guattari’s application of the concept has hitherto been neglected in film studies (Szymanski 2017).

5 Naficy’s and Rodowick’s approaches overlap in many ways, and it is surprising that Naficy does not refer to Rodowick anywhere in An Accented Cinema. The references to Rodowick in Marks (2000) are also very sparse. The concept of fabulation originates from Henri Bergson but has received its political twist from Deleuze. Besides Rodowick, Ilona Hongisto (2015) and John Mullarkey (2009) have made the most extensive elaborations, of which Hongisto is closer to Bergson’s notion.

6 Zuzana M. Pick’s essay was first published in the journal Framework with the full title ‘Chilean cinema in exile (1973–1986). The notion of exile: A field of investigation and its conceptual framework’ (Pick 1987b), and later reprinted as ‘Chilean cinema in exile, 1973–1986’ (Martin 1997).

7 Whereas, according to Pick, Solana’s transition was seen as a ‘betrayal’ of the third cinema movement, films by Ruiz were excluded because they did not cohere with Chilean films of resistance (Pick 1987b: 41).

8 Generally, throughout our account, we mention every film title first in the original, then give its English title, but will after that use the original title. Many of the films discussed have no English distribution titles, and in that case we have translated the original titles, except for those titles that were translated when the films were shown at Kaleidoscope’s international immigrant film festival in 1986.

9 The exact number according to Fernando Camacho Padilla is 28,320. If second-generation Chileans, adopted children and people without residence permits are included, the amount is about fifty thousand in a country with almost ten million inhabitants (Padilla 2011: 12).

10 Representatives of the Swedish government gave money directly to Allende’s daughter Beatriz and later his wife Hortensia Bussi, in November 1973 and October 1974 respectively. For example, in November 1973 Olof Palme gave 500,000 Swedish krona (about 50,000 euros) to Beatriz Allende, and shortly thereafter twice as much. In October, Hortensia Bussi received 250,000 krona (about 25,000 euros) from former Prime Minister and party leader Tage Erlander (Padilla 2011: 44).

Chapter 2

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

Because previous research on immigrant cinemas has concentrated mainly on interpreting individual films according to textual models such as accented cinema, it is important to map and focus production cultures and contexts. Therefore, in this chapter we will present five associations and workshops that became instrumental for minor immigrant filmmaking in Sweden: the Independent Film Group (1950–72), the Stockholm Film Workshop (1973–2001), Cineco (1976–83), Kaleidoscope (1981–88) and the Tensta Film Association (1974–88). We will also mention some of the important individuals who were crucial for these associations and workshops, like Mihail Livada, Muammer Özer and Babis Tsokas. In order to map the cultural contexts for these production nodes, we will start with a brief sketch of immigration to Sweden and its relationship to cultural production and reception in general. The presentation of the associations and the workshops will be put in a theoretical context that originates in the producer-oriented models of Deleuze and Guattari and Pick. These approaches will be complemented with Negt and Kluge’s post-Habermasian theories of the public sphere in order to discuss their claim that a true public sphere is momentary and arises from people’s own actual living conditions.

With the actual conditions in focus grows a need to secure the experience of the incompatible. As we have pointed out, this experience and situation is heterogeneous, and thus the heterogeneity has to be mapped, not erased. One of the effects of this consideration is that the description and analysis of the different production and distribution venues will be uneven. In the case of the Independent Film Group, for example, plenty of empirical evidence has been archived, and due to the availability of the material the association has been included in later Swedish film historiography. In other cases, most notably Cineco, very few works have been executed and hardly any documentation is left, and thus there are few historiographical attempts and little that has been researched. Because history, as Michel de Certeau puts it, ‘vacillates between two poles’, namely reality and textuality, the mapping reflects the heterogeneity of the immigrant associations and workshops (de Certeau 1988: 21). But despite these crucial differences in the material, mutual parameters also have to be established to be able to communicate and compare the raw material of the research.

Immigration and culture in post-war Sweden

Swedish film production was never an isolated national cause, and film workers as well as technical and financial resources have always been in flux, migrating over national borders. This was a fact during the first decades of silent cinema when Scandinavian artists and technicians moved around Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland (Bachmann 2013). Mauritz Stiller, one of the most important directors of the so-called Golden Age of Swedish silent film, migrated from Finland, then a part of the Russian Empire, and later he and Victor Sjöström (a.k.a. Seastrom) and stars like Greta Garbo and Lars Hanson in turn moved to Hollywood, while Gösta Ekman made films for UFA in Berlin. Solitary artists like Viking Eggeling and Otto Carlsund contributed to the international avant-garde in Berlin and Paris during the same years. The migration of film workers was also a fact during the transition to sound film, when pan-European films were shot in Paris, as well as when Swedish film actresses like Christina Söderbaum and Zarah Leander became stars in the thriving Third Reich movie business, and Swedes like Warner Oland and Ingrid Bergman were acknowledged in Hollywood. During the war there were some film workers in exile in Sweden, e.g. the prolific Austrian scriptwriters Adolf Schütz and Paul Baudish. The Finnish cinematographer and director Erik Blomberg was contracted in Sweden as a cinematographer after the war, but left in 1947 due to a protest from the film studio employees and their trade union, who threatened to go on strike if Blomberg’s work permit was renewed.

Within the avant-garde or the fringes of mainstream culture the situation was somehow different, and most of the experimental filmmakers were organized as amateurs and considered themselves as such, in the vein of Maya Deren. A very loose constellation of artists gathered in the 1950s in the Independent Film Group in Stockholm. Key members such as Peter Weiss and Mihail Livada had arrived in Sweden as refugees, while others were nomadic artists. Not all of them were filmmakers at first, but they chose film as their medium in order to get access to the means of artistic expression.

The period during the Second World War is sometimes called the first wave of immigration in modern Sweden (Lundberg 1989). The majority of the immigrants were refugees from a world in war, predominantly of Scandinavian, Finnish and German descent, but also individuals from France, Poland and rather significant groups from the Baltic states. This was followed by the second wave of immigrant labour during the 1950s and 1960s.[1] Industrial workers were needed in the thriving Swedish economy, and this paved way for groups of immigrants from Greece, Austria, The Federal Republic of Germany, Italy and later from Yugoslavia. Immigrant labour migrated also from Finland during the 1960s and 1970s. The third wave consisted of political refugees at the beginning of the 1970s, mainly Latin Americans, and also people from Greece, Iran, Turkey and, to a certain extent, Eastern Europe. In general Sweden was a haven for political refugees and very often there was an influx of immigrants whenever there was political turmoil such as the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 or the anti-Jewish campaigns in Poland during 1968–71.

It is possible to find another periodization, built upon the economic conditions. Byström and Frohnert (2017) divide the post-war period into three different stages, where the first starts after the war, 1945, and reaches the economic crisis of 1972. In 1972, Sweden closed down its non-Nordic work force immigration and instead increased the numbers of refugees seeking asylum, for example from Chile and Greece. Sweden’s entrance into the European Union in 1995 altered the conditions once again, allowing free movement within the EU, and at the same time new waves of refugees were generated through instability in the Middle East and the breakdown of Yugoslavia. Since then, other migratory movements can be observed, most of them not thoroughly discussed in this context. When it comes to systematic Swedish immigration politics, Byström and Frohnert point out that 1975 must be seen as a crucial year since a parliamentary majority at that time formulated a policy that explicitly changed the focus from assimilation to integration and multicultural perspectives (2017: 56).

We are, of course, foremost focussed on the migration of film workers or people who turned to filmmaking, but they were certainly not alone. The refugees from primarily Latin America, foremost Chile, and Greece, Spain and, to some extent, Eastern Europe and Iran, are of significance when we are discussing film in Sweden. Lots of highly skilled journalists, artists, photographers and film workers came to Sweden during the 1970s, and formed substantial exile communities, especially in the greater urban areas of Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö. Several of them found their way into practical film work through agencies like the Stockholm Film Workshop and organizations like Kaleidoscope; few were able to get into the film industry, ‘the major cinema’, until the 1990s and the beginning of 2000. Most of the films were short films but there are also some full-length productions, like the aforementioned Hägring (1984) directed by Iranian Saeed Assadi, Splittring (Breakup) (1988) directed by Turkish Muammer Özer and Consuelo by Chilean Luis R. Vera (1988). All three met with harsh receptions by the Swedish critics who accused them of being filled with clichés and stereotypes, and characterized by an immature filmic language.[2]

But something happened in 2000 when three specific feature films in particular had a great impact when they premiered: Jalla! Jalla! by Josef Fares (born in Lebanon), Vingar av glas (Wings of Glass) by Reza Bagher (born in Iran) and Före stormen (Before the Storm) by Reza Parsa (born in Iran) (Wright 2005). According to mainstream media, a new Swedish film wave was born, and these feature films were soon followed by others: Fyra kvinnor (Four Women) in 2001 by Baker Karim (born in Uganda) and Hus i helvete (All Hell Let Loose) (2002) by Susan Taslimi (born in Iran). At the same time, several ambitious TV series were produced for public television that addressed migration and ethnical minorities, e.g. Det nya landet (The New Country) in 2000 and Den förste zigenaren i rymden (The First Gypsy in Space) in 2002.[3] Several of the directors became soon established, e.g. Josef Fares whose Zozo from 2005 received a long row of awards. (Outside the critical reception of this so-called boom there were other immigrant filmmakers working, e.g. British Colin Nutley whose films belong to the most popular Swedish productions of this period.) In all, the mainstream film culture, or major cinema, to a certain extent, came to reflect the transformation of Sweden into a contemporary western multicultural society. The new wave of immigrant filmmaking within major cinema had little or nothing to do with the strands of minor cinema, except for those very few filmmakers who migrated from one kind of cinema to another, e.g. Reza Bagher. Bagher had started out almost twenty years earlier at the Stockholm Film Workshop before the success with Vingar av glas. These connections to the minor film culture, or the few feature films from the 1980s, were however never mentioned in reviews and articles, nor in the sparse research on the subject. Accordingly, the (hi)story that was reproduced claimed that there had hardly been any immigrant cinema before the turn of millennium.[4]

Establishing experimental film culture: The Independent Film Group

The co-op Svensk experimentfilmstudio (Swedish Experimental Film Workshop), soon renamed Arbetsgruppen för film (the Working Group for Film), aka the Independent Film Group, was established in 1950 in Stockholm, and was soon to be the most important venue for experimental film in Sweden. The creation of the Film Group arose out of practical needs. Two film enthusiasts, Henry Lunnestam and Nils Jönsson (who owned a 16 mm Paillard-Bolex camera), worked during the fall of 1949 on a film called Vision, but ran out of ideas and had financial problems. When they met with the Romanian refugee Mihail Livada, who was about to start working on his second experimental short De vita händerna (The White Hands) (1950), they decided to get together and initiate an organization.

The Independent Film Group produced well over fifty films during the 1950s, most of them short experimental films and documentaries. It was both a workshop for independent filmmakers and a club for screenings and debates. For a while the group published a modest mimeographed film newsletter of its own, SEF (short for ‘Svensk Experimentalfilmstudio’, later changed to ‘Svensk experimentfilmstudio’).[5] It was succeeded by the journal Filmfront, which started as a mouthpiece for the Independent Film Group but was soon taken over and run by the national organization for film clubs.[6] Members of the group were important in those organs as well as in daily papers as reviewers and debaters, promoting experimental film culture. The importance of the group was diminished during the 1960s, mostly due to lack of resources and that key persons were tied up by other, more prestigious tasks. The Independent Film Group was later reconstructed as a foundation, Filmform, functioning to this day, now primarily working with the distribution and promotion of artists’ film and video.

As stated before, almost all of the members were amateurs, in the sense that very few had had professional film training. The driving force behind the association, Arne Lindgren, was a dentist by profession. A noteworthy peculiarity is that none of the members seemed to have ambitions to work within mainstream cinema. Most of the group were students in art and literature, and some would make a significant career outside film, for example Pontus Hultén, who became director of Moderna Museet in 1960, the national museum for modern art in Stockholm (and later the first director of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris), Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd, who turned into one of the few Swedish visuals artists with an international reputation in the 1960s, and Rut Hillarp, an influential poet in the Swedish literary community of the 1940s and 1950s. They stayed within the film group for some years, and then went on in their individual careers within other art forms. Thus, they never became influential voices in Swedish film culture. (The turn to film art that took place within the establishment of international European art and auteur cinema – otherwise represented by the omnipresent Ingmar Bergman – never made room for the experimental minors.) One way to describe the filmmakers of the group is that they were in becoming – they were not decided or defined as something specific, they just articulated a will to get on with their individual trajectories, defining individual aesthetic positions. They started within film culture, but film culture was not articulated as an ultimate goal.

The aim of the Independent Film Group was to promote the production of ‘free, experimental film’ (Krantz and Lindgren 1971). Because of the ambition to reach a broad audience, the workshop collaborated with other film clubs, amateur film organizations and cultural societies in general. Film programmes from the early years also indicate the openness of experimental film culture at the time. Together with Stockholm University College, the group ran night classes and screenings devoted to art film, for example a programme with lectures and workshops on the theory of experimental film during the autumn of 1952, where filmmaker and artist Carl Gyllenberg taught on the aesthetics of film and ‘the conditions for experimental filmmaking’ (Lindgren 1952: 24).

What is characteristic of the early production is the diversity, the blending of existential, symbolic and (male) melancholic meditations, explorations of film material and language and poetic documentaries of urban and modern Stockholm. Many of the early films were eclectic experiments and tests marked by curiosity and artistic freedom, for example Study in Colours (1951) by Mihail Livada and Carl Gyllenberg, an investigation of the use of colour as an artistic device, De vita händerna (1950) by Rut Hillarp and Mihail Livada, a visual poem in black and white and Odjuret (The Beast) (1953) by Per Olov Grönstrand and Nils Olsén, a documentary about how the new city centre in Stockholm developed. There were no common aesthetic principles governing the work of the filmmakers. The co-op consisted of individualists and the common platform for the group was experimental film per se, but all projects were initiated individually, and usually financed privately. Only a few films were sponsored, for example by funding from the Stockholm municipality (Häggbom et al. 1960). The screenings of films, mentioned above, were arranged until 1955 when the activity was concentrated on film production only. The number of members was fluctuating, with around fifteen to twenty active members, and around 150 passive ones (viewers of the public screenings). After 1955, the members were elected and the profile became more elitist (Andersson et al. 2010: 72). The primary task for the co-op from 1955 was thus defined as producing film, rather than screening it.[7]

The Independent Film Group functioned as an apparatus, mediating independent filmmaking through the three possible ways that David E. James mapped out (2005: 204): facilitating production, enabling consumption and working within an ideological discourse. The principal aim of the group, according to the founding documents, was to facilitate production, but the need for an overall promotion of experimental film culture soon became evident. The economic realities also governed this process; the group had very meagre means to actually facilitate production in a material way, but there were several well-educated and ardent members who could speak and write about film. The group was a ‘Lebenszusammenhang’ in the words of Negt and Kluge (1993), a context of living and being, the aim of which was to create a centre for experimental film culture. Due to film hardware being both expensive and hard to find, the group organized a film library, bought projectors and cameras and created a public sphere of its own in order to promote and enable a minor cinema culture.

In this context of living in accordance with your film interests, there were also immigrants, Scandinavians like the Norwegian Willy Buzzi, a prolific reviewer for the Filmfront magazine and later the author of a book-length study of film aesthetics, as well as French artists like Jean-Clarence Lambert. But the two vital names are Peter Weiss and Mihail Livada.

Peter Weiss, born in Germany but a Czech citizen, came to Sweden in 1939 together with his parents and siblings, escaping from the Third Reich. During these first years in Sweden he reunited with other exiled friends, as with the German author Max Barth and Hungarian artist Endre Nemes. He had his first Swedish art exhibit in Stockholm in March 1941, and was appointed guest student at the Royal University College of Fine Arts in Stockholm 1942. In 1946 he received his Swedish citizenship, and in 1952 became a member of the Independent Film Group. Weiss was to become one of the most important members in the loosely organized workshop and was even chairman for some time. Together with friends, he made his debut as film director with the short Studie 1 – Uppvaknandet (Study 1 – Awakening) (1952), which was the first in a series of surrealist shorts. He wrote several articles and essays on experimental film, for example in the new film magazine Filmfront and in daily papers. Some of his articles were revised and collected in the monograph Avantgardefilm (Weiss 1953). He continued making experimental shorts, shot some commissioned films and directed a feature film, Hägringen (The Mirage) (1959). Hägringen derives from prose sketches and poems dating back to the 1940s; the first, more lengthy treatment was the Kafkaesque novel Dokument I (Document I) (1949). The plot is simple: a young man with no name and no past arrives in a big city, in fact Stockholm, where he meets people and becomes involved in absurd conversations and acts. During his walks through the city he meets a young woman and the two of them fall in love. Some parts of the film are very documentary in their style, e.g. scenes from the old slum blocks of Stockholm, while some sequences are dreamlike, almost hallucinatory in their visual nature. The theme of alienation is underlined by several devices, e.g. the dialogue parts that are often absurd, mostly consisting of questions in a style more literary than typical everyday speech.

The Swedish reception of Hägringen was austere. Some positive aspects of the film were noted, but as a whole it was rejected, mainly because of what was seen as an outdated use of surrealistic imagery. The poet and critic Artur Lundkvist was alone in his praise for the film. Later, the film was established as part of the Swedish experimental film canon, and has been claimed as the work of ‘a true auteur’ (Ek 1982: 20). The film describes an exilic process, and the production and reception of it is ironically also a history of something foreign – first neglected, then accepted and even canonized.

After some smaller contributions, e.g. a documentary on new housing projects in Denmark, and the co-direction with Barbro Boman of the, in many ways failed, Svenska flickor i Paris (The Flamboyant Sex) in 1961, Weiss left filmmaking at the beginning of the 1960s. He had a major international breakthrough with the plays Marat/Sade (1964) and Die Ermittlung (The Investigation) (1966). After that there was no return to minor filmmaking.

Mihail Livada, born in Romania in 1908, was, like Weiss, an outsider and an individualist, using the co-op for his own purposes but also someone who worked collectively. His career was modest. Unlike Weiss, there are few documents on him, and there was a good reason why he was very selective with information concerning himself. He was trained as an engineer and held a pilot’s licence from the Romanian air force. In Sweden he acted as a self-taught photographer with artistic interests, not as the engineer who was sent to Finland during the Second World War on a mission for the Romanian military intelligence (Livada’s brother was a member of the ultra-nationalist, anti-Semitic and Orthodox Christian Iron Guard). Both Finland and Romania were allied with Nazi Germany at the time, but nevertheless Livada was spied upon by the Finnish secret police, who registered that he also made trips to Sweden.[8] After general Antonescu was overthrown in 1944, Livada succeeded in staying in the Nordic countries, and did eventually leave Finland for Sweden. At the beginning of 1947 he met the young Swedish poet Rut Hillarp at the Rive Gauche club in Stockholm; they fell in love, and started an intense relationship that, with many ruptures and reunions, was to continue until Livada died in 1992.[9]

Livada was one of the few of the film group with a professional approach to filmmaking and photography. His filmography is, however, hard to put in order; he collaborated with several artists and should probably be credited for more films than he usually is in, for example, the indexes of the SFI, Svensk filmdatabas.[10]

In 1949, he edited and shot, together with Swedish poet Rut Hillarp, the short film Det underbara mötet (The Wonderful Rendez-Vous). He is usually credited as director for the short absurd sketch Skalden, spindeln och handen (The Poet, the Spider, and the Hand) from 1951, for which French poet Jean-Clarence Lambert wrote the script. He is also credited for the editing of De vita händerna, mentioned earlier, made by Hillarp (Nils Jönsson evidently shot the footage). Other important shorts from the Independent Film Group in which Livada acted as cinematographer are Iris (1954) by Eivor Burbeck and Försvinnaren (The Disappearing Man) (1957) by multifarious artist Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd. Then there are several other films, produced by the Independent Film Group, which he edited or directed, even if dates are hard to confirm. Another film worth mentioning that he shot and directed in the 1960s is the early performance piece N (1967) by the young art school student Anne Robertsson.[11] The latter underscores the fact that he continued to function as an ‘éminence grise’ in the backstage section of minor cinema culture. He was for many years a teacher and influential supervisor at both the University College of Art, Craft and Design and the Stockholm Film Workshop. Livada was also for many years a member of the board of the Stockholm Film Workshop.

The other film amateurs organized into a national union in the 1950s, and were worried about the international reputation of Swedish amateur film when confronted with the surrealist shorts by Weiss, for example, calling for a reaction against films that only depicted ‘anguish and misery’ or were ‘experimental and abstract’ (Andersson et al. 2010: 78). Ironically it was exactly the work marked by anguish and misery that received international attention. Jean-Clarence Lambert published an article, ‘L’avant-garde suédoise’ in French film journal L’âge du cinéma in 1951, and Edouard Laurot wrote an enthusiastic article on Swedish avant-garde film, ‘Swedish cinema – Classic background and militant avantgarde’ for Film Culture five years later, in which especially Weiss received a lot of coverage (Laurot 1956). Seen in a wider perspective, the works of Weiss and Livada form a starting point for the experimental film culture, which was to thrive during the 1960s with new venues like Moderna Museet, and the contributions made within public service television. It would have been impossible for Peter Weiss or Mihail Livada to start this work without the Independent Film Group, as when organizing themselves they also found ways to finance their enterprises, and at the same time the field of experimental cinema or avant-garde film in Sweden could be defined only through the conflicts with the cinephiles and the mainstream amateur filmmakers. Thus, through the breakdown of the seemingly homogenous amateur film culture, a field was structured with the outlines of a tradition in the shadow of major cinema practices.

There were other members of the group who were in exile, not only Peter Weiss and Mihail Livada, and in a way the group was an agency for their individual careers and ambitions, but the questions of exile or immigration were never explicitly addressed within the group. Nowhere in SEF or Filmfront are there any notions or discussions concerning the exilic experience. The exile was hidden, and the group in no way handled the questions of migration or exile. This was a problem for the individual to solve. This mirrored the attitude that the Swedish society had concerning immigration politics; it was non-existent. Like the case with Vera’s Consuelo thirty years later, which we presented in the introduction, there was no actual readiness among the wider public to acknowledge or read the exilic aesthetics or situation. In the vocabulary of Negt and Kluge, the reception of Consuelo shows that although the social experience of exilic and diasporic identity received its articulation in the form of a feature film, it did not resonate with the general public. Hence, the need for another public sphere, for a public in becoming, as it were.

The background and the premises of Weiss and Livada, as well as their political preferences, were significantly different, as were their dialectical wanderings of exile, although both were part of the same film group. However, as exilic outsiders, they found a context for their filmmaking in the Independent Film Group, albeit a transformed one. It was not the exilic or diasporic as such that was the common ground but the search for the minor. The public sphere of the film group enabled Weiss and Livada to reassess their cultural practice, to find a context, and the group constituted that institutional formation which, according to Pick, set the limits for how to articulate experiences. One of the outcomes of such a renegotiation is Weiss’s short Studie 1 that will be presented in next chapter.

Immigrant film as cultural policy: The Stockholm Film Workshop

The Swedish Film Institute (SFI) and the public Swedish Broadcasting Company (later Swedish Public Television [SVT]) founded the Stockholm Film Workshop in 1973 as a joint initiative.[12] Both allocated a substantial sum of money and decided that the workshop should run for one year, after which time it should be evaluated. This was done and after the evaluation the workshop came to be active and influential for minor cinema filmmaking in Sweden for almost thirty years. The founding was a state initiative in the spirit of the Swedish social democratic cultural policy that was officially launched in 1974 with broad parliamentary support. As such, the workshop was heavily influenced by similar initiatives in Europe and the United States, with the Copenhagen-based Danish Film Workshop (called ‘workshoppen’) as the model. The sibling workshop in Copenhagen was founded in 1970 and is still active.

The aim of the Stockholm workshop was to foster experimentation and to support projects of a riskier character, while the aspiring filmmakers called for initiatives that would make it easier to shoot and produce film. Film had hitherto been a far too exclusive form of cultural expression. However, it soon turned out that those who actually approached the film workshop and made use of the facilities were mostly those at the far margins of established film culture, or even outside of it altogether. Besides semi-professional filmmakers who wanted to experiment or become fully fledged professionals, there were a substantial amount of applications from women filmmakers and immigrants – groups who clearly had a subordinate role in society at the time, and in particular when it came to the established areas of film culture.

The Stockholm Film Workshop was organized with a working committee that decided on which projects to support. Everyone who wanted to make a film with the support of the workshop had to hand in an application. The support that was granted usually consisted of rolls of film, lending of equipment and provision of workshop facilities, which included editing tables, animation stands and personnel who would assist with sound and film editing. Also, direct financial support was given when a film was in a state of completion. The working practice of the workshop was very diverse. It could work as an open laboratory for those filmmakers who were established; as a collective workshop for those who were aspiring filmmakers; and as a school for those working on their first film and who had no previous experience. Each and every application submitted was judged on the basis of its own merits; a positive response could be given to one project because it was from a well-established artist who wanted to experiment with film, while another because the subject matter was unique, as those who proposed the project had first-hand knowledge of the topic in question. We have estimated that more than four hundred films were produced at the Stockholm Film Workshop (Andersson and Sundholm 2014).

Figure 3: Filmverkstan (The Stockholm Film Workshop).

Over the years, there were many individuals who contributed to shape the methods and thus the profile of the workshop, but it is fair to underscore the importance of Jan Bark, who was the director of the Stockholm Film Workshop for several decades. He was himself a composer and musician, but also an experimental filmmaker.[13] He was especially interested in the pedagogy of film, both as a way of educating the individual filmmaker and as a general aim for the role of film – and other art forms – in society. Hence, he developed courses and programmes in order to train and supervise the filmmakers of the workshop, but he also had visions of the workshop as a pedagogical instance in everyday culture. Bark claimed, in an inquiry on the workshop he was commissioned to write, that it should not be seen as an ‘educational institution’ but as a ‘resource of experiences’ (Bark 1979: 47). The content of the work was the practical experiences of the film workers as well as the experiences of the audience, which were also a part of the resource system. This intention, which was formulated by Bark, goes back to the official report on film policies delivered at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, where it was stated that a network of film workshops should be established in order to meet the needs of the citizens (SOU 1972).

When Sweden implemented its first state-run cultural policy in 1974, it embodied a shift from the ‘democratisation of culture’ to ‘cultural democracy’ (Duelund 2008). Whereas previous cultural policy was based on the idea that culture was produced by professionals and then brought to the people, now it was the people themselves who were the producers of culture. When the film workshop was inaugurated the aim was to democratize film production by making it easier to get access to the means of production and to create conditions for a non-commercial, more experimental filmmaking. However, this production was still financed and monitored by major state bodies SFI and SVT. What Bark, and his precursor, film director Kjell Grede, realized was that the people constituted a unique resource, and if given the technological means and the necessary pedagogical aid they would contribute, in turn, with their life experiences. Thus, the workshop became organized according to the analysis of Negt and Kluge. Actual living conditions and experience were the fuel of free filmmaking, and every film was unique and constituted a momentary public sphere both in terms of making and screening the final print. The principle of constituting a resource of experiences was so important that Bark claimed that your personal work on a film and the collective effort that was behind every film production comprised the actual content of the workshop (1979). Hence, the work on a film was more important than the final product.

During the first ten years of the workshop, about ten to twenty per cent of those who were in contact with it were immigrants. The years 1978 to 1980 comprised the culmination of this early period when several Latin American filmmakers in exile, along with immigrants from Turkey and Greece, were most active. After 1988, the proportion of foreign or immigrant filmmakers stabilized to a fifth, with the Latin Americans diminishing but immigrants from Iran and Iraq increasing. The immigrant filmmakers at the Stockholm Film Workshop were, of course, a very heterogeneous group and can be divided into different fractions, activities and conditions. Those who came from the United States, for example Maureen Paley or Daniel Halfen, had established artistic contexts internationally, while others, for example several of the Greek and Iranian filmmakers, had to create their own contexts and start anew.

An important common feature is that many of those who arrived from abroad had chosen to come to Sweden due to the country’s reputation as a progressive society with a sincere interest in culture. Yildiz Kafkas from Turkey is one example. She originally left her home country in the late 1960s, attracted by Swedish culture and the films of Ingmar Bergman in particular. After studying film at the University of Stockholm, she contacted the workshop during the winter of 1974 for an experimental short, and was given rolls of film and other support, but never managed to complete her film. The Norwegian Solveig Ryall, a trained filmmaker and photographer who lived in Toronto and was involved in the Canadian women’s movement, contacted the workshop during the spring of 1973 with the request to receive support for a documentary on Swedish public health care. Hence, for many foreign filmmakers, it seemed almost like a miracle that there was a place in downtown Stockholm that was open to everyone, where you could literally step in and apply for rolls of film and borrow expensive equipment for your own film project.

The proportion of applications from people of Norwegian origin was remarkably high during the first two decades of the workshop, which is explained by the fact that Sweden, compared to Norway, had well-established schools and institutions of higher education in both film theory and practice. It was for this reason that someone like the now highly distinguished Norwegian director Bent Hamer came to Stockholm in the 1970s, making several films at the Stockholm Film Workshop in the late 1980s. Another major immigrant group at the workshop consisted of those who had emigrated from the Eastern Bloc. These were often intellectuals with a strong cultural interest, for example the Polish artist and actor Karol Cichecki.

Nevertheless, the workshop was also open to established filmmakers who only spent some time in Sweden and who were given the opportunity to work on projects of their own choice. One of the foremost women filmmakers of the classical American avant-garde cinema, the Swedish-American Gunvor Nelson, a citizen of the United States at the time, made several of her groundbreaking animated collage films from the 1980s at the Stockholm Film Workshop: Frame Line (1983), Light Years (1987), Light Years Expanding (1988), Field Study #2 (1988) and Natural Features (1990). Of these, Frame Line was an elaborate depiction of Nelson’s return to Sweden, a country that was both familiar and foreign at the same time. Norwegian documentary filmmaker Oddvar Einarsson is yet another example. He worked at the workshop during the spring of 1973, re-editing his legendary documentary on environmentalists’ actions at the rapids of Mardøla, Kampen om Mardøla (The Battle for Mardøla) (1972). Einarsson needed to provide English subtitles for a screening in Paris in the autumn of 1973.

Many artists from abroad who resided in Sweden were also in contact with the workshop. The dynamic duo of Maniac Productions – Michael Laub from Belgium and Edmondo Za from Italy, today mostly known as collaborators with Marina Abramovič – applied several times for help and support for editing finished work on video or documenting their performances, but always with poor results. Thus, there were certain boundaries drawn by the board of the workshop for the art scene. Besides Laub and Za, the Polish-born artist Irena Flies was another who wrote several applications but who received no support for her projects. The Stockholm Film Workshop was thus not totally open, and borders were established, but while film at the time was still an expensive and relatively inaccessible form of expression for most artists, it is not surprising that many performance and video artists tried their luck. It is obvious that the working committee of the workshop had a curiosity for new forms of expression, cultures and people, and it was because of the latter that many who had just arrived in Sweden felt encouraged to approach the workshop with applications for their projects. The workshop, in turn, offered an emerging context for those who had neither local contacts nor the necessary financial or cultural resources. In this way, it played a similar role as its precursor, the Independent Film Group. Both were institutions of minor cinemas and were happy to remain so; they did not aspire to be part of the field (in Bourdieu’s sense) of Swedish film.

The Stockholm Film Workshop was inaugurated in order to facilitate production, but like the Independent Film Group it included other activities, even if it did not really enable consumption and seldom organized public screenings. There was potential for this, especially when considering the ideas of Bark, but the material conditions were too harsh and the funding institutions – SFI and SVT – were never really interested in working with distribution. Thus, the films were seldom pitched for a general audience but remained within that organic, momentary public sphere from where they had come. The pedagogical work and mission constituted on the other hand a kind of ideological apparatus, although it never materialized into writing or publications. It was rather reproduced in the actual pedagogical practice and supervision and seen in those few reports that Bark wrote for the board of SFI when they challenged the existence of the workshop (which happened regularly, see Bark 1979, 1980, 1990). In that way, the Stockholm Film Workshop also constituted a minor cinema culture similar to the Independent Film Group. Both were minor and happy to remain so, and did not aspire to become major but to stay truthful to their own cause, and thus attracted likeminded people. The Film Workshop, however, had a clear pedagogical and political agenda: to enable people to make films on their own terms and give them the means of production and a voice. It was due to the latter that the workshop attracted so many immigrants and women filmmakers. A majority of the filmmakers whose films we are analysing in the next chapter were at some stage active at the film workshop, for example Guillermo Álvarez, Reza Bagher, Myriam Braniff, Menelaos Carayannis, César Galindo and Muammer Özer.

The momentary agency: Cineco (Cinecooperativo)

The Independent Film Group was a traditional film co-op, an association for making, distributing and fostering experimental film culture. It was also typical of its time. Film was a booming culture in the 1950s and the intellectual interest in film was immense. At the same time, film technology was both rare and expensive, and therefore you had to take part in collective endeavours in order to be able to shoot or watch films. The Stockholm Film Workshop was, on the other hand, a state initiative, a collaboration between SFI and SVT. It was typical of its time too, a child of the new social democratic state cultural policy, the aim of which was to put the means of production in the hands of the people. Although both SVT and SFI were regulated governmental agencies, the way the actual workshop was organized guaranteed a far-reaching autonomy. Bark’s dictum of the workshop as a resource of experiences resulted in working practices that in many ways embodied the visions of Negt and Kluge. No wonder, then, that the different directors at SFI wanted time and again to close down the workshop due to its pedagogical agenda, something that they finally succeeded in doing in 2001. The Film Institute demanded results – films – not processes and experiments. Nevertheless, organizing for the unexpected and the open implies that you must impose restrictions. Although the Stockholm Film Workshop was open and offered many immigrant filmmakers the opportunity to make films, some of them at times felt that they had to also create their own organizations in order to have their say in a more uncompromising way and to provide self-realization on their own terms. Cineco and Kaleidoscope were founded on the basis of such a need. The driving forces behind the two organizations, the Colombian Guillermo Álvarez and the Turkish Muammer Özer, both had approached the Stockholm Film Workshop with film projects. Özer had been more successful than Álvarez, but there was friction, and both disagreed with some of the decision-making and advice from the workshop. Most of Álvarez’s projects were initially rejected, and Özer could not see that the workshop fully understood the situation of the immigrant filmmakers.

Cineco, or Cinecooperativo, was something quite different compared to the Independent Film Group and Stockholm Film Workshop. Cineco was primarily a production co-op, organized by a single person, Guillermo Álvarez, who gathered together a group of likeminded people. Álvarez had been a student at the New School for Social Research in New York, where he was engaged in a student theatre group and became interested in film. He arrived in Sweden as early as 1972 having spent some time in Paris. The reason why he ended up in Sweden is typical for many immigrant cineastes. Once again, Ingmar Bergman was the lure. Having seen some of Bergman’s films he was interested in Sweden and Swedish cinema. Paris was, according to Álvarez, a better city for a cinephile than New York, but could offer neither work nor possibilities to make film. In addition, an immigrant in Sweden at the time could take a short-term job without having a permanent visa or residence permit.

Álvarez arrived in the summer of 1972 and decided to stay. This was during a period when the Swedish immigration policies became more open due to the political oppressive regimes in Greece, Spain, the Eastern bloc and Latin America. Also the legislation was more positive towards immigrants, even though the labour immigration of the 1950s and 1960s halted almost entirely. It was still easy though to come to Sweden for work in the summer when most Swedes were on holidays. The following winter, Álvarez submitted a proposal to the Stockholm Film Workshop. He had finished a script for a feature film that was based on a short story by Julio Cortázar, but the workshop thought that the project was too extensive and ambitious. The script was returned with the short message: ‘Return with a plainer idea’.[14] Álvarez would come back four years later when he submitted a synopsis for a documentary about the Stockholm underground, Underjordiskt sällskap (Underground Company) (1980). In the meantime he had earned his living doing the usual jobs that an immigrant could find at the time: janitor, dishwasher and subway ticket vendor. He also had some film roles, e.g. as a Latin American terrorist in the Swedish feature Operation Leo (1981). The film was based on real events around the planned kidnapping of a Swedish minister in 1977 by the German Red Army Faction.

Figure 4: Cineco. Underjordiskt sällskap (Underground Company), 1980. 16 mm. Courtesy of Guillermo Álvarez.

The idea for Cineco’s Underjordiskt sällskap was based on Álvarez’s own experiences of working in the Stockholm underground. Between working on the documentary and an upcoming short film Hägringen (The Mirage) (1981), Álvarez had taken courses at what was then Sweden’s prime film school, Dramatiska Institutet (University College of Film, Radio, Television, and Theatre), or DI as it was commonly known. None of the other members of Cineco (Silvia Carlsson-Camandona, Bengt Sundkvist, Benito Muños, Eloy Pérez, Nikos Charalampides and Kiriakos Papadopoulos) had previous experience of filmmaking or any training in film production.

At the time, DI arranged shorter courses in film production that made it possible for people like Álvarez to study even if they had a full-time job. Underjordiskt sällskap was turned down, and although Álvarez had managed to complete a few shorts for DI, he came to the conclusion that if you wanted to make films you had to set up your own organization.[15] It was in this way that Cineco was founded in 1976. In spite of the fact that Álvarez had an organization, a collective of people from Spain, Colombia, Greece and Sweden, he did not succeed in raising money for Cineco. So, he borrowed equipment from DI and began shooting his documentary without funding. After working on the documentary for a year he showed the unedited footage to the Stockholm Film Workshop, and this time they granted him money for both post-production and a final print. Encouraged by the fact that the co-op had succeeded in finishing a film, they started on a new, more ambitious project, Hägringen. This was to be a narrative short film about male Latin American immigrants in contemporary Stockholm that we will analyse in the next chapter. Hägringen was made without any financial support, and after finishing the film Álvarez tried to sell it to SVT, who said that they could not broadcast Hägringen because it offered a far too negative image of the immigrant. Accordingly, Cineco produced only two films, and Álvarez left Sweden for Colombia in 1984.

To be or not to be a filmmaker: Kaleidoscope

Kaleidoscope was founded in 1981 on the initiative of Muammer and Synnöve Özer. Muammer was Turkish and Synnöve Finnish. They had moved from Finland in 1977 because there were better opportunities for filmmaking in Sweden.

Muammer Özer’s trajectory is characterized by his desire and obsession to make films. He got interested in film at an early age, and while enlisted as a soldier on Cyprus he saved money to be able to buy his first film equipment, a Super 8 camera. After leaving military service, he managed to get hold of a second-hand 16 mm camera. He started shooting commercials and also made a documentary about Turkish politics, Den gordiska knuten (The Gordian Knot) (1968–70), which he finalized for distribution in Sweden. Because the conditions for a working-class cineaste were harsh in 1960s Turkey, Muammer Özer repeatedly tried to leave the country. He made several efforts to escape to the United States and Hollywood by hiding in cargo ships, but was discovered each time.[16] In 1970 he hitchhiked as an illegal immigrant throughout Germany to England, working in both countries, but did not succeed in getting any opportunities to make film. When he left for Germany a second time in 1971, now with a visa, he became involved in a politically active Turkish organization (Turkey had faced a military coup in 1971). The association persuaded Özer to film and document a planned hijacking of a ship in northern Italy. Özer was into it for the filmmaking rather than the politics, but the planned hijacking never took place. However, the Turkish police had been informed about the planned attack, and when Özer returned to Turkey he was imprisoned for three months, during which he was interrogated and tortured. Before the actual trial, Özer was released from prison for a few days and took the opportunity to leave the country immediately. This time he chose to go directly to Finland, a country that he had visited twice before. Finland was not a random choice. The country had a small Turkish-speaking minority (Tatars), which dated back to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the country belonged to the Russian Empire. A year after his arrival in Finland, Özer managed to get accepted at the School for Art and Design in Helsinki, which was the only film school in Finland at the time. In Finland he met his wife, Synnöve, a becoming journalist.

Muammer Özer graduated from film school in 1976 and left with Synnöve for i Stockholm, Sweden the following year. During the fall of 1977, Muammer Özer suggested a film project, Ensamhet (Loneliness) (1977), to the Stockholm Film Workshop. Ensamhet is a short feature about an older woman living alone whose only companions are her memories. Özer’s suggestion was accepted and he finished the film rapidly. The film is an allegory about the situation of the immigrant, and is also based on a common immigrant experience. Many immigrants got their first job in the social home care service and were shocked when they saw how lonely many old people were in Sweden.[17] It is telling that the only person that acknowledges the old woman in Ensamhet is an immigrant woman.

Another project soon followed, Jordmannen or Toprak Adam (1980), an ambitious film that combines devices from both animation and documentary that we will analyse in the following chapter. At 28 minutes, Jordmannen was a lengthy film for the Stockholm Film Workshop, and disagreements over the length would be the reason why Özer left the Stockholm Film Workshop and initiated Kaleidoscope. Özer came to the conclusion that immigrants have to form their own associations.[18]

Kaleidoscope, the association of immigrant filmmakers, was founded in 1981. The statutes of the association were taken in May 1981. They were drawn up by Muammer Özer, written down by Synnöve Özer, and signed by Myriam Braniff and Fern Seiden, who was a filmmaker from the United States. Kaleidoscope, like Cineco, was thus born out of the need to be able to produce and articulate that context of living the immigrants found themselves in. These associations were founded in order to enable a public articulation of experience, and to claim that their context of living also had public relevance. That many immigrants chose film as their medium had primarily to do with the fact that they were passionate about film, and that they were filmmakers or cinephiles. Özer and Guillermo Álvarez left home and travelled through countries in order to find opportunities to make films, gathering likeminded people. Álvarez, for example, found his protagonist for Hägringen when he visited screenings at the Cinematheque in Stockholm. But, the choice of film as the medium of articulation also implied that you were able to bypass Swedish language, or depict a linguistically multilingual or accented milieu. Thus, although the Independent Film Group and Stockholm Film Workshop were open and represented the position and culture of the minor, they did not directly correspond with the collective experience of the immigrants. An indication of this is that when Menelaos Carayannis submitted a proposal to the Stockholm Film Workshop for a film called With a Black Mark with dialogue in Greek, the board of the workshop had a discussion if they could support a film that was shot in an ‘immigrant language’.[19] The workshop had supported films made in both English and Norwegian, but these were clearly not considered to be immigrant languages.

Accordingly, Cineco and Kaleidoscope were initiated out of the need to articulate the immigrant experience and position, to be able to address a new public and to create a public sphere of relevance. That the mission was to meet the social horizon of experience of the immigrant filmmakers, and their context of living and becoming, was clearly articulated in the statutes of Kaleidoscope. They stated that the overall mission was to support immigrant filmmakers, which was specified further by twelve points that are worth quoting in full length:

(1) To support both production and distribution

(2) To provide information about funding opportunities, production facilities, festivals and other activities

(3) To create solidarity among the filmmakers

(4) To work for collective and cooperative methods

(5) To submit proposals for film projects and apply for funding

(6) To organize workshops in film production

(7) To foster collaboration between immigrant filmmakers and Swedish filmmakers

(8) To organize screenings and public events

(9) To provide help with language translation

(10) To organize workshops for immigrant youths

(11) To assist filmmakers with distribution (but not taking responsibility for the distribution)

(12) To inform filmmakers about their rights and duties

To this was added that even though immigrant filmmakers founded Kaleidoscope, the association was open for everyone who was interested in working with film in line with the statutes.[20]

It is worth noting that in the same way as the Independent Film Group and Stockholm Film Workshop had acted as open spaces for the immigrants, albeit with the primary mission to foster minority cinema cultures and not immigrant filmmaking, Kaleidoscope was also considered as an open space for the minority, although its prime mission was to support immigrant filmmaking. Thus, Kaleidoscope also had Swedish filmmakers as its members, and especially those who felt that they belonged to a minority in Sweden addressed the association. Paul-Anders Simma, who later became a well-known Sami film director, wrote to Kaleidoscope and expressed his interest in becoming a member: ‘I am not an immigrant, but Sami, a minority in film-Sweden after all’ (Simma 1982). Muammer Özer replied that Simma was most welcome, and that while he belonged to a minority, he must face similar problems in his film work as immigrant filmmakers do (Özer 1982). These problems were stated in a short description of Kaleidoscope that was written during the spring of 1981. First, immigrants faced a new culture and language – a situation that made them into children again, as Özer expressed in an interview that was broadcast by SVT as part of a programme about Kaleidoscope.[21] Second, equipment and technology were expensive whereas immigrants had low-paid jobs, and they were thus forced into working with film on weekends and evenings like amateur filmmakers.[22] Third, they had neither the necessary networks nor knowledge of the key institutions – or of the procedures of how to approach them for that matter – in order to apply for funding.

One became a member of Kaleidoscope by applying, but it was stated that the majority of the members of the board had to be immigrants. Among the members were Reza Bagher, Myriam Braniff and Luis R. Vera. Neither Livada nor Álvarez were members. Kaleidoscope had soon to face the problem that because it was not able to raise money for film production, many were not interested in contributing.

In the beginning Kaleidoscope tried to foster both production and publics, and there were plans to inaugurate both a film workshop and a film festival. Also, a catalogue was compiled with a list of immigrant films and filmmakers who resided in Sweden. The catalogue was finally published in 1984 as Invandrarfilm i Sverige. Filmer av och om invandrare (‘Immigrant film in Sweden: Films by and about immigrants’). The first film festival was organized in 1982 and it was stipulated that either immigrant filmmakers or filmmakers who addressed immigrant topics could take part in the festival. The first festival was pan-Nordic, while those that followed in 1984 and 1986 were international. The decision to organize a film festival was a strategically wise choice as it brought attention to the films and the association, giving them publicity and offering the filmmakers an opportunity to have their films screened. Films by Muammer Özer, Menelaos Carayannis, Babis Tsokas, Cineco, Luis R. Vera and Reza Bagher were shown at the festivals. Jordmannen and Underjordiskt sällskap in 1982 and Löftet by Carayannis in 1984 were given awards. John Akomfrah and the Black Audio Film Collective won the first prize of the festival in 1986 with Handsworth Songs, an event that went unnoticed by the mainstream media at the time, which surprised the organizers as the previous festival in 1984 had received a lot of media coverage.

However, it turned out that it was easier to receive funding for a film festival than for film production. Kaleidoscope thus succeeded with what Alexander Kluge claimed in retrospect that the filmmakers of the New German Cinema’s Oberhausen group had neglected in the 1960s, namely distribution, an essential strategy for screening in order to create a public sphere (Liebman 1988). This had also been a recurring critique by the filmmakers against the Stockholm Film Workshop, which only supported production until the making of the final print. Distribution and screening were up to the filmmakers. On the other hand, it became clear that Kaleidoscope was not able to start any film production. The filmmakers wanted and needed the association, but foremost, they desired to make films. This was also the reason why Kaleidoscope, after Özer had left the association for shooting a feature in Turkey, slowly faded away until it was officially closed down in 2005.

Figure 5: Kaleidoscope. Programme for the third Immigrant Film Festival, 1986.

Do it yourself: The Tensta Film Association

The Tensta Film Association grew out of a youth recreation project in Tensta, a northern suburb of Stockholm that was constructed during 1966–72. One of the prerequisites for the Tensta Film Association was the reorganization of the municipal financial support for cultural organizations and activities, which brought the decision bodies closer to the actual residents. In the early 1970s the city of Stockholm had expanded geographically, and several local councils for the different neighbourhoods were founded. Among others, the Järva culture committee, which encompassed the northern suburbs of Hjulsta, Rinkeby and Tensta, was created in 1973. The money allocated to the committees was calculated on the basis of the number of residents, and in the course of the new cultural policy the funds increased during the first years. The aim was to give access to many different cultural activities in the suburbs, and predominantly to children. In the beginning the initiatives from the Järva culture committee did not differ in any significant ways from the previous cultural policy, but as the number of immigrant associations increased, more and more immigrant associations founded their own organizations and applied for money in order to arrange their own cultural events. Still, throughout the 1970s and the 1980s, most people on the board of the Järva culture committee were Swedes born in Sweden. Hence, in the annual report from 1977 the committee states that ‘the board’s contact with the immigrant groups in Järva is one of many difficult tasks that the committee is working on’ (Järva kulturkommitté 1977: 5).

The first inhabitants in Tensta were predominantly of the Swedish working class, but the area soon developed into one of the major immigrant neighbourhoods of Stockholm. The building of Tensta was part of the ambitious national public housing programme initiated by the Social Democratic Party and called the Million Programme, because 1,006,000 apartments were to be built during 1965–74 throughout Sweden. Finally, 940,000 dwellings were built, out of which about one-third were in the form of large high-rise buildings in concrete, forming new neighbourhoods and suburbs. Tensta was one of these.

The driving force behind the Tensta Film Association, Charalampos (Babis) Tsokas, arrived in Sweden in 1970. His story is similar to that of many immigrants; at first living for some months without a job or money, after which he found undeclared work as a dishwasher. Eventually he settled down in Tensta and got a job in the Swedish Postal Service (Postverket). He also worked at a local recreation centre for young people in Tensta, where he met both Muammer Özer and Menelaos Carayannis. Tsokas, who had an interest in film, had already begun to work on a film script about what it was like to be an immigrant in Sweden. As he started working at the recreation centre he got the idea to make a film with the local youngsters. He wanted to create something mutual, and decided to make film into a meeting point for the young immigrants from different countries. So they founded the Tensta Film Association in 1974, and Tsokas bought a 16 mm camera using some of his own money, getting the rest from the centre. The first film they shot was Monos, which we will present and analyse in the following chapter.

The opinions about the film were quite harsh at the time of the premiere. Monos was described as clumsy and technically poor by one journalist, but for the filmmakers – Tsokas and sixteen local youths – Monos was proof of the fact that it was possible to make films on your own terms and by yourself.[23] They started to tour with the film at different youth recreation centres in Stockholm.

Monos was the beginning of the production of a total number of nine films in 16 mm made by the association: Dilemma (1974), Parallell (Parallel) (1978), Vill du följa med mig Martha? (1980), Betongen som blommar (The Concrete that Blooms) (1982), Avskedet (The Farewell) (1986), Hemkomsten (The Homecoming) (1987), Middagsgästen (The Dinner Guest) (1988) and Vi måste göra något (We Have to Do Something) (1989). Throughout these years, the association slowly became Tsokas’s own production hub. In 1976 he was accepted for a one-year programme in film and television production at the University College of Film, Radio, Television, and Theatre (DI). In 1979 he was moved to the unit for information at the Swedish Post as they realized that Tsokas had filmmaking skills. Tsokas would make hundreds of educational films for the Swedish Post, both documentaries and short fiction films.

Monos was made in a very primitive way. It was cut with ordinary scissors by running the film through a projector and the sound was recorded afterwards on seven-inch audiotape. The film was shot on reversal colour stock. Dilemma was made in the same way. Because Tsokas managed to make it into DI he could lend equipment for Tensta’s third film, Parallell, while he could use the facilities and equipment of the Swedish Post for the later work.

The five first films are unique, in the sense that they were all collective efforts, based on stories collected in the neighbourhood. Editing always took place at the community centre so the youngsters could pop in and give feedback. Tsokas also made use of his own experiences as an immigrant when making the films. For example, he got the idea for Parallell from his experience of spending his first six months in Sweden as a lodger. In the film, a Greek immigrant is isolated in his room as his elderly landlady – being equally isolated – is trying to get the attention of her own family that she has invited over for Christmas. Middagsgästen, on the other hand, is based on a memorable event for Tsokas, when an alcoholic shared his meal tickets with him, feeling sorry for the newly arrived immigrant who was broke and hungry.

The conditions of production for the different Tensta films varied, and the way to raise money for the production of the films ranged from approaching local municipal organizations to pitching projects to different NGOs. It could also go the other way around. For example, Betongen som blommar was made on the initiative of the local municipal administration (Tensta-Rinkeby) that wanted to have a documentary made about the local neighbourhood, and which mostly received negative press. A quite substantial sum of 60,000 Swedish krona was allocated for the project, and the association borrowed an editing table that was placed at the local community centre where the film was edited, with the local youngsters intervening and giving feedback. Betongen som blommar was shown in local venues, schools and youth centres, and became an important public information film at the time. It was, however, never shown on television, something that some of the Tensta films succeeded in doing. For example, Parallell was included in the programme Invandrardags (Immigrant Time) that presented the celebration of Greek Christmas, and Vill du följa med mig Martha?, that we will look at in the next chapter, was broadcast as its own programme, as a single film.[24] The film tells the story of a Greek housewife, oppressed by her husband, who finds a way out of her domestic sphere of submission by joining a women’s group.

Figure 6: Tensta Film Association. Babis Tsokas at the editing table in Tensta editing Betongen som blommar (The Concrete that Blooms), 1982. Courtesy of Babis Tsokas.

The Tensta Film Association was both a collective production hub and a way of producing and creating a public that had not hitherto been acknowledged. From how the films were shown or financed you can see the struggle to be acknowledged as a part of the general public. The first films were shown in local venues and addressed the local audience, whereas Betongen som blommar addressed the people outside the neighbourhood, i.e. those who would constitute the average public sphere as defined by Habermas. Another film that was pitched for a large audience and which created interest from the press was Vill du följa med mig Martha? This was because the film addressed the question of women’s liberation, a subject that was considered to be of general interest, and not merely for immigrants.

Whereas the point of view of the immigrant is the subject in all the narrative films from the Tensta Film Association, in Betongen som blommar it is rather Swedes who address other Swedes, showing that Tensta is better than its reputation. The documentary starts by informing the viewer that the Tensta-Rinkeby area is built on ancient Swedish ground that, among other things, is home to one of the oldest churches in the Stockholm area. After this domestication of the immigrant neighbourhood, different people from Tensta-Rinkeby are interviewed. These are either inhabitants of Tensta-Rinkeby or representatives of the local council. In the final shot, the ultimate authority makes his voice heard, namely Sweden’s famous prime minister Olof Palme, who praises the multicultural neighbourhood. Besides the Swedish male voice-over, twelve different people are given the opportunity to make their voices heard in the 30-minute documentary, out of these ten are Swedish, with this being in a neighbourhood with a majority of immigrants. Accordingly, the voice is given to Swedes although they are in minority in Tensta; they are the acting subjects. Thus, the majority, the immigrants are constituted as objects to be looked at and bereft of agency. Tsokas later complained in the press that the local authorities demanded too much influence on the content of the film (Johansson 1982).

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

In 2001, Muammer Özer looked back at his time as an immigrant filmmaker in Sweden and wrote a short report titled ‘Att vara eller icke vara filmare – det är frågan… Den förlorade generationen!’ (‘To be or not to be filmmaker – that is the question... the lost generation!’). In the report, he claims that first-generation immigrants have to face the hardest battles and often end up as the lost generation because immigrants are not notified as an economically disadvantaged group, and when they are recognized as a group it is through a polarized politics of representation, being either a good or bad immigrant. As we have seen, this was also the fate of Cineco’s Hägringen. According to Swedish Public Service Television – the established public sphere par excellence at the time – the film offered a far too negative image of the immigrant.

Nancy Fraser has famously summarized the problem that Özer points to as that between an affirmative or transformative approach to ‘redistribution’ (financial reallocation) and ‘recognition’ (cultural/symbolic acknowledgement) in the choice to either support or destabilize group differentiation (Fraser 1997). Özer’s own solution to the problem in the report is that the funding bodies should affirm the immigrant filmmakers as a group when it comes to initiatives of redistribution, making resources available by organizing funding for immigrants exclusively. However, when it comes to the films that are being produced, there should be no group affirmation. Each and every film should be considered on its own terms. Here, Özer argues in line with the mission of the Stockholm Film Workshop. As David E. James has pointed out, it is through the logic of any minor cinema practice that such an enunciation becomes a social act as well, marking its position as a part representing the whole as long as the practice takes place within an asymmetrical power relation. This is discernible from the discussion that the board of the Stockholm Film Workshop had when Carayannis proposed a film project in Greek, and hesitated over whether they could fund a film that would be in an ‘immigrant language’. This is also commented upon by Özer in his report when he states that the figure of the immigrant is a ‘sacred cow’, and are always stereotyped and thus always embedded in a social articulation (Özer 2001: 15).

Negt and Kluge approach the dilemma of redistribution versus recognition from another viewpoint, and according to their ‘anthropology of human productive power’, as Fredric Jameson has named it, they stress that experience is also being produced, and therefore has both a material and a social dimension (Jameson 1988: 157). Whereas Habermas moves within the framework of established institutions and mass media, and thus separates production from the context of living (in accordance with his dichotomy between private and public), Negt and Kluge rather ask how experience may, and even has to be, enabled and produced, because ‘a new public language […] is lacking’ (Jameson 1988: 157, original emphasis). Although both Negt and Kluge and Jameson primarily focus on a clear-cut class division, i.e. between working class and the bourgeoisie, there is in Negt and Kluge’s approach a theme that is of relevance for an analysis of a cultural practice of subordinate groups in a society characterized by diversity and different oppositions. As we noted in the introduction, a true public sphere is coherent with the context of living of a particular group and its experience. The experience, however, is not something given but has to be produced, and this process is a part of the experience. Therefore, as Negt and Kluge write, one:

would […] broaden the concept of experience as production, experience in the production of experience. This social experience, which is in the process of organizing itself, recognizes the limitations of commodity production and makes the context of living itself the object of production.

(1993: 8, original emphasis)

This is very close to the case of minor literature, as defined by Deleuze and Guattari. Due to deterritorialization you are bereft of your language and previous practices of cultural production. As Özer writes in his report, an immigrant filmmaker is without professional or social networks, without a language (språklös), as ‘strange as a child in a new country’ (Özer 2001: 8). Hence, due to this experience, the need arises to create a new language in order to encourage a new audience to participate in a new social context. And the struggle to find a new language is a question of going public while there are no private languages.

The crucial difference between Deleuze/Guattari and Negt/Kluge, however, is that the former pair point to the conditions of cultural production in a minority situation and ways for a minor aesthetics that would make self-realization possible, whereas the latter’s perspective is the activist’s. Negt and Kluge suggest the ways in which one has to organize oneself in order to articulate one’s own experience and form a public – claiming that one’s own particular experience is also of public interest. It is exactly in the latter way that Álvarez and Özer acted through Cineco and Kaleidoscope. But, we do not consider these organizations as forming ‘counterpublics’, an often-used term or concept in contemporary film studies and post-Habermasian scholarship on the public sphere (Wong 2011; Fraser 1992, 2014; Kurasawa 2014). As in our approach to the concept of minor cinemas, the public sphere is also used as a descriptive category. The public sphere of Cineco and Kaleidoscope was marginal, articulated and founded out of need, but they did not necessarily stand in opposition to the established field of film culture. Many immigrant filmmakers would have been happy to be included in the field of Swedish film. The associations grew out of necessity, and the immigrant filmmakers found their context in minor cinema cultures because that was mostly the only way for them to be able to make films in Sweden at the time.

Here we see how what Pick calls ‘the privilege of exile’ becomes relevant, but also Appadurai’s thesis of ‘modernity at large’, and the production of locality. As Pick claims, you have to ‘reassess cultural practice’ – there is no other choice if you want to make films. The minor cinema practices are thus a way for the filmmakers to reinvent both their film practice and create (and learn) a new language, but as we have seen earlier, this articulation and reterritorialization demands the production of an organization in order to secure a public sphere worth its name. Organization, to organize and become organized, is thus not something merely technical but integral to the production of the articulation as well: ‘the production of the form of the content of experiences themselves’, as Negt and Kluge have it (1993: 8). It is exactly because the situation is a pressing one that production moves from being a question of financial investments – the production of commodities – to that of experience and articulation. Due to the disconnection from home and the transition to translocality, a new context, locality, has to be created. It is like a forced self-realization – migration as modernity. It is thus almost the fate of the immigrant filmmaker to produce minor cinemas, or in Özer’s words: ‘the immigrant filmmakers are making their films outside established channels of production, they are made with a minimum of financial resources but with a maximum of enthusiasm, will and obstinacy’ (Özer 2001: 9).

Throughout the history of these associations and workshops, the films were funded through an amalgamation of different sources, with money being procured from their own pockets, NGOs or, in most cases, from different municipal and state bodies, whose primary function was not to finance filmmaking. The only exception was the Stockholm Film Workshop, which was funded and run by SFI and SVT, but which allocated as much money into the organization of the workshop as into the production of films. The people on the board of the workshop did not themselves produce films within the workshop. In that sense, the organization was separated from the production. Each film produced at the workshop did play a part in the culture of minor cinemas, but only some of them had a mission for the immigrant filmmaking community. The Independent Film Group was also a specific case, having experimental cinema as its mission. That these two organizations became important for immigrant filmmakers is to be explained by their marginality. The threshold was low, and there was no real prestige in becoming and being a member. It was the marginality of the workshop that made it possible for subordinated groups to find a place for themselves there.

A crucial decision at the Stockholm Film Workshop was that they chose to not be part of the established field of Swedish film. A field of Swedish film in Bourdieu’s sense was not established until the Swedish Film Institute was inaugurated in 1963. The actual imperative behind establishing SFI was to create an organization for financing film so that Swedish film would have a future in the constantly shrinking film market due to the popularity of television. SFI funded both popular/commercial and art-house features, ‘quality films’, as the controversial director of SFI, Harry Schein, coined it. In order to fund quality films an intricate organization had to be set up, because the value of these films could not be based on box-office figures. Thus, Schein introduced a system with a jury that gave points on quality, which were then translated into grants that a production would receive afterwards. In this way, a field for Swedish film culture was created, a symbolic economy that claimed autonomy and distinction from the commercial circuit. SFI became an agency of consecration ‘ensuring the incommensurability of the specifically cultural value and economic value of a work’, as famously formulated by Pierre Bourdieu in his work on cultural production (Bourdieu 1984: 11).[25]

Some of the immigrant filmmakers aspired to become part of the field. Luis R. Vera’s intention with Consuelo was to enter the established film circuit of narrative film and distribution in proper cinemas. The Iranian filmmaker Saaed Assadi had tried the same a few years earlier with his feature film Hägring (1984), which premiered the same year as Muammer Özer’s Splittring. Both Assadi and Özer financed their films by themselves. Özer had put up his own production company, Devkino, which produced the film. A large cohort of Kaleidoscope’s members were involved in the project that was partly shot in Muammer and Synnöve Özer’s flat in the southern suburb of Liljeholmen in Stockholm. As mentioned, the reception of Assadi’s and Özer’s films by the leading critics was harsh. The major newspaper Dagens Nyheter titled the review of Splittring ‘Fotprygling i svenskt vardagsrum’ (‘Foot whipping in Swedish living room’), indicating the absurdity of a scene in which the patriarch of an immigrant family is whipping the feet of his teenage son as he refuses to follow the law of the father and the family traditions (Hjertén 1984) – something that was unthinkable as a scene from a Swede’s perspective of Swedish everyday life. In the same review, the film critic makes the comment, clearly directed against Assadi’s film, that most of the films by immigrant filmmakers in Sweden move within a register of different shades of bleakness.

These early feature films, which all failed at the box office and received very harsh critiques from the leading reviewers, show that among the immigrant filmmakers there was a wish to become part of the established field of Swedish film culture. However, not one of these received favourable reviews in the 1980s, hence Özer’s claim that they constituted the lost generation. The failure is also an indication that 1980s Sweden was still a very homogenous culture – functioning along the lines and an ideal of a classic Habermasian single public sphere – and thus was the fate of the films to remain in the circuit of minor cinema cultures.[26]

As we have seen, this was something that the Independent Film Group and Stockholm Film Workshop were happy with. The Tensta Film Association made it into a virtue. The films were shown in the local neighbourhoods and received quite a lot of attention exactly because they circulated within their own domain. The established press embraced this community culture but did not care about the films that were produced. Cineco and Kaleidoscope had the vision of a succession, but failed. Kaleidoscope did exist as an organization until 2005 but ceased to have any substantial activity after the 1980s. The Tensta Film Association existed well into the early 1990s but Tsokas was not the key figure anymore and the association diminished, little by little. Cineco and Kaleidoscope managed to have their films shown at national festivals such as the short film festival in Uppsala and Göteborg International Film Festival, and some of Özer’s films were even shown on public television. But the rule was that these were exceptions in relation to the field of Swedish film as such and what the society at the time considered to be of public and general interest. Thus they remained minor cinemas (and minor cinema organizations), not because they stood in opposition to the majority as counterpublics, but because they were not part of the current hegemony and therefore unable to avoid misrecognition. The films were ignored as individual acts and articulations, and thus considered to constitute merely a part of the (immigrant) whole. As we have seen, this position is both a dilemma and a solution, as it gives the films political force and forces the filmmakers to act, although they therefore also often confirm a certain pattern. How the filmmakers dealt with this cluster of immigrant minor cinema problematics and aesthetics will be analysed in the following book chapter.

Notes

1 It was also attractive to come to Sweden to work for the Summer during these decades. For example such avant-garde figures like VALIE EXPORT and Peter Weibel went to Sweden for ordinary manual but well-paid labour.

2 Margareta Norlin on Hägring: ‘The film is far too long, and the scenes are heaped upon one another without a dramatic structure. Furthermore it is obvious that Assadi does not master the nuances of the language and thus also fails with the instruction of the dialogue’ (1984: 149). Mario Grut on Consuelo: ‘The acting is feeble and without life. The dialogue parties are more an exchange of rhetorical paragraphs than conversations’ (1988). Bernt Eklund on Splittring: ‘There is an uncertainty in the visual narration that prevents the film from ever reaching under the surface […]’ (1984b).

3 Jalla! Jalla! (2000), dir. Josef Fares, prod. Memfis Film, Sweden, 92 min.; Vingar av glas (2000), dir. Reza Bagher, prod. Omega Film & Television, Sweden, 105 min.; Före stormen (2000), dir. Reza Parsa, prod. Illusion Film & Television, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Finland, 106 min.; Fyra kvinnor (2001), dir. Baker Karim, prod. New Horizons Film & TV, Sweden, 94 min.; Hus i helvete (2002), dir. Susan Taslimi, prod. Migma Film, Sweden, 100 min.; Det nya landet (2000), dir. Geir Hansteen-Jörgensen, prod. Göta Film, Sweden, 232 min. (four parts); Den förste zigenaren i rymden (2002), dir. Agneta Fagerström-Olsson, prod. Giraff Film, Sweden, Norway, Finland, 232 min. (four parts).

4 There is another way of backtracking major cinema and its relationship to immigrant cinema, and that is to deal with feature films concerning immigration policies and topics on migration, directed by Swedish directors within the major cinema system, such as Jag heter Stelios (My Name is Stelios) (1972), directed by Johan Bergenstråhle (co-written with Greek immigrant novelist Theodor Kallifatides), or films on other topics but directed by established immigrant directors within the major cinema system, such as Pistolen (The Gun) (1973), directed by the Czech Jirí Tirl and Förvandlingen (The Metamorphosis) (1976) by the Czech Ivo Dvorák. These films are not within the scope of our research, but are of course connected to the wider discussion on immigrant filmmakers and immigrant film.

5 The newsletter was distributed during 1952 and 1953 in eight issues (two of which were double issues). It contained matters related to club activities as well as short essays on film and film reviews.

6 Filmfront was published from 1953 to 1956, rather sporadically; see Andersson (2007).

7 Minutes from meeting with the active filmmakers within the co-op, 15 May 1955, Filmform Archive.

8 The information regarding Livada is taken from the archives of the former Finnish state police (Valpo) and Romanian department of state security (Securitate). Valpo ID-card, Livada (23 October 1944). Securitate dossier no. 6765.

9 Their lives are related in Holm (2011).

10 http://www.svenskfilmdatabas.se/.

11 For a presentation and analysis of the film, see Andersson et al. (2010: 116).

12 For a detailed history of the workshop, see Andersson and Sundholm (2011, 2014).

13 His most well-known film is Spindrift (1966), made with Erkki Kurenniemi from Finland. The film was arguably the first computer animation made in Scandinavia. It has recently been restored and reconstructed by Mika Taanila. Bark also left behind numerous experimental films on Super 8 that he made for himself.

14 Application 20 (22 February 1973). Stockholm Film Workshop Archive, SFI.

15 According to Guillermo Álvarez, it was Mihail Livada who gave him the negative feedback (interview 22 October 2016).

16 Özer would use those experiences for his feature film Hollywoodrymlingar/Hollywood Kaçakları (Hollywood Runaways) (1998).

17 The social homecare service is a recurring topic in the immigrant films, for example En gammal melodi (An Old Tune) (1981) by Menelaos Carayannis, or Främlingar (Foreigners) (1978) by Claudio Sapiaín.

18 The disagreement concerned a documentary about Pamukkale that he decided to finance himself through his own company, Devkino. He finished the film Pamukkale – naturen som konstnär (Pamukkale – Nature as Artist) in 1983.

19 Application no. 736, SFI archive, collection ‘Filmverkstan’. The board made a decision in Carayannis’s favour on 19 March 1979.

20 Statutes taken by Kaleidoscope 14 May 1981.

21 Broadcast 13 June 1984.

22 In an interview for the newspaper Dagens Nyheter, Muammer Özer expressed that the immigrants are considered by the SFI as belonging to the same category as children, pensioners or disabled people (Rudberg 1982).

23 For example, in the newspaper article about the association, published in the regional supplement issue of Dagens Nyheter (Westmar 1974).

24 Parallell was broadcast as part of the programme Immigrant Time on 23 December 1978, and Vill du följa med mig Martha? was shown on primetime, 8 July 1982, both on SVT.

25 Andersson and Sundholm (2014) present an analysis of the field of film in Sweden and its establishment.

26 The bluntest expression of this is a short commentary in Dagens Nyheter after the film had been shown on television. The reviewer states that Özer’s film is ‘not good enough for public screening’ (see Melbourn 1986).

Chapter 3

From Avant-Garde to Communion: Ten Films by Immigrant Filmmakers in Sweden

As we have pointed out in the previous chapters, the premises of cultural production in a minority situation are characterized by an intertwinement of the individual and the social. Whereas we have so far stressed the production context – the need to get organized and to establish institutions for a production of locality – in this chapter we will open for an analysis that also considers the diverse aesthetics of the immigrant films. Accented cinema and fabulation in particular will be the mode and device that we address, but we will also adhere to Zuzana M. Pick’s analysis and position, and establish in the name of diversity each film as a unique object through a careful description and presentation.

The chapter is structured as follows: after a short introduction to the concept of fabulation, as developed by Rodowick, we present and discuss ten films from our corpus of Swedish immigrant films. The films are selected in order to both cover the five production nodes we research and to show the diversity of the production. With some exceptions, due to an attempt to keep the production nodes presented more coherent, the chapter does form a chronological account of immigrant film within the minor cinema framework, from 1952 to 1992. However, we want to stress that it is not intended as a homogenous history, but instead as meshes of small histories, entangled, and in asymmetrical relationships with each other. In order to constitute each film as a separate object of analysis we present a detailed description of the film’s aesthetics, the facts of production and distribution, as well as different readings according to the interpretative framework that we have introduced and where fabulation is one of our key concepts.

Fabulations in the minor key

The immigrant situation and the conditions of the newly arrived immigrant filmmaker are fundamentally characterized by a becoming; both the filmmaker(s) and the public that the films address are in an interstitial space and state of change; hence, there can be no given addressee. As Alison Butler has pointed out, the films project a community rather than express it (2002: 21). Therefore, the films constitute ways of negotiating where you are and who you are, producing and enabling a new experience not yet articulated publicly. These films are in search of a language and an audience. Thus, a typical trait in many of the films is the wandering figure, outdoors or indoors, who is looking for a context. Another trait is fabulation in the way the term is interpreted and used by D. N. Rodowick through his reading of Deleuze and Guattari.

According to Rodowick – whose initial argument and analysis are much more refined than our application here – the condition for production in a deterritorialized situation is that you cannot adhere to a stable subject–object divide. The split forces one to negotiate this divide, to produce and fabulate (narrate) your situation through a processual approach that enables a ‘double becoming’, a becoming of both the producer and the public that is being addressed (Rodowick 1997: 161). Hence, Rodowick also stresses that both filmmaker and audience are in search of a language and a context. This problematic of the immigrant’s situation as that of modernity at large thus encompasses a theory of cultural production, regardless of whether the filmmaker is already a trained professional or someone who is learning the craft while making a film. Both have to reassess their cultural practice because of the new context.

Accordingly, the immigrant films analysed in this chapter are considered to be cultural interventions and inventions, produced in search of a context, a style and a voice. This device of finding a new narrative voice may appear not only as an amalgamation of filmic styles (e.g. documentary and fiction) or different narrative registers (e.g. sound and image), but also in a more literal sense, e.g. through the use of a multilingual dialogue and broken, accented Swedish. These traits of inventiveness are, however, forced rather than personally invented due to the position of the immigrant filmmaker as a minority. The position of the Other and the process of becoming are thus not part of a question of what is being represented in the films, but the very starting point for the films and our analysis. Such an approach suggests that every immigrant film is also an allegory of its own premises of cultural production, as David E. James has argued in Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (1989).

The following ten short films that we are analysing are low or non-budget productions from the margins that reflect their cultural position and the struggle to articulate a hitherto unacknowledged experience for a public in becoming. The analysis will focus on how the immigrant films enable the experience of the immigrant situation to be deterritorialized and bereft of a language, and how the filmmakers and the films therefore aim at producing locality to create a new language and an audience that is not yet there as a public. This may take place through an accented style or the strategy of fabulation, but other strategies are also possible, as we will show. Although every film is characterized by the immigrant situation and has been made under minor conditions, each one of the films reflects its own specific premises of cultural production, which is Zuzana M. Pick’s important point in her analysis of Chilean exile cinema, by making the paradoxical claim that there is a ‘privilege of exile’ (Pick 1987b: 42).

Studie 1 (Uppvaknandet) by Peter Weiss (1952)

Studie 1 is indeed creating new territory. Peter Weiss was trained as painter and was a skilled writer, but had never used the cinematic language himself: ‘Studie 1 is my first attempt to film. I shot the whole film on a Sunday, with the assistance of the photographer Ingvar Larsson. When editing I used everything we had shot, almost no frame was wasted’ (Weiss 1953: 14). Peter Weiss was at the time a Swedish citizen, but since his immigration from Germany in 1939 still an outsider in the Swedish culture. His art exhibits had failed, and his literary works, written and published in Swedish, were not acknowledged (Holmgren 2014). But as a cinephile, always at the movies, he met other cinephiles. In 1950 he made his first trip to Paris and saw everything he could at La Cinémathèque. Back in Stockholm he became involved in the Independent Film Group, where he met fellow cinephiles and realized that he could make films of his own.

Studie 1 had no budget at all; the production costs were later estimated to 150 Swedish krona at the most, money that was used by Mihail Livada when he bought film stock to help Weiss (Bengtsson 2010: 21). The two roles in the film, a man and a woman, were enacted by Weiss himself and the professional actress Eva-Lisa Lennartsson, the latter a member of the loosely organized avant-garde community of post-war Stockholm. The photographer Ingvar Larsson was a member of the amateur filmmakers’ club in Stockholm, and he used a camera that belonged to the club. The Independent Film Group distributed Study 1 and later recorded a soundtrack that was added to the originally silent film.[1] The soundtrack is significant as it mostly creates a second space in the film and thus another narrative level, which is important for our analysis.

The short film, six minutes in all, received a positive reception among the film amateurs and was awarded a prize at the festival Årets smalfilm 1952 (‘Small gauge film of the year 1952’), coming second. It was the first step in a short career within filmmaking for Weiss; after several shorts – experimental films, documentaries and commissioned information films – he ended up making a feature film in 1959, the surrealist Hägringen, which was supported by Jonas Mekas (through the donation of film stock) on the basis of the merits of the short films. As has already been accounted for, he left filmmaking in the beginning of the 1960s when he made a breakthrough as a playwright, but there exists an underground flow of cinematic impulses in his artistic work, for example in his last novel, The Aesthetics of Resistance, where the cinematic perspective governs the narration (Andersson 2008).

The intention with Studie 1, according to the filmmaker, was to rather plainly create a language to master the filmic expressions:

In this study I wanted to express a rhythm of eternity, the recurrent morning, the slow awakening after the night. The first images of the walking feet imply the theme of awakening, still in the sign of the dream. The dream atmosphere is then kept and intertwines with the shabbiness of the real room. The iteration of the way through the rooms together with the recurring ceremonial actions of the morning create the timeless, the monotonous.

(Weiss 1953: 14)

Usually the different readings of the film concentrate around three characteristics or themes. The autobiographical, the conventional notion of modernism in which you depict ‘the artist as outsider’ and the overall affinity with surrealism. But the images of exile and confinement in the film transcend general strands of modernism and psychobiography; they also point towards a minor cinema in the becoming, conditioned by exile and deterritorialization.

Figure 7: Peter Weiss, Studie 1 (Uppvaknandet) (Study 1 [Awakening]), 1952. 16 mm. Courtesy of Filmform/Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss.

The film starts with images of a man’s naked feet, slowly walking over a dark sheet where some white sticks are formed into letters, creating the title of the film: ‘STUDIE 1’. The soundtrack is a constant but distant noise, consisting of not only some recognizable sounds, like motors and voices, but also some unidentifiable pulses. In the beginning of the film it is possible to discern something like cars passing by, and maybe children’s laughter, which creates an outer space in contrast to the inner space in which the film is enacted. With one significant exception, the sound does not match the visual movements. The link between signifier and signified is thus not really established, and the codes are open. In a study of the use of language, sound and noise in the works of Peter Weiss, Markus Huss has pointed out how Weiss constantly used the acoustics and the noise – even in novels and short stories – as a way of coming to terms with an unstable relationship with languages, even the loss of them and the condition of exile (Huss 2014). In light of this, the soundtrack in Studie 1 develops into a reflection on the ontology of language and its adherence to codes. But it also raises the ambiguous question of language as a means for communication as well as a barrier, a wall that confines someone without language, or with an unstable relationship to language, like the exiled person. Since the film was silent from the beginning, with a soundtrack added, it can be said that the sound just enhances the silence, i.e. the loss of language.

In the shot following the opening image, the sheet is white and wrinkled. The black textile has turned white. Black and white (=Weiss) are the fundamental elements of film stock. The greyness of the film has been seen as a comment on this ontological fact (Bengtsson 2010: 28). This could be connected to the extreme close-ups that follow, reminding us of the ‘cinema of attraction’ that was the beginning of film art, a film art in becoming (Gunning 1986). As the black-and-white cinema of attraction in the beginning of the twentieth century was a film art in becoming, Studie 1 is an exercise for a film art yet to be, repeating the premature steps of the craft.

The man walks on, and at an extreme low angle we see the feet coming closer and closer. Pictures of naked feet can be found in other surrealist films, e.g. Danish Wilhelm Freddie’s Spiste horisonter (Eaten Horizons) (1950) that Weiss wrote about in his volume of collected essays Avantgardefilm 1956, and in  L’age  d’or (The Golden Age) (1930) by Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, in which some of the most famous images are of the actress Lya Lys, sucking the toe of a marble statue. (Naked feet and other body parts are well represented in several films by Weiss, as well as in his collages and book illustrations.) Walking is the dominant activity in the film, and the mobility of the two individuals contrasts in an effective way with the confinement of their situation. Locked between walls with no obvious way out, they wander back and forth, not unlike guinea pigs in a laboratorial maze.

The next image is shot from a high angle, depicting a room where a man and a woman sleep. She sleeps naked on the floor, he under a white sheet, on a bed. The man rises. He wears a string vest and pyjama trousers. He sits on the bed and puts his feet on the floor, once again in an extreme close-up, close to the legs of the sleeping woman. The harsh awakening from a night of joy is a rather common trope in film, literature and art. Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks (1947) – which, by the way, is mentioned by Weiss in Avantgardefilm, probably due to screenings in Paris (Weiss 1956: 109) – is one example of many. The somewhat strange situation is that the woman lies naked on the floor while the man lies in bed, with clothes on. This asymmetry can be interpreted as a rather conventional male sex imagination, where the woman is commodified into a nude body, ready for use. Such images are also recurrent in the novels of Weiss, and this trope is furthermore important in biographies about him and statements from people around him, where his sexual desire is often described and discussed. The presence of this image in the film complicates the textual structure, since it is of such an obvious type that it almost turns into a self-reflexive criticism. It oscillates between unbridled male imagination and the ironic commentary on such a fantasy. In a study of Weiss and his position in a borderland between verbal languages – German and Swedish – Ola Holmgren connects this to the male gaze: Weiss is the ‘Exile Man’, trapped in a patriarchal ideology, but during the exile experience, i.e. the changing of languages, he gets closer to his emotions, and is forced to be more naked and vulnerable (Holmgren 2014: 127). Weiss as the Exile Man sees the woman as an object of desire, but he also sees himself seeing this.

If the awakening with a nude woman, an art model maybe, is possible to connect to the art world, the next image has an explicit semiotic relationship to art. The man enters a room filled with sketches on the walls, with litter on the floor, an easel and paintings stacked together; this is with no doubt an artist’s studio. As has been pointed out, a painting or drawing, hanging on a wall, is made by Weiss (Bengtsson 2010: 20). On the floor a bicycle is placed upside down. When the man passes it, he touches one of the wheels, which starts to spin. Slowly, the man walks through a corridor, almost as a sleepwalker. The black-and-white film stock and the somewhat blurred cinematography could be interpreted as a reference to Conrad Veidt’s Cesare in Robert Wiene’s Das Kabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) (1920), and through that once again to a film art in becoming, but also to persons living on the border, in a twilight zone. The man walks into a kitchen filled with empty bottles and waste. The corridor is dark and we can only see the man as a silhouette; in the kitchen, however, the vision of him is clear and light. He walks towards a bathroom cabinet hanging on the kitchen wall. He looks at himself in the mirror, and the angle is such that his gaze is directed towards the viewer. The human face in the mirror is a recurrent motif in art, mythology and poetry. The mirror often has an ambiguous position: it is both something that reveals the truth and something that distorts the truth, as in the first letter in Corinthians: ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face’. But it is also ambiguous because of its constant reminder of the double nature of man, and the recurrent idea in fantasy and the gothic about the mirror world as a double. When the protagonist brushes his teeth in slow, mechanical movements, he is grinning at his own picture as if it is someone else.[2] He gargles, and there is a cut to an extreme close-up of his mouth from above, where the water bubbles and shivers. This gargling is matched by the soundtrack, and it is the only sound that is connected to a visible source. It happens twice in the film, as the scene in front of the mirror is doubled. (The gargling sound is also heard again without a matching image).

The gargling and the brushing of teeth are inscribed in a semiotic game, underlining the instability of language codes, while at the same time these actions remind us of several binary structures like inside/outside and depth/surface. The view of the man looking at himself is furthermore a kind of free indirect discourse in the sense that Pier Paolo Pasolini, and later both Patricia Pisters and Gilles Deleuze, developed the concept (Hongisto 2016: 200). The characters of the film are animated by the vision of the filmmaker and there is a fusion between the worlds or worldviews of the author and the character. The man looks into the mirror and the face in the mirror looks at the viewer, due to the specific angle between the actual face and the mirror. The face in the mirror can be seen by the viewer of the film but not in the same way by the protagonist, and thus a free indirect discourse is created. The filmmaker Peter Weiss interferes with the actions of the protagonist, enacted by Weiss himself.

The man lights a cigarette and walks out of the kitchen, entering a bathroom where he sits on the toilet, still smoking. In the next shot the nude woman enters the study, where the wheel of the bicycle is still spinning. She seems to be as somnambulist as the man. She passes him, and these actions are repeated: the man smoking, looking at the woman and the woman passing him. We see her coming close to the camera several times, and the film ends with an extreme close-up of her chin when she walks into the lens. Just before that we have also seen her from the left side when she passes the man, her naked breast placed in the centre of the picture. Several of the actions are thus repeated, especially the movements from the bedroom, through the studio and into the corridor close to the toilet. The repeated movements and discontinuities are reminders of a world out of joint, and are also traces of the exercises the filmmaker has to undergo to acquire his new language – the language of film.

The autobiographical reading of this film is evident. The man in the film is enacted by Weiss, who actually lived in the flat where the film was shot, and whose paintings were hanging on the walls. This footage could thus be interpreted as a mere document of a morning in his life. This kind of reading, for example in Bengtsson (2010), treats the film as a reflection of the biography of Weiss when it comes to his supposedly romantic view of the artist, his views on women and a generally disturbed adolescence. Bengtsson in fact interprets the film as a rebellious letter directed to the mother of Weiss (2010: 25). Another possible reading of the film deals with the art references, for example the intertextual web sketched above with labels like ‘Wiene’, ‘Freddie’ and ‘Anger’. But the autobiographical interpretation and a more reductive intertextual reading of the film risk overshadowing the value of the film as a documentation or even analysis of the conditions of immigration, and its quality as fabulation.

This is a film that deals with its own language, its own becoming as film, and thus a tool for the immigrant filmmaker in his efforts to find a position in a new society. It is experimental in a very basic sense; the filmmaker tried to find a language of film, e.g. in repetitive continuity and extreme close-ups, filtered through a grey light. It is clear that this is a narration in becoming. Its set of rules is not fixed yet. There are some obvious flaws in the continuity: the spinning bicycle wheel suddenly stands still, some stockings that are hanging to dry in the kitchen are moved, and then moved back again, and the frontal tableau image of the man looking into the room, with one of his own paintings on the wall to the left, does not match with the next shot where the painting is partly hidden behind some cardboard and canvases. The extreme close-ups of the naked feet of the man, as well as his mouth, filled with water, are hard to motivate through the narrative, and are almost elements of a pure cinema of attraction. The naked feet of the man, or the naked breasts of the woman, are put in the centre of the image, and you can of course interpret them as signs for ‘corporeality’, ‘sexuality’ or ‘desire’. But they can also be seen as modules in an experimental filmic alphabet, not yet connected to stable references. In this way, the film tries to seek its territory. But it also deals with reterritorialization and exile on a more thematic level.

Several of the actions are repeated, such as the walk through the room, and the lighting of the cigarette. The narration goes on in a syncopated fashion – two steps forward, one step back, but never back to the beginning. As pointed out by Weiss, these ceremonial actions create the monotony of the piece. These actions are also, however, important as signs of normality. To rise in the morning, to brush one’s teeth and uphold all other routines are important when you want to achieve normality, and this is often something that the refugee wants. The artist in exile wants some kind of monotony, signifying that they are or will be socialized into the new society. The confinement in the apartment and the obstacles on the floor, hindering walking, as well as the recurrent patterns of shadows are stylistic devices that are connected by Naficy to an accented cinema. The space is closed. The soundtrack not only emphasizes the closedness of the space but also creates ambivalence; we are reminded of an external world that we however do not access. Moreover, the sound of the film progresses in a linear manner, as an external society that has its time, whereas the internal world, the space of the apartment and the subject, is characterized by repetitions, a non-linear, subjective time. In this way, the film breaks up a stable subject–object divide, a device that Rodowick considers to be typical for fabulation, for storytelling as an activation process.

Rodowick stresses three points, in particular: that fabulation is a process that is inseparable from the time of enunciation (and thus does not refer to something that is given beforehand); that sound and image are both equal and independent discourses in the audio-visual narrative; and that film ‘gravitates between [fiction and documentary] in a free indirect relation’ (1997: 157). These three traits are thus characteristics of a narrative in becoming, a fabulation, in which both filmmaker and audience are in the making. In Studie 1 this is being played out in intricate layers, stressing the process of the narration. The straightforward recording of the simple actions in the apartment is disjointed spatially, which gives the film a documentary-like impression, whereas the repeated actions break with the documentary discourse. The sound from the surrounding world complicates further any attempt to establish a hierarchy between what is being seen and what is being heard, thus establishing ‘the acoustic and the visual, the false and the true, in ways that are both complementary and incommensurable’ (Rodowick 1997: 157). The visual and the acoustic are two separate registers that only meet and match each other in a realistic vein when the man in the film gargles, thus making the human body and the mouth into the source of the sound, and also the only semiotic match between the registers.

The man and the woman are confirmed as bodies; their corporeal existence over and over again underlined by the factual claims about their bodily functions (sleep, sexuality, digestion) and their obvious nakedness, exposed in close-ups of body parts, such as their feet, while their status as humans and individuals is less clear. They can be seen as outsiders as they are artists-to-be in a world that does not acknowledge them. But their confinement in the small apartment – where every moment is repeated, and where they are surrounded by debris – while they at the same time try to escape through art and lovemaking, can also be interpreted as an allegory of the refugee situation. Located in this confinement they wait for something, walking to and fro like sleepwalkers, locked into their own nightmares or inability to communicate. This fable documents its own inability to produce locality in a conventional sense, but in a paradoxical way this confinement and disorientation are together the locality that remains, almost as an indexical sign, the locality of the deterritorialized refugee.

The woman may be placed in there as a means for the male refugee to get in touch with the community outside the flat. In several migration stories, for example the films we are looking into here, the refugee is a lonely male who tries to connect with the new society through a woman. Here, the man and the woman are bodies rather than persons; like marionettes, they are moved around in the maze, without any way of escape. Their asymmetric relationship does not promote authentic communication, hence their way of always passing by, never meeting. As Weiss would put it much later, regarding his exiled compatriots in Stockholm during the war: ‘they did not constitute a real community, since exile did not move people together; they were all on their own with their rootlessness […] once in exile they could never get rid of it’ (Weiss 2006: 984).

Monos by the Tensta Film Association (1974)

Whereas Studie 1 is clearly placed within the tradition of avant-garde cinema, and addresses the problematics of becoming on an elaborate aesthetic level, Monos has a very different point of departure. Babis Tsokas, who lived in the neighbourhood of Tensta and worked part-time at the local youth recreation centre, was very interested in film. So, he decided to combine his own interests with those of the neighbourhood and suggested to the local authorities that he could shoot a film with the local youngsters. They founded the Tensta Film Association, received money for film stock, and Tsokas co-financed the purchase of a 16 mm camera. The film was a true collective effort, scripted and shot together with teenagers from the youth centre, and the production is credited to the association as a whole. Besides Tsokas, sixteen youths from Tensta were involved in the production, including the editing of the film.

The duration of Monos is seventeen minutes. Due to the conditions of production – learning while making, shooting outdoors with natural light, and not recording any sound – long takes and static spaces were to be natural stylistic choices for the film. There are hardly any match-cuts or other classical editing strategies. Monos tells the story of a young Greek boy, Nikos, who is walking the streets of Stockholm longing for home and looking for a context in his new country. The first two opening shots show downtown Stockholm in the morning, the cityscape is that of a modern, almost empty city, a recurrent image in many of the films made by Cineco and Muammer Özer. On the soundtrack we can hear typical Greek folk music being played on the bouzouki. The very first shot is taken against the sun and the sky, creating a contrasting image in black and white. The camera pans slowly downward after which follows a rough cut showing the same space, but now with correct aperture time. It is not unlikely that the first shot is a mistake when it comes to lighting and aperture time, but the dark, contrasting image creates a setting and mood for the film. The first dark shot lingers in the past as we move into the next shot that displays the same space that is now in full light, with Nikos barely visibly in the background.

The third shot introduces us to the main protagonist, the immigrant boy Nikos, dressed up as newly arrived immigrants tended to be. At first we see his reflection in a shop window, the body split in two, after which the camera pans to the right, showing Nikos looking into the window. After this follows a shot of a long duration in which Nikos is walking towards the camera down some stairs. The next shot is a close-up. The music stops and a voice-over says in Swedish: ‘Here I walk. Alone. Far from my dearest’. Then follows a cut to the space where we had seen Nikos descending the stairs and the voice-over continues: ‘I walk and walk and walk. All alone’. Now Nikos enters Sergel’s Square and Plattan (‘the slab’), the legendary pedestrian plaza of downtown Stockholm, beneath the actual square, which serves many functions: it is a busy pedestrian passage, a popular meeting place, a square for political manifestations, and notoriously one of the prime hubs for Stockholm’s drug trade. When Nikos has reached the centre of the square, which, unusually enough, is empty, the camera zooms out in order to stress his loneliness.

Already during these three introductory minutes of Monos we are being shown some of the foremost devices and locations of immigrant filmmaking: the self-reflection and wandering used already by Peter Weiss, and the modern cityscape of Stockholm and the pedestrian plaza beneath Sergel’s Square that Muammer Özer and Guillermo Álvarez would incorporate into Jordmannen and Hägringen. This deterritorialization of the immigrant character receives a further twist in Monos as we follow the story by means of a filmmaking that is searching for its filmic expression. The cuts are rough, and the camera shaky and erratic in its movements. The elaborate aesthetics in Studie 1, the repeated movements and the split of inner and outer space (the image space of the apartment and the sound space of what is off-screen) stress narrative as process. We do not know what the images or sounds refer to, as the film never establishes a coherent time-space continuum. The wandering of Weiss in the apartment is serial, not consequential, and the space is therefore existential rather than actual. Due to these devices the narrative unfolds according to a free indirect discourse between different modes. One of the most telling moments is when we are placed into a direct subjective address with Weiss looking into the mirror, and what we have so far considered to constitute the actual documentary sound – the sound of the street or the outside world – is suddenly synchronized with what takes place in the space of the picture (and inside the apartment). In Monos, we have a similar effect of disjointed spaces and non-synchronous sound, a lack of coherence partly due to the deficient conditions of production, and also due to stylistic choices. The post-synchronized sound, in particular, adds further layers; the inner speech of Nikos and the music do not correspond with what is being shown visually and are thus rather comments on what is being shown on screen.

After the introduction of the film that presents our main character and the alienating modern spaces of the city, a transitional space is introduced. We are now entering his neighbourhood, which is Tensta, the suburb fifteen kilometres north of downtown Stockholm. Yet again we have a walking Nikos in focus, but suddenly there is a pan to the left and we see two Swedes, a man and a woman, sitting on a bench drinking beer and laughing. This is the only segment in the film where Nikos is watching someone that is not an immediate part of his own private space. On the soundtrack we hear both some noise and Greek music, but you cannot hear what the laughing couple are saying. Through a cut we move back to Nikos who is looking back at the couple off-camera and smiling. This is the first match-cut that is being used in the film. The short scene and the cut suggest, like in Cineco’s Underjordiskt sällskap and many other immigrant films, that the only Swedes that an immigrant may connect with are those who are socially outcasts. After Niko’s arrival in Tensta we move to the next significant space of the film, the youth centre. We are being shown Nikos walking and finally reaching a rundown wooden shack. This is the actual youth centre where Babis Tsokas worked at the time, and where he also met Muammer Özer and Menelaos Carayannnis. The shack was not built with the intention of its being a youth centre, but erected for the construction workers who built Tensta – when the work was finished the modest wooden building was turned into a youth centre.

Figure 8: Tensta Film Association, Monos (Alone), 1974. 16 mm. Courtesy of Swedish Film Institute/Babis Tsokas.

The first shot from inside the shack shows a girl in a bright red coat in the foreground and with her back against the camera, playing billiards. Nikos, dressed in black, stands in the background looking at her. After establishing this male gaze, Nikos moves forward and takes a seat at a table alone. The camera introduces different characters in the building – the image is often out of focus – and after a while the camera returns to a boy playing the guitar. On the soundtrack we can here the bouzouki that is totally out of sync with the image. As the bouzouki stops playing, the boy in the image continues playing. We cut back to Nikos and suddenly we can hear a young voice on the soundtrack, asking in Greek: ‘How is my dad doing today?’ A female voice answers: ‘He is out fishing’. The dialogue continues, interwoven with the music: ‘And my mother is at home, making dinner’. ‘In a while my brother will arrive’. ‘And we will eat together’. The soundtrack continues to shift between Nikos’s inner speech in Greek, the music and sound from the youngsters in the shack, thus establishing different layers and localities. Shortly after the Greek dialogue establishes another territory for the film, there is a cut to Nikos who is out of focus. The blur increases and a cut to a Greek harbour follows and we see a fisherman in his boat, presumably Nikos’s father. After a series of idyllic shots from Greece we are moved back to the shack where the girl who had been playing billiards stands in front of Nikos and asks in Swedish if she may sit down. She asks where Nikos is from, who answers in Greek that his name is Nikos. He shows images of his parents and tells her in Greek who they are. The girl continues posing questions in Swedish – ‘Where are you from? Do you speak Swedish?’ – but receives no answer. Suddenly, they touch each other’s hands and walk out and through the neighbourhood. As they walk through Tensta, which is now depicted as a normal neighbourhood with children playing, with elderly people strolling around and women walking home after shopping for groceries, a song starts in Greek, Aeriko, a melancholic song about unattainable love. Nikos follows the girl to her house; they embrace and she goes in, and Nikos is back walking alone in the streets. The promise to connect with the surrounding world, which the Swedish girl embodied, failed: yet another recurrent trope in immigrant cinema.

Spatially, Monos establishes only one space, which is in the shack where Nikos’s mind and the surroundings cohere. Otherwise, the film follows a divide in which he is mentally connected to Greece and disconnected from his actual surroundings in Sweden. That the film ends with Nikos walking back alone is coherent with fabulation as process – the journey to find a context continues. The encounter in the shack might as well have been a fantasy of Nikos.

Monos was never shown on TV or in a traditional cinema setting. However, Tsokas visited many youth centres in the suburbs of Stockholm and screened the film together with some of the members of the Tensta Film Association, mostly with Karafil Skepi from Albania, who played the part of Nikos. Monos managed to get some publicity from the press because it was a community project for teenagers from a troubled Stockholm suburb.[3] In these articles, Monos is perceived as an important effort because the film offered immigrant teenagers an opportunity to show how they felt and what they had experienced when arriving in Sweden. In addition to such a positive reception in general, the aesthetics of the film was criticized for being clumsy and technically deficient. One journalist wrote that in Monos nothing is being said and very little happens (Westmar 1974; Hagberg 1974). This lack of action – of events that lead to other events, thus forming a causal chain – which would motivate the editing, is a mutual trait of both Studie 1 and Monos. The narrative is rather organized as a series, another characteristic that Rodowick singles out in his analysis of the different strategies of fabulation. In the serial narrative, ‘the body becomes an undecidable figure, hesitating between the virtuality of the past and the indeterminacy of the future’ (Rodowick 1997: 154). In Studie 1, the man who wakes up to a new day walks around in a somnambulist manner in his apartment, whereas Nikos in Monos just wanders around the streets of a city, stuck in his memories of the place that he has left, without knowing where he is going. Both films are also characteristic of an accented cinema, for example the confined existential space in Studie 1 as mentioned earlier, and the evident ‘inscription of the biographical, social, and cinematic (dis)location of the filmmakers’ (Naficy 2001: 4). Studie 1 and Monos embody the experience of being deterritorialized and in exile, and express the efforts to depict that experience. The difference is that Monos had a significant immigrant context, being screened in the local neighbourhoods, whereas Studie 1 remained within the avant-garde community and later became incorporated into the oeuvre of the playwright and author Peter Weiss.[4]

Vill du följa med mig Martha? by the Tensta Film Association (1980)

Vill du följa med mig Martha?, the fourth film made by the Tensta Film Association, differs from the main interpretative grids of Naficy and Rodowick. The film points to Pick’s finding that the immigrant filmmakers always has to reassess their cultural practice, but that this reassessment does not necessarily follow any pre-given genre or style. Vill du följa med mig Martha? is 23 minutes long and tells a linear story with the use of regular choices from mainstream film grammar: establishing shots, match-cuts and shot/reverse-shots. Muammer Özer was responsible for the camera work, Tsokas directed and the editing was done collectively with people from the Tensta Film Association, but under the firm guidance of Tsokas.

Tsokas got the idea for the film after having been to several immigrant meetings and paying attention to the fact that it was always the immigrant men who got together while the women were absent. Thus, if immigrants were a subordinated group in Swedish society at the time, Tsokas explained in an interview, the most inferior group consisted of the women.[5] Tsokas began to collect stories from Tensta and the association received 6,000 Swedish krona from the Järva cultural committee for the making of the film. As Tsokas had studied at DI and thus had the necessary contacts for borrowing proper film equipment, the grant was sufficient and the production more professional. Vill du följa med mig Martha? was also the first film that the Tensta Film Association shot with a clapper, and therefore had correctly synchronized sound.

The dialogue in Vill du följa med mig Martha? is in both Greek and Swedish, and the subtitles alternate accordingly. At the time Sweden had a recognizable population of Greek immigrants, which dated back to the immigration of Greek labour during the 1960s. The numbers were enhanced by the military coup in 1967.[6] In the 1970s several young Greeks with artistic or journalistic ambitions happened to end up in Sweden, several of them applying for projects at the Stockholm Film Workshop, like Petros Panamas, George Tsalikis, Christos Kefalas, Atanas Tassopoulos and later on Dimitrios Solarides and Manuel Geranis.

Compared with the theme of the loss of language in Studie 1 and the direct expression of how it is to live in-between or outside languages in Monos, the act of subtitling is an attempt to integrate the audience into a multilingual situation. However, the film also establishes different linguistic registers; of mother tongue and of foreign language and accented speech, and depicts how the different characters navigate through this multifaceted situation. Martha and her husband are accented, linguistically displaced and without sufficient skills in the local language, whereas their diasporic daughter can shift between the two languages and the two worlds. The subordination and alienation due to limited knowledge of Swedish constitute a common theme in the immigration films, e.g. in Hägringen the leading character, a Latin American immigrant, is not able to stand up against his Swedish girlfriend when they are arguing in Swedish.

Vill du följa med mig Martha? tells the story of Martha, a married Greek woman who works as a cleaner and who is the mother of a teenage girl. At home is her unemployed and discontent husband, who controls the home despite Martha being both the breadwinner and the one who does all the housework. The husband complains that Martha does not have time to bake bread anymore and makes the same food for every meal. The daughter, who speaks perfect Swedish, lives in her own interstitial space, spends time with her teenage friends and has the ability to leave home whenever she wants to. Martha is unhappy with her situation and longs to return to Greece. Martha’s husband wants to stay in Sweden and claims that there is nothing to return to.

The first shot of the film shows a mop in close-up, after which the camera follows the arm holding the mop until Martha’s face is in focus. She is cleaning the floor together with a colleague, a Swedish woman, in what appears to be a local canteen. As they leave the woman tries to persuade Martha to join her at the women’s association in Tensta. Martha declines by saying, in broken Swedish, that she has to go home and cook before her husband arrives home. Nevertheless, her colleague points out the direction of the women’s association, in case Martha changes her mind. When she arrives at home she discovers that a letter is waiting for her.

According to Naficy, letters are one of the prime devices of the aesthetics of accented cinema: ‘[e]xile and epistolarity are constitutively linked because both are driven by distance, separation, absence, and loss and by the desire to bridge the multiple gaps’. He distinguishes between three types of epistole in An Accented Cinema, ‘film-letters, telephonic epistles, and letter-films’. Out of these three forms, the film-letters ‘inscribe letters and acts of reading and writing of letters by diegetic characters’ (2001:101).

The letter Martha finds when she gets home is from her mother, and as she reads it we are transported to another place and language. When Martha reads we hear her mother’s voice in Greek recounting what she has written. This is also the first time that Greek is spoken in the film. The distance, the feeling of loss and the longing of Martha are emphasized as she reads about how her mother is happy and grateful knowing that Martha is living in such a ‘fine and hospitable country’. The letter also contains a picture of her nephew and a couple of leaves from the family lemon tree.

After finishing the letter, Martha starts with the housework and in the next shot we see her washing the dishes. The camera zooms in on Martha, and when she is in close-up there is a cut to the women’s association where her colleague is playing the guitar, singing the famous Swedish feminist anthem ‘Befrielsen är nära!’ (‘Liberation is close!’), a song that was originally written for the classic Swedish feminist play Jösses flickor (Gee Girls) (1974). This cut to the women’s association is crucial, as it hints at what is going to happen.

Although a letter is an obvious device in the aesthetics of accented cinema, Naficy makes the claim in line with his evaluative and textualist approach, that ‘[i]n the case of accented films, however, epistolarity appears to be less a function of plot formation and character motivation than an expression and inscription of exilic displacement, split subjectivity, and multifocalism’ (2001: 103). Accordingly, as examples of ‘accented epistolaries’, Naficy mentions Chantal Akerman’s News from Home (1977) and Mona Hatoum’s Measures of Distance (1988) – not films that follow ‘traditional linear, realist narration’. However, Vill du följa med mig Martha? is constructed according to a linear and realist aesthetics. The act of reading the letter defines her as a character; it describes Martha’s feelings, but it is also a preparation for events to come, i.e. it is plot related. The letter works according to the mode of an accented cinema as it expresses the displacement and longing of Martha; we understand that she is trapped, imprisoned in her new setting, which is stressed further in the next shot. In this scene the phone rings and one of her daughter’s friends who speaks only Swedish is on the phone. Martha struggles to communicate with her, and the misunderstandings and difficulties in expressing herself underline her displacement and alienation. Soon her husband arrives, who tells her that he did not get the job that he was applying for – they chose someone who spoke better Swedish instead. Martha’s husband goes on complaining about the food Martha is cooking and continues when their daughter arrives. He cannot understand why she is wearing patched jeans.

The family drama escalates at the dinner table. The daughter talks to Martha in Swedish who replies in Greek, after which she makes the remark that even after seven years in Sweden she has still not learned the language. Martha says that she wants to move back, and that she has been imprisoned in Sweden for seven years now – ‘What have I experienced?’ she asks rhetorically. The daughter, on the other hand, wants new shoes, and when she asks her father in Swedish for money he replies: ‘you shall speak Greek!’ As they have finished their modest and unhappy dinner, the daughter goes to her friends and the father goes to play cards at a cafe. Martha is left alone at home, at first looking out of the kitchen window, then wandering around the apartment. Finally, she decides to leave the flat and goes to the women’s association. On leaving home she is about to put on her headscarf, but puts it away. We follow her while she is walking through the same neighbourhood and surroundings that Nikos was strolling through in Monos, but compared to him Martha is determined. The final scene in the film is without synchronized sound and is accompanied by the upbeat music that started when Martha decided to leave home. As she enters the women’s association her cleaning colleague is greeting her. The film ends with a freeze frame showing a happy, smiling Martha.

The aesthetics of Vill du följa med mig Martha? is significantly different from Studie 1 and Monos. From the perspective of the Tensta Film Association it was their first fully fledged film and it received a significant amount of attention from the local press. Whereas Peter Weiss’s film and the Tensta Film Association’s first film clearly work according to an accented logic and display the processes of fabulation and becoming, Vill du följa med mig Martha? does not integrate these into its aesthetics. Studie 1 and Monos create a discrepancy in relation to the surrounding society, whereas Vill du följa med mig Martha? offers a solution, which is to be found in the Swedish society.

The interest in the film by the press and the established public sphere was clearly due to the feminist theme. The articles covered both the making of the film and the screenings, and emphasized the encounter with the Swedish women’s movement (Pesikan 1979). Another article conveyed how Tsokas and the Tensta Film Association had been forced to begin shooting the film twice. Both times it happened that the women’s husbands forbade them to continue when they found out what kind of film they took part in (Sörman 1982).

Vill du följa med mig Martha? also differs from Studie 1 and Monos, in that it does not use a processual aesthetic. The serial structure in the previous films envisions a becoming, a character in search of a context, whereas Martha already has two established worlds to choose from: the patriarchal home and the social context of the women’s club. Spatially, these are depicted as distant from each other as Martha crosses the bridge from home on her way to the female community towards the end of the film. The home of Martha is depicted as an accented space, but it is divided through the family and the immigrant community. Gender and language isolate her from both her husband and her daughter.

Figure 9: Tensta Film Association, Vill du följa med mig Martha (Do You Want to Join Me, Martha?), 1980. 16 mm. Courtesy of Babis Tsokas.

As we can see, Vill du följa med mig Martha? does not really correspond with Naficy’s theory of accented cinema or Rodowick’s definition and use of fabulation either: the world is set, Martha has to choose between two established worlds, and not make it her own way. Martha’s solution was discussed during a screening of the film at the local municipal centre in the nearby neighbourhood of Rinkeby about six weeks after the premiere in Tensta. The discussion was reported in the press under the title ‘Allt för stort steg gå till svenskar’ (‘Way too big step to go to Swedes’), and according to the article the immigrants, both male and female, were of the opinion that the step from the private space of the immigrants to the social space of the Swedes was too big, and the film put demands solely on the immigrants, not on the Swedes (Sörman 1980). The local Swedish politicians were reported to be of the opinion that the film showed what should happen, or depicted how problems arise when different cultures are mixed. Tsokas’s reply, according to the press, was that the crucial point is that Martha broke with her isolation and exclusion from society, where she actually went was of no importance.[7]

It is obvious that the clear division in the film into two worlds – that of the immigrants and the Swedes – and Martha’s solution to join the latter one, the women’s movement, were greeted in the press and the established public sphere with approval. Also, the working committee of the Järva cultural committee was positive. One of the board members reported from the premiere in October at Tensta’s local cultural centre that the film was good and that the cultural committee should buy a print of it.[8]

The reception of the film is useful in the discussion of the various theoretical concepts and approaches that we have introduced of accented cinema, fabulation and the public sphere, as well as Pick’s more pragmatic and empirical approach. First, we see yet again how Naficy, with his theory of an accented cinema, establishes an evaluative and normative approach. Accented films are certain films, not necessarily films in general, that are made by diasporic and exilic filmmakers. However, Rodowick’s application of the concept of fabulation is of normative kind, but opens up a space for a discussion of a film’s aesthetic potential for a becoming, a making of a public. Due to the aesthetics being used in Vill du följa med mig Martha?, the film is placed within the established public sphere. Rodowick’s emphasis on fabulation (and Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of cultural production) on the other hand shows that a certain aesthetic might have a different function and effect. Due to the aesthetic solution in Vill du följa med mig Martha?, the film was hijacked by the established public sphere (and embraced by the local politicians), and was thus not fully able to depict the process of the organization of the social experience, to use the vocabulary of Negt and Kluge. Accordingly, Vill du följa med mig Martha? shows how every immigrant film may differ in its aesthetics as the cultural practice has to be reassessed every time, as Pick has claimed. However, the choice of aesthetics also indicates which effect a film will have and how it may be appropriated and used, as well as what part it will play in that becoming which we have claimed as characteristic of the cultural practice of immigrant filmmaking.

Interference by Maureen Paley (1977)

Maureen Paley’s seven-minute 16 mm film is very different from the community-based films of the Tensta Film Association. As with Peter Weiss’s Studie 1, Paley places her film within a contemporary avant-garde film context. The 1970s being the decade of two strong movements within avant-garde film, i.e. structuralism and feminism, which often challenged each other, Paley draws upon both. Paley had profound knowledge of the contemporary theoretical film and art discourse and she would later become a successful curator and owner of a prestigious art gallery in London. However, Interference can also be placed within an immigrant film context, addressing as it does the question of who you are and what you should become in order to make a place for yourself. The trajectory of Paley is thus embedded in a migratory context, even if her work has more similarities with the achievements of Peter Weiss than the other filmmakers we are discussing here. She worked explicitly within the avant-garde community, and has continued there, even though she eventually left filmmaking. (In 1977 she left Sweden for the United Kingdom and further studies at the Royal College of Art, and in 1984 she opened a gallery in London’s East End.)

Paley was a student at the Sarah Lawrence College and Brown University in the United States and was into both still photography and Super 8 films; she received some sponsorship from Polaroid and came to Sweden to continue with the filmmaking.[9] She had begun working on Interference while living in the United States, and as she accompanied her partner who had received a scholarship for studying in Stockholm she found out that the Stockholm Film Workshop would offer her an opportunity to continue working on the film. Jan Bark played a vital role here. In her application to the workshop, she wrote:

The three-part film I referred to is autobiographical. The completed first part, shot just before coming to Sweden in July 1976, is a film diary of shadows and light in my apartment in the United States. The second section is begun but cannot be finished without an optical printer. I have glued bits of my hair and cut-up bits of exposed film onto clear celluloid (Super 8) and need to optically reproduce this for projection. The third section, yet to be started, would be a collection of straightforward autobiographical moments.[10]

She managed to finish Interference with the assistance of Jan Bark at the workshop and it was even broadcast by SVT. The film is quite unique in the Swedish context due to its sophisticated theoretical approach that situates the film in a contemporary experimental film discourse on the body, self-representation and mediation. These are connections to structural film through Paley’s interest for copying, for example through Xeroxing, and the highlighting of the material process in projection and reproduction, in this case through the material remnants of her own body, the strands of hair that dominate the frame in section two of the film.[11] But perhaps more important than the material or structural aspect of the film is the feminist angle, where Paley once again must be seen as on the frontline in her interest in the politics of body and space.

The film consists of three segments, the first showing the interior of a home, the second consisting of frames with extreme close-ups of the artist’s hair and the third a split-screen with blurred edges, where the lower half depicts the artist’s feet, seen from her point of view, and the upper half consists of a flickering television screen.

The film opens with a voice-over that places it within a tradition of narrative as a self-reflexive process: ‘This film is a souvenir, I will show some pictures, I will photograph my hair, I will tell a story, I will show a film’. The voice-over repeats this, accompanying images of an apartment – close-ups of the floor tiles, a toilet seat, a doorframe and a bathtub. A camera shutter clicks repeatedly and all sounds have a faint echo, as if the apartment was empty. One way of making a summary of the film is to describe it as a story about an isolated artist, living in an empty flat, trying to find a language. This connects Interference with Studie 1, and there are other parallels as well; the empty apartment is hard to map, both for the viewer and the protagonist. It is almost a maze, even if in both cases it is a question of only a few rooms. This locality is divided into discrete units, placed serially in time rather than space. In this serial structure a subject is defined, searching for orientation and point of view.

The voice in Interference is authorial. It is the voice of the biographical person Maureen Paley. She sounds distant at the beginning, and the echo intensifies or underlines this distance. Suddenly the voice is very clear and loud, and the materiality of the sound has a presence. The close-ups of the bathroom tiles and the sharp contrasts in light point forward to filmic works that will pursue the endeavour further, for example Jayne Parker’s The Pool (1991). Paley, and later Parker, writes a kind of corporeal autobiography, an aesthetics that has been close to the strategies of feminist video art, from VALIE EXPORT to Pipilotti Rist.

The next segment, where the hair is in focus, starts with a superimposition of a young woman at a window and a grainy structure (later to be revealed as hair), and the voice-over tells a first-person story:

Until I was 14 years old I had very long hair down my back. I wore it in a braid or a pony tail and in school was always the one with the longest hair […] I have a nervous habit of pulling out my hair. I dream sometimes of being able to collect the hair I’ve left in rooms, near chairs, on the floor, and replace it on my head.

The autobiographical stance and the authorial voice underline the fundamental subjectivity of the diegesis. It is a world where an identity is to take place or be defined. The frames rushing by depict strands of hair at a microscopic level. The artist then tells us, through the voice-over, that she is afraid of going bald, and how she once ‘Xeroxed a strand of hair over and over, until, from successive Xeroxing, it disappeared […] I wish I could Xerox myself a new head of hair, make multiples for every hair I lose’. She relates how her mother collected all the lost hair she found around the furniture and collected it in a box, and how she herself collected hair and put it into a plastic bag and Xeroxed it: ‘It no longer looked like hair […] Putting my hair on film is like putting it in and through a box; the first being the camera, the second the projector’. After remembering several cases of people with no hair, she notes: ‘My father once told me that pulling out my hair was a substitute for masturbation. I don’t think so’.

In the third segment the subject, medium and object are united in one single frame, demonstrating the dichotomies of the film: subjectivity versus objectivity, and proximity versus distance. In her voice-over Paley comments:

I’m looking at my feet, I’m looking at the TV, I’m looking at myself, I’m looking at a film, the movement on the TV is similar to the movement of my feet, one is personal, one is impersonal, I am looking at both, I am looking at them in a film, I am looking at them from outside the film, the motion of my feet is caused by me breathing while holding the camera, it is not abstract, it is concrete.

Paley also comments, through her voice-over, on the relation between the image of the flickering TV screen and her feet:

The movement on the TV is not similar to the movement of my feet. There is no interaction. There is only interference. The camera is interfering with the TV scanning rate. My breathing is interfering with me holding a camera and photographing my feet. The film is interfering with me looking at myself.

During the final part of the segment we can see the lower part of a female body walking into the frame, standing in front of the TV set. After the voice-over has finished with the last sentence, ‘[t]he film is interfering with me looking at myself’, we are left with the noise of the television for almost one minute. The noise goes louder, and when the sound is at its greatest the film ends.

The film admits its materiality at several stages; with the sound of the camera shutter, the superimpositions, the noise of the TV set and, of course, the comments in the voice-over concerning the composition of the frames and the relation between interaction and interference. Another analogy for the filmic process is the Xeroxing, which is mentioned several times and is used both as a means to reduce an object – the hair – and reproduce it, and even multiply it. The act of mechanical reproduction is thus an ambiguous procedure, and discloses another binary that structures this work, which is quite unique in a Swedish context.

The meta-materiality of the film is coupled with the meta-corporeality of the artist. The film is shot and edited by Maureen Paley, but she also uses her own body and fragments of it – the hair – as material for the production. The discussion of her hair and its meaning also turns into a question of actual sexuality: ‘My father once told me that pulling out my hair was a substitute for masturbation’. And the voice-over’s rejection of this proposal builds new dichotomies, now with the sexually codified corporeality as the main element.

At the Stockholm Film Workshop the dominant genres were documentaries and fiction shorts, and to a certain extent experimental animations. But Interference was made within the context of structural and feminist film, something that was almost invisible in Swedish experimental film culture. Even if films were made, there was no critical reception available, no critical discourse that could take care of works of this kind. Paley is an artist who is typical of the cosmopolitan avant-garde; her movements are not connected primarily to political necessities but to the serendipity of everyday life, and to some extent the art networks of her time. Her project could be completed due to the help of Jan Bark, who in his policy for the workshop always wanted to make room for the experimental. An aspect of the experimental here is the migratory pattern of the film. The production was started in the United States and completed in Sweden, while the itinerant artist went to the United Kingdom. This film can be said to have been produced by the global, and is itself formulated without an interest in the local: the avant-garde ignores the local level. Interference is, with these distinct aesthetic devices – meta-materiality and meta-corporeality – a fabulation on deterritorialization and thus the shaping of a new identity, this time within the context of feminism, while Studie 1 works within a more traditional modernist discourse, governed by a male romanticism and iconography. They share the continuous movement and desire to get out of the closed room.

It is, however, also possible to read the film in an immigrant context, a subject in search of a context in which the sounds of the street scene in Studie 1 are here replaced by the TV set, the imposed reality that questions you and which you have to relate to. The final shot is suggestive as the noise from the TV increases and Paley’s feet disappear. Here, the dialectic wanderings of exile are represented as two feet in front of a television that suddenly disappear, and the film ends. There is an end to the feminist fiction and the beginning of it as a fact.

Jordmannen by Muammer Özer (1980)

Jordmannen (sometimes titled Toprak Adam) is the most typical immigrant film of Swedish minor cinemas. The film was a close collaboration between Muammer and his Finnish wife, Synnöve, with Muammer credited for writing, editing, shooting and directing the film. Muammer Özer was a trained filmmaker when he arrived in Sweden. In Finland he had started to work on a film called Yabanci in Turkish, or Ulkomaalainen in Finnish (The Foreigner) (1979), which tells the story of a Turkish immigrant in Finland. Özer continued to shoot the film while at film school in Helsinki, but did not manage to finalize the production until he had moved to Sweden.[12] Upon arriving in Stockholm, Özer started his own production company, Devkino, and came to shoot, direct and produce several short films in Sweden. The first films were made with subsidies from the Stockholm Film Workshop and many of the shorts were shown on SVT. His ambition, however, was to make feature films, and Özer went on to direct and produce four feature films, out of which most were Turkish co-productions.[13]

Also, Jordmannen was made with financial support from the Stockholm Film Workshop, which provided equipment, film stock and subsidies for a final print. The film was finished a year after Ulkomaalainen, which in many ways forms a parallel story to Jordmannen. Many of the tropes and themes are the same and both films are based on Özer’s own experiences. However, Jordmannen uses more of the strategy of fabulation than Ulkomaalainen, which is a quite typical accented film. In the latter the story of the immigrant is told in the first person, and we closely follow his life in confined and isolated spaces. Jordmannen is on the other hand a fusion of accented cinema and filmic fabulation, and it is also the film that has received the most positive reception when different immigrant films have been screened at various venues.

Jordmannen follows a strategy of fabulation in the way that the narrative blends different styles – documentary and fiction, colour with black-and-white stock, first- and third-person narration – and mixes devices from animation, such as dolls and toys, with plain live action, all within an episodic and serial structure. The film constructs no narrative space and does thus not adhere to any mainstream editing strategies. Whereas Ulkomaalainen is a first-person narrative in which Muammer plays the leading part as a Turkish immigrant – it is his story that we follow – in Jordmannen the narrative unfolds as a story with general claims. The protagonist is a small brown clay doll without personal characteristics. In this way, the clay figure functions as a metonym for the migrant, who is never personified, only typified. His surroundings, in contrast, consist of real environments and characters, and thus both the exclusion and subordination of the immigrant are emphasized.

Figure 10: Muammer Özer with the clay dolls for Jordmannen (The Earthman), 1980. Courtesy of Muammer Özer.

Jordmannen is introduced by a child dressed as the sun, who enters the frame playing a flute and addresses the viewers with the information that the story about the Earthman, a crofter from Anatolia, will be told. The first shot of the narrative shows a poor farmer in a village in Anatolia who is threshing with two oxen, sitting behind on the drag. The next shot shows the Earthman in a close-up from behind, after which follows scenes from the village while the voice-over tells us that the Earthman works for a cruel landowner and that the only way to get away from poverty and the landowner’s evilness is to escape to another country. After the introduction, the next shot shows the boy who continues his narrative, saying that the Earthman is waiting for an opportunity to leave, ‘and then one day’, a cut follows showing a letter falling from the sky. In the next shot we are shown the Earthman with the letter in his hands while a new voice-over, this time Synnöve Özer with her Finland-Swedish accent signalling otherness, which says that the employment agency of the Republic of Turkey has given the opportunity to the Earthman to travel to Germany. A cut is made to an image of a sign that says ‘Dr. Hans Müller’, which is the beginning of a surrealistic, comic and intimidating scene showing how the Earthman is undergoing a physical examination by a doctor.

Accordingly, the mode of the film is that of an allegory with a mixture of oral and audio-visual narrative, all according to the task of both finding and presenting a story for an audience that is in becoming – projected rather than represented, as it were. In this way, Jordmannen again raises the question of how prepared the Swedish audience and context were to receive the film and its narrative. In the feedback that Muammer Özer received from the Stockholm Film Workshop, one was critical of the blending of different modes, thus judging the film against established criteria of realism and genre. One criticized the employment of a ‘verbal narrative’, i.e. the use of the sun in the beginning as well as the letters, devices that are typical for exilic and diasporic narratives. Furthermore, it was pointed out that the use of the dolls was against the rules of realism, especially when this was not motivated by genre, i.e. not animated according to standard rules. The clay dolls were not walking, and hence did not move, and there was no explanation of why the Earthman was smaller than the real actors in the film. Another written comment from the workshop posed the question of how the Earthman actually ‘shrank’. It was also stated that the film was ‘too evident in its message’ and that it was doubtful who the actual ‘consumer group’ would be.[14]

The list of critical remarks constitutes a clear example of how the members of the steering group at the workshop were unable to understand the position of Özer and Jordmannen; that the exilic narrative told the story of someone who was in the process of becoming, of negotiating a place for himself, which implies that you strive for an aesthetics that tries to overcome a clear subject–object divide. Hence, the impossibility of applying established rules of realism or genre to such fabulatory narratives. We can also see how, in the case of Weiss and Paley, norm breaking was accepted (although the films as such were rather ignored) because their films were considered to be experimental or avant-garde works.

The Earthman is faithful to the allegoric mode and strategy of fabulation throughout the film, and after the examination by the German doctor, in which the Earthman is carefully measured and inspected, Özer intercuts images of rotating manual tools – a broom, a spade, a drilling machine, etc. – indicating what the Earthman is actually being examined for. The sequence ends with the Earthman receiving a stamp – one at first assumes of approval. However, the next cut takes us back to Anatolia and the Earthman reading a new letter. This time he is the sender, and he reads the letter to his friend in Sweden, Memo, saying that he did not pass the health test and asks if Memo could help him to come to Sweden. Memo’s reply is shown as a split-screen with Memo (played by Özer) to the left looking straight into the camera and the letter in Turkish to the right, while Özer is reading it aloud in accented Swedish, concluding that he will help the Earthman. From here the doll starts its journey, which is shown as a montage of images of the Earthman and footage in both colour and black and white, material that Özer originally shot during his previous travels away from Turkey.

As the Earthman finally arrives in Sweden the first shot shows him, small and vulnerable, on the slab, i.e. at Sergel’s square in downtown Stockholm. The montage that follows contrasts him with the modern, alienating cityscape of a wealthy western town. When the Earthman meets Memo it turns out that his friend has changed, and has become a successful businessman who only cares about money. The Earthman asks for money from his friend, who agrees on the condition that the Earthman borrows a sum on which he has to pay interest. The Earthman signs the loan agreement and goes to the immigration authorities, where he is once more humiliated and hit with stamps until the clay doll is flat enough to be inserted into an envelope and archived. Eventually, he is taken out of the archives (that are now covered in dust) and the stamping of the doll is shown in reverse. He has once more to go through the immigration authorities, but now he has to agree to a set of propositions, for example that he should always obey and not question what he is told to do, that the Swedish way is both the only and the best way to do things, and so forth. He is then finally removed from the power of the civil servants, brought into a factory and inserted into a machine with a rotating wheel. The next montage shows how he works, earns money, sleeps and eats, but lacks any emotional connection with his new surroundings, despite the abundance of consumer goods. The concrete slavish work of Anatolia is transformed into the abstract and standardized work of the western world. A way out of this treadmill takes place in a poetic montage in which the Earthman finds himself at a seashore and begins to dig a female figure in the shape of a clay doll out of the sand. Together they form a family, have children and alternate between the joy of family life and the monotonous work at the factory until they are hit by both a recession and the loss of money because of the failed business in Turkey.[15] The family is literally thrown away, out into the street where they are swept away by a street-cleaning machine and dumped. Abandoned as garbage, they get together as a family and in the last sequence are shown in silhouette against a descending sun while a voice-over of several people repeatedly shouts ‘What shall we do?’ The narrative is completed with a return to the sun, who poses the question: ‘What would you do in their situation?’ after which he goes on playing the flute.

Jordmannen was shown on SVT in October 1980, but without any further commentary in the press. The film received the Grand Prize at Kaleidoscope’s first immigrant film festival in 1982 and was mostly screened at venues that addressed questions of immigration and immigrant’s rights. It is interesting, however, to compare how the film was announced when being screened in different settings. When it was screened for the first time on television as a separate programme, Jordmannen was described as a ‘film that in dramatized form describes how it feels for an immigrant to arrive in Sweden’.[16] When the film was screened four years later as part of the programmes addressing the Finnish immigrants in Sweden, the description (in Finnish) characterized Jordmannen as a narrative about ‘the trajectory of a Turkish immigrant to Europe’s centres of migration and how he transforms into being a part of the industrial production’.[17] The description in Swedish both makes the story subjective and relates it to Sweden. Hence, it is the immigrant’s feelings in relation to the nation of Sweden that is foregrounded in the description. The presentation in Finnish, on the other hand, offers both an analysis and a wider picture that goes beyond the border of the nation state and its introspection. We are told that the immigrant’s trajectory is European and that the objective of the film is to show how and why the immigrant is integrated into Europe’s centres of migration. The condition that the receiving country considers the immigrant as primarily a production force and not a human being was later commented upon by Özer in his report on the ‘lost generation of immigrant filmmakers’, quoting the following saying that he once heard: ‘We [the Swedes] expected a workforce, but people came, such as workers, filmmakers, artists, authors, cultural workers’ (Özer 2001: 7).

Hägringen by Guillermo Álvarez (1981)

Whereas Jordmannen is arguably the most typical Swedish minor immigrant film, Hägringen is a prime example of a praxis of accented cinema. Where Özer establishes an allegorical space for his film, and thereby enables different narrative inventions and stylistic changes, Álvarez follows the rules of established narrative fiction. Establishing shots and shot/reverse-shots are the stylistic pillars of Hägringen, and he does not use free indirect discourse as Özer does. In Jordmannen, different points of view and enunciators alternate, and therefore the social is always embedded with the individual, while in Hägringen we are placed within one unitary narrative space.

Hägringen starts with a prologue and a close-up of a face. The face is Roberto’s, the main protagonist of the film, and whose story we will follow. The camera zooms out and it is revealed that he is sitting behind bars. As the zoom stops, the film’s credits appear. The first shot of the actual narrative is a point-of-view shot and we see how someone approaches a door on which there is a sign that announces that this is the social service centre of a local council in Stockholm. The door is opened and the camera steps in and continues towards the elevators. As the camera is approaching the door of the elevator, we see an elderly woman looking into the camera and opening the door; however, she ignores the person that the camera embodies. We see a hand grabbing the elevator door just before it is going to close, and the camera/person is able to sneak in quickly and catch up with the elevator. In the next cut we see a camera following a body of a man from behind – we can only see part of the upper body and the hands, but neither feet nor head. The body moves through a corridor into a room with a woman breastfeeding her child and finally the figure that we have followed sits down and we catch a glimpse of his profile. It is not until the next cut, as an old friend of the man arrives exclaiming ‘Roberto!’, that our protagonist is established as a subject. Thus, Álvarez uses the common devices of an established grammar of point of view and narrative space to signify that Roberto is ignored as a subject; his presence among Swedes is acknowledged through the gaze of others, but he is never present in the picture as such. It is not until a fellow Latin American is addressing him in Spanish that he is inserted into the proper narrative space of the film, a shot/reverse-shot structure in which he is interacting and talking to another person.

Roberto complains to his friend, who is also waiting for his turn at the social service office, that he must always come here and ask for help. His friend replies: ‘But why are you complaining? You will not find another place where you can make money so easily without working’. He tells Roberto that he has found a moonlighting job and that no one will kick him out of Sweden. When Roberto’s number is called, there is a cut to a long shot of downtown Stockholm and the slab. On the soundtrack there is dialogue in Spanish between Roberto and another friend, and they discuss various options for the friend’s future in Sweden. Roberto indicates the options with self-confidence: to find some other immigrant with good connections who is able to arrange a job, or get a Swedish girlfriend who also speaks Spanish. Since the camera is panning around the slab during the dialogue, the scene is interpreted as a flashback; however, towards the end of the scene it turns out that Roberto and his friend are on the slab as well, although their dialogue is never synchronized with their visual presence. Instead it is the Swedes, their voices and utterances in Swedish, who are synchronized audio-visually. The parallel to Weiss’s Studie 1 is obvious, and Roberto is displaced; his mind is not in coherence with his surroundings. But whereas Studie 1 divides sound and image without a clear hierarchy between subject and object, internal and external reality, in Hägringen it is obvious that what is being shown visually is the world that Roberto has to relate to. It is only when he speaks Spanish, or within those confined and claustrophobic spaces that mark the chronotope of accented cinema, that Roberto’s voice is synchronized with his surroundings. The chronotope of the claustrophobic spaces connects Hägringen with both Löftet and Myriam Braniff’s La espera, and we will discuss it further in relation to Menelaos Carayannis’s film that has an elaborate aesthetics built on the long-take and a mise-en-scène that is constructed around dark confined spaces.

Towards the end of the scene on the slab we see Roberto and his friend talking but their voices are not heard, and instead we hear the song of a woman who is singing in the square, and as she stops a Swede comes up to both and tries to sell them drugs. The end of the scene plants a hint of what will happen, and the Swedish pusher will be the reason why Roberto ends up in prison. The next sequence stresses again the linguistic and spatial displacement of Roberto. The camera zooms in on Roberto, who is in a phone booth and says in Spanish that he is on his way home. However, as he steps out it is full winter with heavy snow, and as Roberto disappears into the background of the image space the camera stays with him in the inhospitable landscape, although he is barely visible. The scene is significantly different from the time-space continuum of the preceding one and therefore stresses the significance of mise-en-scène, which according to Naficy is a typical trait of accented cinema as ‘mise-en-scène carries a heavier narrative burden than editing’ (2001: 154). The immigrants are always related to their surroundings and are hence always put in a social context.

Apparently, Roberto was talking to his girlfriend in the phone booth, and after the shot of the sinister landscape we move to the university and three young girls sitting in a cafeteria. It turns out that one of the girls is Roberto’s girlfriend, and together with her friends they complain about the burden of having an immigrant as a boyfriend: first they are lovely, then they become lazy, and moreover they sound childish when they speak Swedish because they don’t know the language well enough.

These first nine minutes of Hägringen introduce the style and theme of the narrative along with the deterritorialization of Roberto and his linguistic and spatial displacement. The narrative does not advance according to a serial structure as Jordmannen, and there is no use of free indirect discourse either, or of a voice-over. The film is carefully structured around key episodes, although the storyline digresses into flashbacks and subjective sequences. One of the key scenes in the film is when Roberto is at his friend Björn’s, a leftist intellectual who works at the university. They are together with two other Latin Americans in order to drink and eat. Björn has just received money from the Swedish International Development Organization (SIDA – the same agency that funded some of Sergio Castillas’ early political films) for travelling to Latin America, and Roberto and his friends discuss his intentions. They agree that their Swedish friend’s intentions are good, and that it is understandable that he would take the chance as SIDA pays well and tall blonde men have value on the continent. However, it is evident that the act of sending a Swede over to Latin America to build what should be their future is a harsh fact to face, and the more drunk they get the more they begin to remember the fights and revolutions that they were part of back home, and eventually they quarrel about their own intentions and possible guilt. Soon, Roberto has had enough and leaves the place. The scene emphasizes that Roberto and his friends have been stolen twice from their revolution and ideals – first in the home continent and then in Sweden. They have no future and nothing to build on in their present context.

The scene in the apartment contains two digressions, one exterior shot that stresses the alienating landscape, and yet another flashback. In the first cutaway we see tall, dark high-rises during fall or winter, submerged in grey light making it difficult to judge if it is noon or evening. The other digression is lengthy and shows how Roberto met his girlfriend, and how they go out and make love. This flashback is inserted when Roberto leaves for the bathroom, moving from the social space of the living room and his friends into the small and private confined space of the lavatory. The parallel to Weiss’s Studie 1 is obvious – it is in the cramped spaces that you are confronted with yourself.

Figure 11: Guillermo Álvarez/Cineco, Hägringen (The Mirage), 1981. 16 mm. Courtesy of Swedish Film Institute/Guillermo Álvarez.

After the lengthy flashback, Roberto returns from the bathroom and the scene in the apartment ends soon thereafter. Roberto, who has become very drunk, leaves suddenly and goes home (on his way he witnesses a gathering of the youth association of a party, ‘the party of new order’, which calls for law and order). In the sequences that follow we see how Roberto strives further, tries to get a job, drifts around in the subway and gets more and more depressed. The wandering of Nikos in Monos is replaced here with recurrent travels underground, on escalators and subway trains. As the scene in Björn’s apartment expressed, Roberto and his fellow Latin Americans are trapped in a double void. They not only lack a context in the present but do not even have a stable past, being unable to agree about what they have left and therefore incapable of influencing their future and what is taking place in their home continent.

Eventually, Roberto’s girlfriend is fed up with living with someone who neither has a future nor aspires to have one, and kicks him out. As Roberto drifts around he ends up in a suburb in the evening and runs into the drug dealer from the slab and they end up in a fight. The pusher has a knife, which he loses as he attacks Roberto, who picks it up and accidentally stabs the attacker. In the last shot the camera tracks out from the scene and drifts away.

Hägringen was a very ambitious project. It was completely self-funded by Cineco, but in addition Álvarez managed to bring in a professional photographer from Italy, Sandro Carriello. Carriello was a friend of one of the production assistants, Gianni Albergo. Albergo, like all the others behind the film, had no real film education but was a cineaste and enthusiast who would later work themselves into the trade. The one who played the leading part of Roberto, Pepe (José Luis Alonso) Roman, was not Latin American but Spanish. Álvarez had run into him when going to screenings at the Cinematheque in Stockholm.

Álvarez and Cineco never succeeded in having Hägringen screened for a larger public. The film was shown at the short film festival in Uppsala, but when Álvarez tried to sell it to SVT he received the comment that the film depicted immigrants in a far too negative manner. The previous film they had made, Underjordiskt sällskap, had been a false promise, as it were. The documentary of the Stockholm subway had received subsidies for a final print from the Stockholm Film Workshop and was therefore included in their catalogue. Underjordiskt sällskap even won a prize at Kaleidoscope’s first immigrant film festival in 1982. Hägringen had the qualifications for being a film to be screened and the style was quite conventional; however, it was controversial in terms of content, and it aspired to more. The film was also not subtitled and the key scene at Björn’s place was in Spanish only. But taking into account how feature films such as Consuelo and Splittring had been received, it is hardly surprising that Hägringen could not make it into the established public sphere. It was not experimental in its style and was closer to Vill du följa med mig Martha? than Jordmannen, although much more refined in its cinematic aesthetics than the former. Neither does Hägringen really fit into the stylistic paradigm of accented cinema, although it is thematically one of the best examples of accented Latin American cinema in Sweden. However, in comparison with the narrative of Vill du följa med mig Martha? Cineco’s film was distressing, a sinister version of a narrative in search of an audience. The negative – or absent – reception was a clear indication that there was no audience among the established public sphere. Thus, it was hardly surprising that Álvarez moved to Colombia for good in 1984. He took the unique print with him and the negative would get lost in Stockholm when the lab that had stored it went through different changes in ownership and moves, finally closing down in 2011.

Havet är långt borta by Reza Bagher (1983)

Like Hägringen, Havet är långt borta is built on the established grammar of filmmaking. The film was written and directed by Reza Bagher, born in Iran, who arrived in Sweden in 1976, aiming to become an engineer (Andersson and Sundholm 2014: 144–45). He then turned to film studies in Stockholm, both at the university and the University College of Film, Radio, Television, and Theatre, and started to make short films at the Stockholm Film Workshop, inspired by, among others, Bo Widerberg, whose Kvarteret Korpen (Raven’s End) (1963) meant a lot to the young Bagher: ‘A guy from Malmö in 1963 had made a film that was all about me […] To touch others emotionally and move them in the same way I had been by Kvarteret Korpen was something I wanted to do’ (Zabeti 2005). Havet är långt borta was shot in 1983, and he then continued with the short format at the workshop, often making a kind of filmic short story, depicting problems of communication and understanding. His film for children, Gorbatjov (1992), won great acclaim, and he would later be acknowledged as a part of the so-called film boom with Vingar av glas (2000). Havet är långt borta was hardly recognized at all, but it was shown during Kaleidoscope’s second immigrant film festival in 1984.

Havet är långt borta is set in Gamla Stan (Old Town) in Stockholm, the historical city centre, close to the royal castle, an environment that was in fact very popular among Swedish experimental filmmakers during the 1950s. Several of the films by the Independent Film Group were shot here, including those by Peter Weiss. The avant-garde filmmakers in Stockholm often used Old Town in an ironic mode, as an old background for a new drama. Bagher’s use of the locality is subtler. He plays down the symbolic power of the city centre by reducing it to an exterior, an excuse for getting in to the subject. The film opens with an establishing shot, showing a man in a telephone booth close to the walls of the Stockholm Cathedral (Storkyrkan), and a girl waiting for her turn outside. The rain is pouring down and the soundtrack is filled with the sound of water. Some of the shots are taken from inside the booth, with the talking man in dark silhouette and the water making it hard to see through the glass of the booth. We hear only fragments of what the man says: ‘couldn’t we talk for once […] what is it that I don’t understand? […] you never have time […] there is something I have to tell you […] wait, I can’t hear you […] you have to listen […]’. The conversation ends and he leaves the telephone booth while the girl outside takes his place, swearing about him. The telephone booth in itself is a common mise-en-scène detail in films, often used as a device to explain chains of communication, but also for other means of communications than the telephone connection; people meet by the booth, or inside it; they leave letters to each other in it; they correspond with graffiti, and often the telephone booth signals both isolation and contact. In Havet är långt borta, the booth is among other things the arena for the theme of the impossibility of communicating.

In order not to be soaked by the rain, the man – who is dressed in a bright yellow shirt and a blue jacket, the colours of the Swedish flag – finds his way into a cafe, where he sits at a table where a young woman is eating. Beside the table there is an aquarium. In the cafe it becomes obvious for the spectator that the sound is not synchronized with the shots. The noise in the room becomes a blurry acoustic background for the dialogue, clearly recorded in a studio.[18] Some of the lines are hard to define diegetically. The voice of the man complains over the bad weather, but it is unclear if it is a thought or an actual line that can be heard by the woman at his table.

The man offers the woman a cigarette but she declines, and a waitress tells him that smoking is forbidden in the area; he excuses himself, says that he did not know. He has so far been depicted as transgressing smaller cultural codes (talking for too long on the payphone, smoking in a non-smoking area), and the woman at his table makes slightly awkward faces and exchanges glances with one of the waitresses. Then the man looks at the aquarium and comments on the fishes: ‘How alike they are’. The woman looks at the aquarium. Through points of view, outlined by a shot/reverse-shot, it is clear for the viewer that the man sees two fishes swimming together, while the woman sees only one, which is mirrored in the glass. The non-diegetic music, which started in the exterior scene, is a piano work by Ethelbert Nevin, Opus 13, called ‘Water Scenes’. And there is plenty of water outside the cafe, as there is also inside the aquarium. The aquarium, like the telephone booth, has windows of glass, separating the worlds from each other. The man taps at the glass and comments: ‘Always together […] shares the food […] loyal to each other […]’. The young woman looks at him and looks at the fish and he asks her if she has something to say, but she denies it: ‘no […]’. A moment has passed, a possible opening is closed.

He continues, after looking at a young couple at the cafe kissing each other: ‘We humans should live together, as simple and natural as those fishes […] they have grown to look more and more like each other after years of agreement […]’. The woman laughs at him and he speaks loudly: ‘You do not understand!’ The dictum of non-communication from the telephone booth is thus repeated. All of a sudden they are both quiet, exchanging awkward looks, as if they are both embarrassed. The other customers at the cafe look at them. The woman then rises and leaves the premises. When she leaves one of the waitresses embraces her and they look at each other, as if there was a story to be told about her, and a reminder of her position in relation to the man – she belongs to the cafe, he does not. She is inside, he is outside, tapping on the glass to get in, even when she physically leaves the room and he is left inside. Through the scene the man is defined as an outsider, trying to get in with the help of the young woman. He fails, in a way like the protagonists of several of our sample films, for example Roberto in Hägringen. Both the view of the woman and the sound accompanying her can be understood as free indirect discourse in Pasolini’s sense; the shot/reverse-shot montage of the short sequence is not following the optical point of view of the man, and at the same time the soundtrack gives us the sound of the footsteps of the woman underlined by the filmmaker, but possibly not heard by the others in the diegetic universe, sounding very clear in spite of the surrounding noise. It is not a diegetic sound, it is the perspective of the filmmaker that is explored here, causing a fusion of author and protagonist, like in Studie 1. The man looks at one of the fishes and its image – it is mirrored in the glass – and all the noise from the cafe disappears. He looks at his hands and removes a ring from a finger and moves it to the other hand, changing his married or engaged status. The male voice reflects upon the sea, how it is framed into an aquarium, and then ponders on the conditions of love: ‘If you are not two, then you are half […]’.

Then a new person, this time a young girl, sits down at the table. The man does not notice her at first. When she sits down the romantic music on the soundtrack starts again. He shows her the fishes, and even sits by her side to do so. She repeatedly says, ‘it is only one fish in front of a mirror!’ and laughs at him. He suddenly looks sad and walks out. A bell chimes while the girl looks after him, the camera moving closer to her face, now with a sad or wondering expression. When she looks at the aquarium again there are two fishes, one red and one black, and the film ends with the piano music.

At the Stockholm Film Workshop Bagher’s mentor was – as for many others – Jan Bark, whose pedagogy was built on a combination of respect for artistic integrity and continuous questioning and criticism.[19] Here Bagher could collaborate with a lot of other young filmmakers, like Santiago Pinto, Myriam Braniff and César Galindo. Havet är långt borta was photographed by Menelaos Carayannis, whom he met at the workshop. This kind of networking was common among the workshop filmmakers (Andersson and Sundholm 2014: 145). Bagher has described how the lead actor was a friend of his, the psychologist Robert Engström, and has underlined the importance of Carayannis during the process, since he knew how to handle the camera while all the others were amateurs. The extras were tired of the work and wanted to go home; the sound did not work, and there was no chance for the director to check the quality of the takes.[20] The film itself is marked by these problems, notably when it comes to the sound, hence reflecting the process of an artist-in-becoming.

Havet är långt borta thus deals in an explicit way with problems of understanding and communication; the dialogue consists mainly of utterances concerning understanding, and the male protagonist has problems with someone – most likely a woman – who does not understand him, and whom he himself cannot understand, underscored by the fact that he transgresses cultural codes that he does not understand and tries to communicate with the woman and girl at the cafe, but fails. The binary opposition inside/outside can be applied to the actual situation of the man, as well as to the more symbolic register with the fish – or fishes – of the aquarium in focus. The fishes are two but function as one; or it is one fish mirrored. The doubling continues outside the aquarium where the man speaks to a woman who then is succeeded by another person, a young girl. Repetition and doubling dominate this world where the man can see other couples kiss each other and unite, while he himself seems to be only one half. Like Studie 1, this is a film made by a becoming artist learning his devices, and it is also a film dealing with a language that does not work; sound and image are not synchronized, and neither are the travelogues of the individuals in the scenes – they walk in different directions and are halves restlessly seeking the other half. And yet again, we have the male immigrant trope of the promise that a Swedish woman would provide a context in a world out of joint.

In an interview given much later, Bagher makes fun of himself as a young man: ‘I had Sartre and Camus as idols when I made those films. They were so heavy that no one understood them, not even I’ (Anon. 2004). The theme of understanding and misunderstanding could be seen as typical for accented cinema in Naficy’s sense, but Havet är långt borta tends to obstruct such a reading. All the dialogue is put in very correct Swedish, typical for the idiom of the public service media of the time, which results in a collision between the accented visuality (mirrors, shadows, darkness) and the non-accented spoken language. The theme of misunderstanding and linguistic mismatch is transposed to an almost existential view, with the man in the film as an everyman seeking contact in a world where feelings are laughed at and no one responds to real questions.[21] Through this theme, the film adheres to the cluster of immigrant films studied here, dealing with the outsider position through a harsh self-reflexivity and a discourse on the problems of communication.

Löftet by Menelaos Carayannis (1984)

Menelaos Carayannis was a young student who, like several of his compatriots, had good reasons to leave Greece. But, he was not a refugee in the strict sense, as love and serendipity sent him to Sweden. As a young man he went to Paris to study film and photography and met a Swedish woman. Together they went for a holiday in Sweden in 1978, and due to several circumstances, for example that he wanted to avoid being drafted into Greek military service, he stayed for several years and did not return to Greece for good until 1995. The driving force during his Swedish years was, in retrospect, his love for film.[22] He soon found his way to the Stockholm Film Workshop and made the short film En gammal melodi (An Old Tune) in 1981. En gammal melodi is a story about an elderly wheelchair-bound Greek man, a veteran of the Resistance, living in Sweden as a political refugee. He lives alone in the suburbs in a tiny flat. His only regular contact with the surrounding society takes place through home-care services. The film was inspired by the experiences Carayannis himself had in working within social home care. He then undertook some smaller projects and helped other filmmakers, but his most important work was Löftet, finished in 1983. After that, among other things, he completed a film produced by Järva Kulturkommitté, Mörkrets ljusa sida (The Bright Side of Darkness) (1986), a documentary about teenagers at a youth centre on the outskirts of Stockholm, made in the vein of Babis Tsokas and the Tensta Film Association.

Löftet was screened on television and at several smaller festivals, and in 1984 at the Göteborg International Film Festival.[23] At the international immigrant film festival arranged by Kaleidoscope in Stockholm 1984, the film was awarded for both best fiction film, due to its ‘well-thought-out realization both in directing and acting’, and best photography (Özer and Kulvik 1986). The latter was given to Pedro Ramirez from Chile.

Löftet, like En gammal melodi, deals with the immigrant’s deterritorialization. The film is mainly composed of long takes so that the characters appear to be caught in their surroundings. Löftet tells the story of a Greek family man who works as a cleaner and who, as respite, is part of a theatre group run by the local Greek Association. He works hard and sends most of the money he earns back to Greece. In Greece a house is being built with the money he is sending over that is supposed to become his and his parents’ future home. When his father dies he wants to return, but his wife wants to stay in Sweden. Eventually, his mother arrives and he finds out that the house in Greece is far from finished. Soon, his wife becomes unemployed and he is forced to take on more work as a cleaner. He neglects his theatre rehearsals and is fired from the production of the play. One evening, at one of his numerous cleaning jobs, he falls down a spiral staircase and is seriously injured. The final shot of the film shows how the family leave Sweden, but now with a family man who is helpless, bound to a wheelchair. At home in Greece, a half-finished house awaits.

Carayannis was writing his bachelor thesis in film studies at Stockholm University on the films of Theo Angelopoulos at the time. He wanted to create the same kind of slow pace in his own films, something that was criticized by his friends, and which he had to discuss with Jan Bark on several occasions. The film was shot mainly at the premises of Konstfack, i.e. University College of Art, Craft, and Design in Stockholm, and in an apartment in Rinkeby, a suburb of Stockholm. Several of the actors were friends of Carayannis, or were members of a then very active Greek amateur theatre club called Thiassos.

The film has a circular construction – the first scene is at an airport in Stockholm where a group of exiled Greeks demonstrate against the Greek prime minister, and the last scene depicts the little Greek family who arrives at the same airport in order to go to Greece with the male protagonist, Panagioti, in a wheelchair. The space in-between is the land of exile, Sweden, which is seen as a place of darkness, long shadows, snow and cold. The circle returns in panning shots through the film and visually in a spiral staircase that has fatal consequences for the protagonist. Panagioti and his family are introduced in a long panning shot of a bleak suburb with factories and warehouses. With melancholic chamber music on the soundtrack, Panagioti walks to meet his wife after she has finished work, and to start his work as a night cleaner. This illustrates the fact that their lives are conditioned by their work circumstances; they have to work so much that they never really see each other. The problem of communication, which is recurrent in many of the films studied here, is here a consequence of material conditions.

Panagioti holds his little son by the hand and we see them at distance, walking in the dusk, in fact in a wide semicircle around the camera, which then follows them in a tableau shot where they disappear, walking away from us. The dialogue is sparse. (They talk in Greek, which is subtitled with Swedish. The few Swedish lines in the film are not subtitled, which makes it clear that the film is made for Swedish screenings.) Panagioti tells his wife that he has spoken with his mother at home in Greece, and that his father is ill and in need of hospital care, but does not want to come to Sweden. Panagioti has therefore sent them more money. His wife concludes that, ‘It is awful with diseases. They can change your whole life’, and when they have to go their separate ways she says to her husband, ‘Take care of your back!’ Her words are ominous, since the film will end with Panagioti hurting his back and being disabled.

The darkness and cold in the exterior shot have a parallel in the next shot from the office where Panagioti works as a cleaner at night. The camera registers him walking through a dark corridor, emptying waste. The shot has a tableau construction, with the camera tracking or zooming out very slowly while Panagioti is walking towards the camera, almost in a central perspective, opening doors and walking into the rooms to fetch garbage, which he empties into a sack that grows heavier and heavier. He drags the sack behind him while he comes closer, finally walking to the stairs to the left of the image where he ascends. Contrary to the outdoor sequence there is no extra-diegetic music, just the noise of Panagioti walking, and the echoes of him and the doors he has to open. The light is sparse and comes mainly from behind him, and long shadows seem to entangle him. The shot seems long, but it is not even two minutes. The mise-en-scène recalls Kafkaesque and expressionist settings from film history; the imagery corresponds with Naficy’s observation on the preferred chronotopes in exile filmmaking:

The rendition of life in exile […] is manifested in the dystopian and dysphoric imagining of the contemporary times. This is expressed chiefly in the closed chronotopes of imprisonment and panic […] The spatial aspects of the closed form in the mise-en-scène consist of interior locations and closed settings, such as prisons and tight living quarters, a dark lighting scheme that creates a mood of constriction and claustrophobia, and characters who are restricted in their movements and perspectives by spatial, bodily, or other barriers. Tight shot composition, static framing, and barriers within the mise-en-scène and in the shots’ foreground suggest closedness.

(2001: 152–53)

The montage in a way also illustrates the important rhythm of the life of Panagiotis where he sees his wife and kid, works, and then has moments together with his friends in the amateur theatre group. The circular composition of the film and the recurrent tropes illustrating the cyclic and restricted life of the protagonist cohere.

The Stockholm that Carayannis constructs has no resemblances with the Stockholm of Bagher in Havet är långt borta. While Bagher moves in the city centre in order to find a safe place for a drama concerned with the question of communication, Carayannis is on the outskirts, in the suburbs, creating a more fragmented geography, maybe in line with the accented visuality of shots and angles. Bagher and Carayannis are not in the same town.

The scene where the theatre group is introduced comes after the description of Panagioti’s workplace, which makes us assume that he goes directly from work to the theatre rehearsals, something that in fact tends to be his problem since he is often late for the rehearsals. The room is tight around him, and so is the time.

The rehearsal is an example of the humour that is a trait of Carayannis. The actors are not well prepared, some of them overact, some, like Panagioti, forget their lines and the director bursts out in rage over their incompetence. The actors are actual members of the amateur theatre group Thiassos, led by another exiled Greek, Petros Panamas (who plays the main character in En gammal melodi). Their rivalry and problems of collaboration echo the real micro social conflicts within the migrant community and the fiction turns into a document. The play they are rehearsing is the political satire Our Great Circus by Iakovos Kambanellis, originally written in 1973 as a commentary on the military coup. The play in the play is one of many intertextual ties with Theo Angelopoulos whose feature film O thiasos (The Travelling Players) (1975) recounts the modern history of Greece during and after the war with a group of provincial theatre players as the prime narrative movers. Another point of contact is the aforementioned editing style with long takes and a slow pace. The cinephile Carayannis has also put in other, more general film allusions, like the spiral staircase that causes the accident that will be fatal for Panagioti, as well as the silhouettes of the theatre group rehearsing, seen through a window that Panagioti passes. (The silhouettes allude not only to the theatre group per se, but also to the projection technique that is the sine qua non for film art.) Löftet has further self-reflective levels: at one point Panagioti comes home with a brand new VHS player. His wife sighs, complaining that they do not have the time to watch television, and he argues that the technology allows them to manage their time better by recording the programmes they want to see. The recorder and the TV set then stand unused for the rest of the film as elements of the furniture that heaps around Panagioti and limits his world instead of widening it.

The title of the film, Löftet, can be interpreted in an ironic way. ‘The promise’ in the film is the promise Panagioti has made to return to Greece, as well as all the other promises he has been forced to give to employers, family members and friends – promises that he is forced to break by conditions he cannot govern. At the same time, the Swedish noun Löftet can be understood as something more utopian, the promised land. Is the promised land the land of the long-awaited return, or the new homeland? This ambiguity guides Carayannis’s narrative, which, of course, through the accented cinema and its devices, creates a dark image of Sweden, but also makes the viewer understand that the old homeland has its drawbacks too. An interesting depiction of Sweden is the picnic sequence, which is one of the few scenes where the daylight shines. The family and some friends have a picnic together on the shores of a lake. The setting is peaceful and harmonic, but it soon becomes clear that the house in Greece is far from finished, and Panagioti quarrels with both his mother and his wife. A group of friends, or at least other Greek immigrants, sing folk songs together, and the open space becomes charged with all the conflicts that run through the narrative: between generations, between the two countries, between old and new and between past and future. The clash between generations and cultures is illustrated in an earlier scene. Panagioti, who takes on more jobs, works as a waiter at a Greek restaurant. Traditional Greek folk music is played on bouzouki and a young man starts to dance on the empty floor, accompanied by another man, singing. Panagioti passes him and drops some dishes, and the man can continue his dance according to the tradition, stepping over the broken dishes. Then modern dance music fills the room and a lot of people get up to dance, and so Panagioti has to sweep away the physical remnants of the old dance culture.

La espera by Myriam Braniff (1989)

Myriam Braniff was yet another of several Latin American exiled filmmakers in Sweden, working with diverse means and from diverse perspectives. Most of these filmmakers were men, but Braniff is one of the female examples. Braniff is also exceptional, in the sense that she is not an overt example of accented or political cinema. Her style and position were closer to the auteur aspects than the strands of accented cinema.

Braniff was born in Pueblo Hundido, Chile, and went to Sweden in 1977 as a teenager following her father, a political refugee who had left Chile soon after the coup. She later received two years of training in a media programme at Biskops-Arnö Public High School, which at that time took care of many young film students. Braniff was involved in several minor film productions before starting at Biskops-Arnö. She assisted Luis R. Vera (they were married for a while) in Hechos Consumados/Fullbordat faktum (An Accomplished Fact) (1986) as well as the aforementioned Consuelo. She made several applications to the Stockholm Film Workshop, for example a film about ‘La generación de afuera’, the exiled Chileans in Sweden, a project that was not approved. Some years later in 1989 she tried again with a project called ‘Att återvända till fosterlandet’ (‘Returning to the native country’), which was never made. However, the same year she managed to acquire funding for the short film La espera. It is an adaptation of a short story by the Chilean author Guillermo Blanco. The film was shot at Biskops-Arnö in the countryside north of Stockholm. It premiered on 17 November 1989 at Filmens dag (‘Day of Cinema’) in Stockholm, a very important venue for all kinds of minor cinema at that time. It was awarded a prize for new filmmakers in 1989 at a festival for short films in Uppsala, Sweden, and was later screened at SVT with good reviews. Her suggestive imagery and ability to create atmosphere were recognized in the comments and reviews.

The film, shot in Spanish with Swedish subtitles, depicts a woman living in both desire and terror, simultaneously fearing and waiting for a rapist’s revenge. The first shot depicts how a man, maybe a vagabond or a farmhand, rapes a young woman. The black-and-white film stock, the low-key lighting and the non-diegetic music – a repetitive and melancholic guitar ballad – underscore a fundamental ambiguity in the situation. This leads to a short insert, a close-up of a woman sleeping in a bed, but moving restlessly, as if dreaming. The two shots are fused together by the music, and it is not obvious that they function in separate diegetic registers. After a credit sequence follows a long shot, functioning as a traditional establishing shot, showing a rural landscape where a man comes, leading a horse. In the following shots and in the dialogue, it is clear that he is the landowner, who suddenly discovers the couple lying on the ground, maybe close to a shed. He recognizes the rapist and threatens to shoot him. The rapist answers that even the landowner has a young wife he should care for.

The next scene takes place during night in the bedroom of the landowner and his young wife. He talks about the victim of the rape, and his wife then hears the voice of the rapist when he promises to come back, maybe in her imagination. In some close-ups that can be understood as the dream of the woman, she meets the rapist and kisses him, and re-enacts the rape as if it were her own memory. She clutches her breasts with her hands in a way similar to the rapist. The only source of light is the full moon, which on several occasions is shown in a shot with an ambiguous status; it is not necessarily a shot depicting the object of someone’s actual gaze. It can also be interpreted as an element in free indirect discourse, where the filmmaker or the authorial source of the film blends with the vision of the protagonists.

In a following daylight scene, the rapist, now tied up by the landowner, waits to be delivered to the law. The landowner’s wife cleans a wound from when the landowner shot him. The captive begs her to help him so he will not be extradited. At the same time he threatens her. His promise is blended with point-of-view shots from when he was captured; the memory of the woman who was actually raped thus blends with the imagination of the woman who has not been attacked. The wife asks her husband to let the captive go, but he responds by asking what will happen to all the women who are in danger. The night comes and the woman, in bed beside her husband, once again imagines or dreams about the rapist, this time in even more explicit terms. In this dream he not only grabs her breasts but rips open her blouse so her breasts are exposed in the light, which seems to be the same moonlight that shines over the bed where the woman and her husband sleep. At this moment she wakes up as she hears a noise; her husband looks out of the window and says that he sees the rapist. He gives his wife a revolver and goes out to capture the rapist once again. Then, there is a long wait, with a close-up of the woman’s face, and outside suddenly the sound of a gun. The door opens and the rapist returns, smiling. Her willed dream has been transformed into a violent fact. Fade to black.

Figure 12: Myriam Braniff, La espera (The Waiting), 1989. 16 mm. Courtesy of Felipe Braniff.

The ambiguity of the landowner’s wife is underscored by the stylistic devices, including an unstable narration where the point of enunciation is blurred or hidden. Her dreams and point-of-view shots are blended with the images of the woman who was actually manhandled. As Darcie Doll Castillo put it (one of the few who has commented on the film in depth), Braniff subverts the perspectives of the literary source, letting the sexual imagination of the woman turn into a crucial point of narration (Doll Castillo 2000). Through these devices, the film points towards female sexuality without guilt. Some of the vital scenes are shot indoors, most notably those that depict the wait of the woman and the violent ending of the film. Naficy claims that ‘inside, enclosed spaces’ are predominantly coded as feminine and concludes that all ‘accented films, regardless of the gender of their directors are protagonists, are feminine texts’ (Naficy 2001: 154). Braniff plays with the dialectics of open and closed spaces in a way that fits with Naficy’s patterns for accented cinema, even though her overall concerns point in another direction.

The men around the female protagonist are hard, using violence and talking a language of violence, both claiming their owner’s right to the woman’s body. In the diegetic world of the narrative she is helpless, and cannot intervene in the actions, but in her dreams she seeks images of desire, transcending the actual world. The black-and-white cinematography, the bleak depictions of the countryside, the shadows, as well as the associative editing all turn the setting into a dream that also encloses the viewer. The spectator’s point of view merges with that of the protagonist. Braniff opens this suture at the end of the film when the rapist returns and stands face to face with the woman.

Braniff’s work does not depict the exile situation as such (migration is a subject she planned to tackle, but she never finished her documentaries about the Chilean refugees, and it is never highlighted in her completed works, e.g. La espera). Braniff is more of an example of what Pick labels ‘the subjective paradox of exile’ (1987b: 56). Braniff’s films, while forgetting and remembering the facts of exile at the same time, are examples of an ongoing renegotiation of subjectivities related to the objectivity of the factual exile and its biographical, political, geographical and thus mobile conditions. Hence, the ambivalent desire of the female protagonist in La espera may be interpreted as an expression of that interstitial space into which the exilic and diasporic subject has been placed. However, it is also important to consider Braniff’s work as an expression of a single authorial voice – a woman trying to find a language that matches her own situation and desires. The position Braniff had to adopt in Sweden – in particular as a female filmmaker in a cohort of male Latin American filmmakers – required the constant redefinition and renegotiation of her place and practice.

The renegotiation of place creates a hybrid of Swedish and Chilean countryside; the ‘hacienda’ of the Blanco story is converted to a traditional Swedish farm. This is a stylistic device, conditioned by the premises of the production, and at the same time an example of how the migration constructs new geographies, new areas transgressing national and cultural borders. This fabulation allows a setting where a battle between the sexes can be executed, or rather a research into the nature of sex.

Myriam Braniff has been acknowledged as advocating better conditions for female filmmakers through being active in the Svenska kvinnors filmförbund (Swedish Women’s Film Association), and she intertwined this political quest with an aesthetic search for complexity and a place for the female subject beyond conventions and stereotypes. In a polemical article co-written with Charlotte Larsson, Braniff made the claim that Swedish female filmmakers were constantly made invisible, a question that she would return to time and again. La espera documents this struggle. It is by a filmmaker who, in contrast to Weiss or Bagher, had already mastered a cinematic language and was on her way into major film and television production. She used this language and her artistic devices to express a complex of desire, violence and femininity, something that was to be a recurrent set of motifs in her career, mostly in television. External circumstances did, however, shorten her trajectory. She committed suicide in 1997, and was at that point acknowledged as an important filmmaker of her generation.

Fem minuter för Amerikas döda/Pichqa minutukuna ilaqtanchispi wanuqkunamanta by César Galindo (1992)

The last film in our series is César Galindo’s Fem minuter för Amerikas döda/Pichqa minutukuna ilaqtanchispi wanuqkunamanta (Five Minutes for the Souls of America), shot in 16 mm in Galindo’s homeland Peru. In order to make the film, Galindo received subsidies from the Swedish Arts Grants Committee and the Stockholm Film Workshop, as well as from the two Swedish missionary organizations Svenska Kyrkans Mission and Lutherhjälpen.

Galindo arrived in Sweden in 1987 from France at a time when the wave of Latin American immigration was in decline. Sergio Castilla had already left Sweden in the late 1970s, Álvarez in 1984 and Claudio Sapiaín, who was arguably the most established among the Latin American immigrant filmmakers in Sweden, left the following year for Chile. Galindo did not arrive in Sweden as a filmmaker, although it was his ambition; he was a trained architect from Peru who came to France in the 1970s to take a Ph.D. in architecture. Besides his doctoral studies he attended courses in film at the radical University of Paris VIII, which was founded as a result of the political events in 1968. According to Galindo, classes were big and chaotic but inspiring, and the hundreds of students had to share one film camera and one editing table.

During his time in Paris, Galindo became a skilled sound technician, buying his own equipment, and collaborated on the production of several filmed interviews with Latin American authors and intellectuals. It was through these productions that he met Joseph Losey, who invited Galindo to take part in the production of Losey’s La truite (The Trout) (1982). Although Galindo’s role was miniscule and he left the production after one month, the internship-like assignment turned into Galindo’s real film school.

When his Swedish wife wanted to return to Sweden, Galindo followed and brought with him his first work, the documentary Un Día la Arena (A Day in the Desert) (1987). With the help of the Swedish Development Agency he managed to finish the film, which is about poor people who have migrated to the outskirts of Lima to a desert-like landscape. In Sweden, Galindo started off taking jobs related to his profession as an architect, but was only able to get minor temporary positions, and therefore decided to commit himself fully to film. Un Día la Arena proved to be an important merit and the film opened the doors for Galindo to independent filmmaking. In 1989 he finished an hour-long documentary for SVT, För gulds skull (For the Sake of Gold), which is about different people who have arrived in Peruvian Amazonas in pursuit of gold and a better life. The same year he approached the Stockholm Film Workshop with a project called Casa Matusita, an allegory on Latin America. The response was positive and he shot the film in Lima, and Casa Matusita turned out to be yet another intriguing film on Latin American colonial history, concerning suffering, violence, lack of democracy and the suppression of the Indians. It thus has similarities with Castilla’s La historia, and reflects what Pick recognizes as a fundamental designation of Latin American diasporic filmmaking in which ‘the continent is recognized as a battlefield of nations, cultures and ideologies and its collective consciousness is identified in the historical resistance to violence and oppression’ (1987b: 45).

This theme would be picked up yet again by Galindo in Fem minuter för Amerikas döda/Pichqa minutukuna ilaqtanchispi wanuqkunamanta, albeit now with a stylistic minimalism and rigour. When he approached the Stockholm Film Workshop he wrote that he wanted to tell another story from the point of view of a Latin American indigenous Indian, in contrast to those immense investments in the celebration of the Europeans’ so-called ‘discovery’ of America. However, he had not succeeded in receiving any funding and thus had come to the conclusion that the right way to protest would be with a production that had the same proportions as the actual financial and technological power position of the Indians. It would be a short film, made on a small budget and shot in an extremely short time, as a summary of the Indian’s way of celebrating those five hundred years that had passed. In fact, the film was shot during one day in one single take.

Fem minuter för Amerikas döda/Pichqa minutukuna ilaqtanchispi wanuqkunamanta is an intense film that lasts for five minutes, as the title indicates, and is in both Quechuan and Spanish. It starts with a voice-over, saying in Quechuan while the screen is black:

Death came over the seas

It came with the ships

On horse

With the lance and the cross

Came the looting and the genocide

Death

They call it discovery

Or encounter

For us it is the same

Death

In the valley between the mountains rests

Silence after our dead

For us it is a day of mourning.

After the voice-over, music and singing starts, followed by a cut that shows four Indians, a woman singing (the well-known Peruvian singer Nelly Munguia) accompanied by three musicians. These are shown in a full shot, after which a tracking camera starts its movement across the scene.

Figure 13: César Galindo, Fem minuter för Amerikas döda/Pichqa minutukuna ilaqtanchispi wanuqkunamanta (Five Minutes for the Souls of America), 1992. 16 mm. Courtesy of César Galindo.

Fem minuter för Amerikas döda/Pichqa minutukuna ilaqtanchispi wanuqkunamanta is composed of just one single shot taken from a crane. The camera moves slowly backwards from the initial full shot, and as it starts its trajectory a cemetery filled with crosses and smoke is revealed. When the camera continues its movement away from the initial scene, backwards and upwards, the music and singing die down and the sound of a horse appears and increases, while a large cross with a crucified Jesus appears with a conquistador riding in the formation of an eternal eight around it. Instead of wearing traditional armour, the conquistador is dressed as an American football player. Now the sound of the horse diminishes and we begin to hear a female voice repeating in Spanish: ‘On the occasion of the five hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America, the discovery of America, Spain invites the world to join in the celebration’. The camera continues to pull back and pans down, revealing that the sound comes from a TV set that is mounted on a large tomb. Also on top of the tomb is a large white package, a corpse. Finally, the camera rises, the music increases and the TV set is left off-screen, but the corpse remains within the frame, visible. Here the camera stops its movement, giving an overview of the desolate and tragic landscape whose layers have been revealed during the five-minute camera movement. The music and singing that started the film resume.

In Fem minuter för Amerikas döda/Pichqa minutukuna ilaqtanchispi wanuqkunamanta, the slow trajectory of the camera and the different auditory layers create a narrative in which the shot that sets the film and the camera in motion shows the current situation of an exploited and mutilated land, and as the camera moves it slowly reveals the full picture, as it were; the causes and the actors behind the current situation. The tracking shot is a most typical fabulation, condensing a complex and conflict-ridden history into one processual image that is being stretched in time and space, denying that the history could be told according to the rules of mainstream narrative in which there is a clear demarcation between subject and object, and thus incorporating the various layers of history and the different imperialists’ agents into one and the same narrative space.

Galindo’s Fem minuter för Amerikas döda/Pichqa minutukuna ilaqtanchispi wanuqkunamanta was shot at the cemetery of Villa María del Triunfo, a poor neighbourhood in Lima, which is the home of many immigrants from other parts of Peru. While in the country Galindo also shot another film, Cholo Soy (I Am an Indian) (1992). The film is partly a music video of the Peruvian Indian Luis Abanto Morales’s popular but at the time highly controversial and forbidden song with the same name. Cholo Soy confronts not only western colonialism but also the hierarchies of the various ethnic groups in Peru by affirming the identity of the oppressed Indians. The song’s dramatic intro, ‘I am an Indian/ do not feel sorry for me’, presents a singing Morales, after which follow footage and images from contemporary Peru. In the middle of the four-minute film, the song is stopped and viewers are shown a bored, smoking woman sitting on a couch watching the same film as we are on a TV set. A series of images follow composed of archival materials from Latin America’s violent history and close-ups from footage of Fem minuter för Amerikas döda/Pichqa minutukuna ilaqtanchispi wanuqkunamanta, showing the conquistador. Eventually, Morales’s song continues, and the film follows it to its end.

Both Cholo Soy and Fem minuter för Amerikas döda/Pichqa minutukuna ilaqtanchispi wanuqkunamanta have been well received and shown abroad in many venues, but the films have received little attention in Sweden despite Galindo winning the first prize at the Nordic documentary and short film festival, Nordisk panorama, in 1992.[24] It is symptomatic that when the leading Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter had a short notice on the Swedish films that had received awards, Galindo’s film was not mentioned at all, and in another short report announcing a programme of films from the Stockholm Film Workshop, Fem minuter för Amerikas döda/Pichqa minutukuna ilaqtanchispi wanuqkunamanta is mentioned as ‘a pamphlet against the 1992 Columbus anniversary that has received plenty of attention’ (Anon. 1992; Vårdstedt 1992).[25] Like with so many of the other immigrant films, there was no established thematic or aesthetic context for Galindo’s memorial, made in order to honour the indigenous population of Latin America. The carefully crafted tracking shot from the crane that moves backwards reveals and creates a history for a public that has not yet been fully recognized, a narrative that was largely ignored in Sweden at the time as well.

Projecting a public, creating a context

The films that range from Studie 1 to Fem minuter för Amerikas döda/Pichqa minutukuna ilaqtanchispi wanuqkunamanta not only encompass more than forty years of minor immigrant filmmaking, but also represent a diverse body of films in terms of genre, style, length, mission and context. Some were never screened theatrically while others did but were never considered exilic or accented films, or as fabulations in search of a context and a public.

What is evident is that these ten films that we have presented and analysed all struggled with finding an accurate context. One of the valuable intentions behind Naficy’s efforts in arguing for accented cinema as a specific form, and especially in his early writing when he stressed that it constituted a genre of its own, is the aspiration to create an interpretative community for the films – a reading apparatus, as it were. That such a context is and was needed is proved by the ignorant and dismissive reception of not only films that directly address the situation of the immigrant, like Jordmannen and Hägringen, but also how Studie 1 or a film like La espera were discussed and understood. However, the normative character of Naficy’s theory is equally ignorant as it excludes films made according to the established film grammar – films like Vill du följa med mig Martha? or Havet är långt borta. On the other hand, Rodowick’s use of the term fabulation is suggestive as a critical, normative, term for analysing how the aesthetics of the immigrant films may act as ways of projecting a public that is in becoming. It is thus symptomatic that the established public sphere embraced films that did not work according to Rodowick’s dictum, the most emblematic example being Vill du följa med mig Martha?, which confirmed the hegemonic worldview, or a given subject–object divide, as it were.

In the previous chapter we presented the premises of production, concentrating on how the immigrant filmmakers got organized or which associations were available for them to take part in. These public spheres formed important conditions and structures that enabled the filmmaking. But, due to the minor character of the independent immigrant film culture, every film had its own unique history of production. And, as we can see from the analysis of the films and their reception, they also created public spheres, ways of organizing and experiencing the immigrant situation: the experience of deterritorialization and the necessity of the production of locality in order to respond to that experience. However, due to that, the context of living, the experience of the immigrants, was so different from that of the majority culture that the films remained in the margin. The minor immigrant films projected a public and created a context for the makers and an audience in becoming, but mostly remained in the suburbs and were not acknowledged to be of general interest. The aim of our interpretations and the establishing of a vocabulary around fabulation and accented cinema are precisely to give recognition to the films and provide a frame of interpretation, but also, according to Pick’s case-sensitive and materialistic approach, to establish each film as an individual object with its own voice and trajectory. That is, of course, not enough, as the films also have to be confirmed as actual objects and screened in order to have an effect on future audiences, which is the subject of the chapter that follows.

Notes

1 Bengtsson (2010: 27) claims that this was a collective work, approved by Weiss. He also points out the similarities with the soundtracks composed for the following short films of Weiss by composer Daniel Helldén (1917–98).

2 This image was ridiculed by Harry Schein, the head of the Swedish Film Institute, in his memoirs, Schein (1980: 187). Here, major cinema makes a statement about the minor in the open.

3 Monos was also screened together with Dilemma and Parallell at the newly founded House of Culture (Kulturhuset) as part of the public information programmes called Information Stockholm, from May to June in 1979. The new House of Culture was opened in 1974 in downtown Stockholm at Sergel’s Square and was built in order to challenge the reconstruction of a commercialized and business-oriented downtown architecture. Another part of its vision was to embody a new and more inclusive concept of culture.

4 Studie 1 is by now canonized within avant-garde tradition through several scholarly publications, and through the DVD Peter Weiss. Filme, issued by Suhrkamp and edited by Harun Farocki in 2012, where the early films are described as ‘characterized by the nervous search after new forms of expression’. According to rental statistics from Filmform, Studie 1 is the least rented among Weiss’s films and predominantly shown as part of comprehensive retrospectives.

5 In the programme Immigrant Time (23 December 1978).

6 Statistiska Centralbyrån (Statistics Sweden): http://www.scb.se/hitta-statistik/sverige-i-siffror/manniskorna-i-sverige/in-och-utvandring. The total number of Greek immigrants was not overwhelming compared with later migratory movements of refugees; it is estimated that around three thousand Greeks immigrated to Sweden in 1970, and that the total number of individuals born in Greece was 11,676 (according to Nygren 2008).

7 Nygren 2008.

8 Järva culture committee, working committee meeting (28 October 1980).

9 E-mail to John Sundholm (2 December 2010).

10 Application no. 539, Arkiv Filmverkstan, Swedish Filminstitute.

11 Curtis (2007: 205–45) presents Structural Film within the framework of Expanded Cinema, but also places Paley explicitly within the context of the London Co-op, and recalls her contributions to the magazine Undercut (see also 47, 51–74).

12 Typically, the film was shown on SVT and channel 1 on a Saturday morning as part of the regular programmes that addressed the Finnish-speaking immigrants in Sweden (‘Finska program’, i.e. Programmes in Finnish) (26 November 1983).

13 These were, besides the previously mentioned Splittring (1984), the Turkish co-produced films Bir avuç cennet (A Handful of Paradise) (1987), Kara Sevdalı Bulut (A Cloud in Love) (1990) and Hollywood-rymlingar/Hollywood Kaçakları (Hollywood Runaways) (1998) for which he also received subsidies from SFI. A Cloud in Love led to a long-term fight with the Turkish authorities and censorship that kept Özer in Turkey for years. He finally managed to smuggle the negatives out to Sweden.

14 The anonymous notes are archived among the applications that were sent to the Stockholm Film Workshop. Jordmannen, no. 688, Arkiv Filmverkstan, Swedish Filminstitute.

15 The sequence telling the story of how The Earthman travels with money to Turkey and starts his own business, a small grocery store, but is ousted by a supermarket and has to return to Sweden, is omitted by Özer in the recently digitized version (2016).

16 TV schedule for channel 2, Dagens Nyheter (8 October 1980).

17 TV schedule for channel 1, programmes in Finnish, Dagens Nyheter (11 November 1984). The information in Swedish is simply ‘the trajectory of the Turkish immigrant’.

18 This device, splitting sound and image, was used in the Peter Weiss documentary Ansikten i skugga (Faces in Shadow) (1956), which depicts a cafe in Stockholm Old Town, where the sound is recorded at another place and another time. The reasons were practical and it is likely that the same goes for this film, but the effect is distancing and can be said to underscore the theme of alienation.

19 Telephone interview (22 September 2017). Jan Bark did question all artistic decisions, and forced Bagher to defend himself and give his motivations, something that was also experienced by others like Carayannis.

20 Telephone interview (22 September 2017).

21 Reza Bagher himself reconstructs the intention of the film as showing the problem of truth; the woman and the man see the same aquarium but not the same fishes (telephone interview, 22 September 2017).

22 Interview (3 December 2016).

23 It was screened on Swedish television (10 June 1984), with Dagens Nyheter presenting it as depicting ‘the situation of the Greek immigrants in Sweden, their hopes and dreams in contrast to the Swedish reality as well as the Greek one’. Besides later screenings, the film has been made public as a digital copy in connection with our research project, e.g. at Konsthall C, an art venue in the suburbs of Stockholm.

24 One exception was the critic and former professor in film studies at Stockholm University, Leif Furhammar, who in a TV review named César Galindo as ‘by far one of the most exciting short filmmakers that we have’ (Furhammar 2001).

25 The disregard of Galindo’s film was corrected with a notice from 1 October, ‘Stort filmpris till Galindo’, in which it is mentioned that Galindo, ‘a Peruvian Indian who lives in Sweden’, won both the jury prize and audience prize for best film.

Chapter 4

The Cultural Practice of Minor Immigrant Cinema Archiving

The aim of this chapter is to situate the immigrant films within a frame of archival practice, i.e. not only issues regarding archiving, preserving and digitization, but also screening practices. Most of the fifty films that we have studied and that cover about forty years of post-war independent immigrant filmmaking in Sweden have not been archived. Thus, the films have remained invisible, and because there has been no knowledge about them there has been no demand, and thus no distribution.

The archival life of cinema

The struggle for archival acknowledgement is a question of how to establish an archival artefact, an object that may be stored and repeated, and thus to affirm it as a thing that cannot be disregarded. The etymology of the word ‘archive’, arkheion (ἀρχεῖον), implies a close connection between place and power. It was here that important documents were stored and interpreted under the authority of Archon. Thus, the act of establishing an archive is both a question of claiming authority and using it to govern. Because of the position of the archive as a place for superior expertise, the archive acted as an evaluative and excluding institution. And, due to its function as an institution of power, it had to maintain and execute power to evaluate which documents and artefacts should be included in the arkheion.

The archive’s position of power became evident to us when we worked on research projects that dealt with different forms of minor cinemas; on the history experimental film culture in Sweden, workshop-filmmaking and, as in this case, on independent immigrant filmmaking. Whereas much recent archival discussions have been concerned with the digital takeover that has changed both the means and methods for archival work as well as the conceptual understanding of cinema and the cinematic artefact, for minor cinemas the question still remains: how can we get the artefacts into the archives in the first place?

In her seminal book on the film archive after the digital turn, From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film in Transition, Giovanna Fossati discusses the ‘archival life of film’, namely the ‘life of film once it has entered the archive’ (2009: 23). We, on the other hand, have been struggling to create an archival life for the immigrant films, doubting if the films in question will have an archival afterlife at all. It has been evident that if we do not succeed in convincing the archives to harbour the immigrant films that we have worked on, they will not receive a status as historical objects. Moreover, if they are not turned into such artefacts there will be no possibility for others to find them in the future, which would lessen the potential of the films to be screened. Once established as an archival artefact, the film may be resurrected because it is through repetitions, through recurrent screenings, that a single film is confirmed to be of significance. As Jean-Paul Sartre once claimed regarding literature, ‘the literary object has no other substance than the reader’s subjectivity’ (Sartre [1950] 1967: 31). In other words, it is when a novel is being read that it comes into being, and the same goes for film. If it is not screened it is moved to the vaults of oblivion.

Fossati distinguishes between four approaches to the archival life of film: film as original, film as art, film as dispositif and film as state of the art. The film as original approach can be considered the very foundational idea of the archive. When you claim that there is an original object you establish an artefact. As Fossati writes, the idea of the original can certainly be questioned and problematized. But, to claim the originality of an artefact – although we know that it is a construction and an evaluative and performative act – is a necessary aim for the archive to adhere to. Working with minor cinemas, the act of establishing the original is the ultimate archival goal and the question of originality and authenticity is less controversial as these films usually exist as a single print. So, there is no discussion regarding which print should be considered as the original. There is simply one copy only, and that print is usually in poor condition, as with the Cineco films. It is not rare either that the films were shot in reversal film, as in the case of Monos, which means that there are no negatives and just one print. The minority position of the immigrant films is thus confirmed by the fact that the normal condition is that there are few prints, and the existing ones are often worn out. In addition to the scarcity of copies and defective prints, the negatives – if there were any – are often lost, as with the Cineco films as well as most of the productions by the Tensta Film Association. Many of the negatives that had been stored at FilmTeknik, a major film laboratory in Sweden that developed 16 mm film, disappeared when the company went through fusions and removals during the 1990s, finally closing down in 2011.

With the ‘film as art’ approach, Fossati characterizes two different meanings. The archival faithfulness to film as medium, the imperative that a film has to be archived in its original format, or the approach that a film constitutes a unique product of an auteur and therefore has to be archived in a way that is true to the director’s original intentions. One crucial aspect of archiving the immigrant films when it comes to authorial considerations is that when the filmmakers, who mostly made their films under poor conditions and have only been able to afford developing one single print, finally get a chance to have a new digital copy (which increases the possibility of having the film screened) they tend to try to re-edit and improve on the digital copy, turning it into a new version of the film. This happened with Jordmannen when a new digital copy was made out of the original negative. Muammer Özer took the opportunity to omit a sequence in the film that he was not happy with.[1] Hence, the ‘film as art’ notion may contradict and actually go against the idea of film as original. Naturally, every filmmaker wants to establish the best possible historical artefact of his or her oeuvre, aware of the fact that the archive is an institution of power, a place that reterritorializes the film print and gives it authority and claims authenticity. To some extent, major cinema filmmakers also will go on, reworking their pieces, but the main difference is their industrial situation and the fact that minor cinema archiving often deals with one or two unique prints, and an original that is often questioned.

Whereas the previous two approaches are both based on the single film as an artefact and object of preservation, storage and confirmation, Fossati’s third category, film as dispositif, deals with exhibition and programming. Dispositif is the situation ‘where the film meets its user’. According to Fossati, it ‘allows for a different way of looking at films, namely, as dynamic objects where the material and conceptual artefacts are bound together’ (2009: 127). ‘Film as dispositif’ implies that every time a film is shown it acquires a new meaning and thus you perform the archive; hence, the archive is also archiving the social meanings of a particular film. For our project, in which the archival afterlife and the performance of the archive has mostly been an unreachable goal, film as dispositif has been an important imperative in order to make the archive interested in the films. It is through screenings in various places and in various formats that we have been able to raise interest in the work and attract the attention of the archives. Moreover, it is also here that the films may meet an audience and thus receive new meanings, acquiring agency beyond their status as archival objects.

Because of the marginality of minor cinemas and the technical deficiencies, minor cinemas as ‘state of the art’ is a contradiction in terms, as there is very seldom any interest in restoring the films. Fossati connects this framework, i.e. film as state of the art, with archives that interact with the development of film production, something that can be considered as an affair for major cinemas rather than minor ones. Minor cinemas are usually a single print culture, in which the same reels have been screened at various non-theatrical venues. The scratched and worn out copies are in a way the state of the art of minor cinemas, and it is that dispositif that is being preserved, archived and shown.

Accordingly, the archiving of immigrant films is a cultural practice that cuts across Fossati’s four principles. The ultimate goal is to reach archival acknowledgement, and to become a historical artefact. The road to be taken is screening the work in various venues, exploring the possibilities of the dispositif, collecting the work and establishing a temporary archive in order to prepare and persuade the archives to take care of the films, because it is in the archives that the raw material of history is being stored. The much-repeated turn to accessibility (transmission), ‘the digital marketplace [as] the arena where access to the film heritage is recognized as the main raison d´être of [archival] activity’ (Cherchi Usai et al. 2008: 5), is built on the presupposition that the archive is already there. However, while the archive is constantly re-made there is still a hierarchy between fine arts or national archives and other archives. It is still the archives of national museums or national film archives that are the very institutions which are considered to hold the significant material from which history is written and prints digitized.

The archival trajectories of the immigrant films

The key archives for film in Sweden are the film archive at the Swedish Film Institute and the collections of the National Library, which are accessible through the Swedish Media Database. When it comes to collections of documents, e.g. the material concerning the Stockholm Film Workshop, they are deposited at the library of SFI. The collections of SFI date back to the interwar period when engaged cineastes started to collect films, newspaper clippings, posters, etc. in what was called Filmhistoriska samlingarna, ‘the film historical collections’, which were stored at the Technical Museum in Stockholm from 1938, and in 1946 were accepted for membership of FIAF (Andersson 2014). The collections were moved to the institute a year after SFI had been founded. SFI collects and preserves and is also active in screening film. The collection of the National Library goes back to 1979 when the law regulating the archiving of printed matters was extended to all audio-visual material. Everything broadcast in television or radio, all musical recordings and all moving images are collected or copied into these collections. The National Library does not arrange public screenings and does not preserve film stock, but the films are made available for research through digitizing and digital copies. The archives of SFI and the National Library are the two main archives that are responsible for most of the moving image archiving in Sweden, but there are other collections as well, both private and public, e.g. the Swedish National Archives and the regional and municipal archives, as well as specialized archives such as Filmform, the archive for artist’s film and video. Filmform has also allowed for the distribution of those films that we managed to persuade the SFI to digitize into 2K.

The archival situation for the films that we have analysed in the previous chapter is very heterogeneous. Studie 1 is easily accessed as it has been published on a DVD with films by Peter Weiss, Peter Weiss. Filme (2012), and is in distribution through Filmform in both 16 mm and as a digital copy. Weiss, being a famous and well-known author who has lately experienced a renaissance in Germany, has increased the demand for his films. Monos and Vill du följa med mig Martha? have had quite different trajectories. Monos, being shot on reversal film, is a pristine object and has not been archived. Because Vill du följa med mig Martha? was shown on SVT, the film is available for research purposes as a compressed digital file at the National Library. Both films from the Tensta Film Association are in the ownership of Babis Tsokas, and none of the negatives of the Tensta films have been saved. Interference is lost and the only available copy is a digital file that has been scanned of a U-matic transfer from the 16 mm original. Jordmannen was in Muammer Özer’s ownership, and due to our previous research on the Stockholm Film Workshop the National Library agreed to make a basic scan of the very worn-out print. The negative is stored at the SFI film archive. As Hägringen was never shown on television nor had any official distribution, no transfer exists and the only print was with Guillermo Álvarez in Bogotá. The negatives are lost. Both Havet är långt borta and Löftet were transferred into compressed digital files, like many others that received support from the Stockholm Film Workshop. However, we have not been able to find a print or negative of Havet är långt borta, and the print of Löftet is lost. On the other hand, the SFI holds the negative of Löftet and thus there is hope that a new digital copy will be made in the future. Finally, both La espera and Fem minuter för Amerikas döda/Pichqa minutukuna ilaqtanchispi wanuqkunamanta were available as digital files at the National Library because the prints had been distributed by the independent co-op and organization FilmCentrum (The Film Centre). Because of this, both films were also subtitled and the SFI holds the prints that had been distributed by The Film Centre.

Figure 14: A 16 mm print of Fem minuter för Amerikas döda/Pichqa minutukuna ilaqtanchispi wanuqkunamanta. The original label from the lab (dated 7 August), is for another film. The white label informs about where and when the print was screened at Göteborg International Film Festival as part of the immigrant film programme (2015).

It goes without saying that such a diverse archival situation puts demands on not only the research but also on the archival afterlife of the films and the premises for programming and distribution. Monos, Jordmannen, Vill du följa med mig Martha?, Hägringen and Underjordiskt sällskap have been recently digitized (but not restored) into 2K as part of our research efforts, and the films are now in distribution through Filmform. We can already see a demand on screening the films since they have been made available as digital copies. Interference, Havet är långt borta and Löftet may only be shown on monitors, whereas La espera and Fem minuter för Amerikas döda/Pichqa minutukuna ilaqtanchispi wanuqkunamanta are available as 16 mm prints.

The traditional tension between performing and preserving is emphasized due to the archival situation of the minor immigrant films, which, in turn, stresses archival politics as a cultural practice. Every new venue implies new screening conditions and a different venue, and every new effort to screen the films forces one to take into consideration what to screen and in what context. Branigan’s protocol for an impure theory, with its emphasis on research and theoretical studies as something provisional and suggestive, as ways of participating in something that is ongoing, comes to the fore regarding the archiving, film programming and distribution of the immigrant films (Branigan 2006).

The archival politics of minor immigrant cinemas is thus indeed a world and a history in the making that should not be limited to collecting and preserving. It is not enough to establish the film as merely one artefact in the archive, as the work in different formats and in different places needs to be programmed. The question of screening is a case-sensitive practice where you have to ask – in what format and where? Such an archival approach never strives for universality, in the sense that it would claim to overcome historical and social boundaries and contexts by fetishizing the real reel, the artefact and the meaning of a particular film. Such an ideal, the ‘model image’ as Paolo Cherchi Usai terms it, implies a denial of film history, and that film has a history (Cherchi Usai 2001), and a denial that research constitutes a cultural practice, with actual and political consequences.

The Stockholm Film Workshop and immigrant filmmaking

Out of the associations and organizations that we have studied, the Stockholm Film Workshop was the largest one both in output and archival material. The primary sources were the archived minutes of the workshop and in particular the applications for funding that had been sent to the workshop. These, about 2,900 separate applications that sometimes extended into a long chain of letters, notes and manuscripts, were stored at the SFI but not included in the collections as such; i.e. they are not catalogued and thus not searchable. Originally looking for traces of experimental filmmakers in the archive, in connection with a research project on the history of Swedish experimental film culture, we were overwhelmed by the richness and diversity of the film culture that we faced when reading the applications (Andersson et al. 2010). When the research project on experimental film was completed, we returned to the materials and engaged with all sorts of film genres and formats. This, in turn, led to the current project, after finishing a book on the Stockholm Film Workshop, since we discovered that immigrant filmmakers were behind many of the workshop films (Andersson and Sundholm 2014). We listed the names and began to track them down.

We also had to create the archive ourselves. The workshop archive consisted of the minutes of the board meetings and applications that were submitted for funding. The almost 2,900 applications and their aftermath of correspondence and documents were originally collected, as well as other documents with relevance to the archive. However, the archive was incomplete. When the funders closed down the workshop at the end of the 1990s, the Stockholm Film Festival took over the material remains. The intention was that the festival agency should continue with the workshop activities once they received the necessary funding. However, the workshop was instead closed down for good and the archive abandoned. Eventually, what remained of the physical archive was moved to the SFI, and somewhere during these processes and transfers a lot of material was lost.

The films produced had never been archived, as the workshop did not work with distribution. The workshop financed a final print if they thought the film was of any interest, but it was the filmmaker who received and kept the print. Negatives were mostly left at the lab or sent to the archive of SFI, or in some cases taken by the filmmakers themselves. Later, when affordable video technology was available, the film workshop took the initiative to transfer some of the films that had been made, mostly into U-matic. These copies, in turn, ended up at the audio-visual archive of the National Library, which digitized the work in order to make it accessible for research. Another possible trajectory for the films to be preserved was if they had been screened on public television, meaning there was a recording at the National Library, which collects and stores everything shown on public television in Sweden since 1979. Most of the original prints nevertheless remained with the filmmakers, and of the work from the early 1970s there were no electronic or digital transfers. This was also the case with the films connected with the Tensta Film Association, Cineco and Kaleidoscope. Muammer Özer held all the printed material of Kaleidoscope, including the minutes and programmes of the film festivals. Cineco had no remains whatsoever and Babis Tsokas had the prints and a bag of papers, mostly paper clippings. The archive of the Working Group of Film was kept at Filmform, including prints or digital transfers of most of the films that were produced in the connection to the group.

When we started to sort the papers of the Stockholm Film Workshop archive, several applications and attached documents were missing. We had to reconstruct the material in order to interpret it, and start tracing the people and the films. When going through the files we also had to handle the diversity of the material. Among the applications and letters were working samples, like photographs and drawings. On one occasion we found a Super 8 reel filed in the archive as documentation of a project by the artist and animator Lilian Domec. Naive as we were at this stage, at the beginning of the new millennium, thinking that the archive archives neutrally, we separated the Super 8 reel from the collection and transferred it to the film archive at SFI. Some months later, when we needed the film reel in order to check it against facts concerning the actual application, we were told that the film archivists had discarded the film since it was in a substandard format and not ready for distribution. Hence, it was not an artefact of importance, and therefore not an archival item.

These archival anecdotes point towards the problem with the internal, invisible hierarchies of the Arkheion. One reason why the archive of the film workshop was in such disorder is that it represented a minor cinema practice, where very few objects are related to the canonical, national, auteur-oriented cinema practice that was the original reason for building the film archive. Such artefacts are not useful for the nationalist methodology that has historically been the predominant approach of archives such as the SFI. The workshop archive was, according to that archival logic, not a true part of the collection, and therefore not of interest for performing the core of the collections, i.e. acknowledging national auteurs (Stiller, Sjöström and Bergman) or other milestones of Swedish film history.[2] Second, the film archive destroyed material from the collection of the workshop papers since the actual footage was not related to the canonical, national cinema practice, and was not even a film for distribution, just loose footage. It was, according to traditional archival logic, correct to move the film reel from the paper collection since it did not belong there. But through the same logic, the film footage did not even qualify as film in the end. Thus it was destroyed, and the two archives – the film archive and the paper collection – were clean again. This is an especially delicate issue when it comes to experimental film practices, where the sketches and the waste form a substantial part of the process and can be seen as belonging to the final work (Andersson et al. 2017).

The immigrant films are in an even more precarious situation than the experimental films. They seem to lack not only cultural or archival value in general, but are furthermore problematic for the archives to handle since they are not in any explicit way Swedish objects. The responsibility for these artefacts is always placed outside the archives where they are handled. Arkheion treats them as temporary guests, as does the Swedish immigration policy – they do not really belong here. They have a kind of orphan status, existing between separate national film historiographies (Streible 2009).

The term ‘orphan film’ has two definitions: the first sense is more strict and legal, regarding a film whose right holders have abandoned its care or are unaware of any legal claim. The second sense is not that strict but surely applicable to the kind of films we are approaching here: all types of neglected cinema. As Dan Streible puts it, ‘even a preserved and well-stored film […] [is] orphan-like if its existence is unknown outside the archive’ (2009: x). The films of the immigrants are orphan-like in the last aspect: they are seldom preserved and archived, and when they are they tend to be forgotten. Thus, archiving without screening turns every film into an orphan. The notion of minor cinemas, on the other hand, stresses that immigrant films are part of a particular minor cinema culture (which orphan films need not be, as they are merely forgotten), and that the filmmakers cared and still care about the work. The immigrant filmmakers have struggled to get their films shown. It is contradictory that the maker of an orphan film would be present when the film is screened, whereas we always try to have the filmmaker present during a screening.

The excluding techniques mentioned above were for a long time a fact in the practice of the national heritage archives – minor culture was omitted. This was also the case when we started this project. But, with state-regulated revised cultural policies on multicultural diversity and openness, new instructions have been delivered to the archives.[3] A change in acquisition politics has taken place during our work with minor cinemas, which we have been able to take advantage of. We are, on the other hand, also part of that film scholarly trend and those approaches that have shifted the perspective from the auteurs of national cinemas as the centre of interest. There is now room for transnational endeavours, for experiments and shorts, for impure forms – in short, for minor cinemas – in the archives. This is also because short films, and orphan ones in particular, are attractive for being made available through different online streaming services and for inclusion in digitization projects. In this way, the archives may meet the ever-increasing requirements of accessibility of the collections. The archives have thus turned into institutions that are able to negotiate and compromise. This goes for the National Library in Stockholm and its division for audio-visual media, as well as the SFI and its film archive. They have both been helpful and innovative in order to establish new strata of archiving and making the films accessible during our research. Thus, when we have been able to trace and find prints of Monos and Hägringen it has been possible to transfer these prints into digital screening copies and to preserve the film prints at the archive, i.e. to create a functional balance between dispositif and original. This has, however, taken place step by step. First, simple scanning by the National Library has been made available, after which we have been able to show the work and also pitch it to the archive of the SFI, after which, in the best case, a proper scanning has been undertaken.

Performing accidental archives

The ten films we have analysed not only constitute diverse and exclusive objects but have their own unique archival trajectories and challenges when it comes to their archival afterlife and dispositif. We will concentrate here on Interference, Monos and Hägringen.

Interference was a film that we ran into when we were collecting work for our book on Swedish experimental film culture (Andersson et al. 2010). It was included in the catalogue published by the Stockholm Film Workshop, so we knew that the film had been finished (Anon. 2000). Interference was also one of the films that had been transferred to U-matic, and one such copy had ended up in the National Library. Thus, the film had been scanned for research purposes and is available through the library. But since the aim of Sweden’s National Library with regards to its audio-visual collections is to provide access to copies of productions (rather than to preserve materials for public screenings/exhibitions), the quality of their remediated copy of Interference is so poor that it cannot be screened, neither as a U-matic nor as a digital file. And, although we have written about the film in various contexts, we have not managed to create an afterlife for Interference because of the poor state of the copy (Andersson et al. 2010; Andersson and Sundholm 2014, Andersson and Sundholm 2017). Thus, the archival practice and remediation of the films that are available through the National Library do not always open up a possibility of film as dispositif. The scanned U-matic is a trace of a film, digitized in the name of accessibility, but this has not led to it becoming established as a historical artefact. Here, we see how the four principles of Fossati interact. In the case of Interference, film as original includes film as art in order to be a meaningful dispositif. Both our writing and the file are poor substitutes for the filmic object, and thus it may never really reach an audience. Referring to Sartre, you can say that the copy of Interference is without substance. It remains an object of research, having migrated out of the art sphere, while the artist herself has migrated the other way – from filmmaking into curating.

The archival condition of Monos shows the importance of prestigious archives and the limits of digital accessibility when it comes to the premises for establishing a cultural artefact. Because of the outdated technological premises (seven-inch audiotape, 16 mm film), the actual print and supporting sound made it demanding and risky to screen Monos. Luckily, it was possible for the SFI to digitize the film as part of its new diversity policy. Thereafter we chose to screen the film in a cinema in downtown central Stockholm together with Hägringen. This was made possible through the collaboration between an art space, Konsthall C, and the association Film i samtidskonsten (Film in Contemporary Art), which had access to the Stockholm downtown cinema (Zita). Tsokas was invited to the screening and he was troubled because we had chosen the first and – according to him – worst film of the Tensta Film Association. For the filmmaker, the screening and scanning were crucial acts – the establishment and confirmation of the film as art, a significant single object – whereas we considered them as a contextual act. For us, Monos documented the situation, wishes and longing of immigrant youths in early 1970s Sweden, and it was precisely due to the primitive technology and lack of professional skills that the film had a striking documentary quality and worked according to Rodowick’s interpretation of fabulation. Monos was a documentation of a becoming, an emerging public, an audience in search of a context. In contrast, we primarily approached the film as an original, but in the sense that the original act, with all its flaws and desires, was important for saving and showing, while Tsokas wanted to have the best films preserved and shown, not the amateurish well-worn print that was now being digitized into 2K at the expense of the more professionally made and pristine prints of the Tensta Film Association.

Figure 15: From the screening of Jordmannen (1980) and Löftet (1984) at Konsthall C (2016). Synnöve Özer is the second from the right. Courtesy of Konsthall C.

The negative of Hägringen had disappeared when the FilmTeknik lab closed down, and the only available print was with Guillermo Álvarez in Bogotá. He generously sent the print to the archive of the SFI (who paid for the transport), and the National Library made a first scan. We found out about Álvarez and Cineco through the Stockholm Film Workshop material. The print of Hägringen was in such poor condition that we did not dare to screen it and used the scanned copy instead. In order to be able to screen the film we had to have it subtitled, which was helped by the fact that we were now dealing with a digital remediation. The Göteborg International Film Festival was generous enough to help us in finishing the subtitling and the film was screened for the first time in a programme on immigrant minor cinemas that we put together for the festival in 2015.[4] The next step was to persuade the SFI to restore the copy, which they judged to be far too difficult and expensive. Instead, they made a 2K scan out of the existing print and we provided them with the subtitles for the Spanish dialogue. Later, we translated the whole film into English in order to enable screenings abroad.[5]

Since 2015 we have screened Hägringen both in a proper cinema and together with other immigrant films as digital loops on monitors at Konsthall C in a southern suburb of Stockholm. Looping has made it possible to include films such as Löftet, out of which there is no good print or scan for a proper screening. On the other hand, due to the fact that a screening in a cinema context is a particular experience, we also showed Löftet at a special low-tech screening in Konsthall C, which could transform its kitchen into a space for projecting film, both digital and analogue.

These events have been part of the Stockholm art scene, which has proven to be much more interested in the work than the film festival circuit or cinema audiences. By looping films on monitors, we have been able to use the cheaply scanned versions to give the work visibility. But, the screenings in gallery spaces have not really been able to substitute a proper screening where you have an audience that is prepared and in full expectation, ready to give the film its substance (Sartre [1950] 1967).

In the case of Hägringen, we have been able to deal with all aspects of archival strategies, but the first scan was the crucial condition in order for us to persuade the SFI, curators and festival directors to screen the work. As becomes evident, we have used varied means and strategies in order to give the films visibility and thus be able to reach the final goal of archival and historical acknowledgement. However, due to the poor remediation and lack of an analogue original, we have not been able to create enough room to manoeuvre around Interference or Löftet, hence their limited afterlives.

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

In the theory of archaeology, a distinction is often made between voluntary and involuntary records, i.e. that some are made with the intention to record whereas other are unintended to do so, or are accidental (Lucas 2010). Evidently, every film is made with the intention to last, to be screened. However, you may claim that minor cinema culture is an accidental archival culture because many of the films do not make any elaborate claims. They may be part of a larger agenda or meant for another aim than primarily constituting a sovereign film – aspects that downplay the character of the film as a finalized artefact. The remains of the Stockholm Film Workshop constitute such a temporary and accidental archive. Many of the films were pedagogical endeavours, and the question of producing a final print was often considered to be of secondary importance. It is therefore not evident that approaches to ‘film as original’ or ‘film as state of the art’ are always appropriate aims for archival practices that aspire to be true to the films’ original causes and contexts. The Tensta Film Association was also largely a pedagogical project – community arts in many ways – whereas Cineco and Kaleidoscope aimed at making or enabling filmmaking on the communities’ own terms. However, these organizations were well aware of the harsh conditions and limited possibilities, thus leading to the character of ‘work in progress’ that many of these films had.

That so many films of minor cinema cultures have the character of being ruined, of worn-out and mistreated remnants, of the production of an experience in production, is not so much an imprint of the time that has passed, but a material inscription of the actual position that the films have had and still have. Even if the films have been collected and digitized, they have usually not been restored because they have not yet reached the status of significant (national) artefacts.[6] Because of this ‘acquisition without preservation’ approach, it is therefore the cultural position of minor cinemas as palimpsest that is being preserved. As Gavin Lucas has argued, what is peculiar for the palimpsest is that it ‘encapsulates the dual process of inscription and erasure’ (2010: 351). If you have as your archival aim ‘film as original’ or ‘film as art’, you aspire for a print in which the traces of the life of the film have been erased. The stratigraphic layers of screening contexts, social practices and positions are wiped out. It is this politics of the palimpsest that digital technology and the digital copy may mediate and capture, and which is an essential part of the notion of film as dispositif, i.e. of the different possibilities for screening the films so that the historical and the present conditions may be displayed.

Fossati’s notion of dispositif actually originates in Frank Kessler’s elaboration of the concept and his work on programming early film. For Kessler, the question of the dispositif is simply that between ‘texts, viewers and viewing situations (including aspects of technology and institutional framings) in a given historical context’ (2011: 139).[7] Like so often when you deal with minor cinemas, it is however difficult to determine the original viewing context as these films were often more processual than finalized products. There is in a way no institutional setting, while the institutional condition of minor cinemas is mostly exceptional, minor and marginal, and always an exception. The films were screened whenever an opportunity occurred, but there was no given venue except for the avant-garde work that had a given framework. Thus, to programme and screen the immigrant films is more a question of a dispositif in the making, and it is difficult to determine what the accurate historical viewing context was. The screening of the films at the time was mostly an interruption, a unique event that was not repeated and which therefore never created a frame, an institution or given setting for later historiographical use. On the other hand, the history of the various dispositifs becomes important while the films were screened in such different venues, outside of any official distribution and given framework.

There is also a brutal and unintended, symptomatic, truth in those digital transfers that the film archive of the Swedish Film Institute has made out of those worn-out, unique prints and ruins of films like Monos and Hägringen. This practice implies that you are not only preserving and archiving minor immigrant cinema but also documenting its actual cultural position within society at the time of acquisition. The remains of minor cinemas are thus palimpsests of minor histories.

We noted in the beginning of this chapter that the archive has a place, both in a physical and a social sense. The latter is stressed by Paul Ricoeur in his seminal Memory, History, Forgetting when he refers to Michel de Certeau, who stresses that what precedes the explanation (historiography) is ‘the establishing of sources’, which implies a ‘redistributing in space’ (2010: 168). It is exactly such a redistribution that takes place when new artefacts enter the archive. This has yet another aspect, as Ricoeur also points out: when entering the archive, remnants and objects will be available for new interpretations because the archive makes them into orphans (2010: 169). The bond between addresser and addressee is cut and the films are open for dispersion. However, to establish such a living archive presupposes a constant influx of new work that is in such a condition that it may act within a proper archival dispositif so it can be turned into ‘substance’, and be constituted by the viewers’ subjectivity. What we have learned through the programming of the films is that nothing can really match cinema as an event, the exclusive screening for an audience in which the filmmaker or any other who was part of the production is present. To screen a single work emphasizes that it is a cultural object of significance; hence, it becomes inserted into that politics of recognition that Nancy Fraser (1997) has stressed as one of the very pillars for a democratic and including society. The gallery setting in which you screen a digital copy often reduces the work to being merely a visual representation, yet another image of society and culture, whereas the event of screening a film stresses the very object. The dispositif of the screening event is therefore significantly different.

That we have worked with historical material that is remediated in the gallery and confirmed as historical objects in a cinema-like setting also affects the viewing situation. If the films, as we claim, originally constituted a specific public sphere and ways of creating a context and a public by the means of how the making and showing of the films were organized, and thus became ways of organizing and experiencing the immigrant situation, a contemporary screening of course has a different function. It becomes part of the politics of recognition, which is established in hindsight. But, it may also work as a new public sphere, like when one second-generation immigrant came up to us after we had shown Jordmannen and Löftet at Konsthall C and said: ‘these films have given me a history, which I have lacked in Sweden until now’.

Notes

1 In the original version, The Earthman travels to Turkey after his family life in Sweden is established and sets up a shop in his home village that goes bankrupt. This part is omitted from the new digital copy.

2 When you enter the film house that hosts the Swedish Film Institute you face two cinemas, named Mauritz and Victor, and when you go up the stairs to the offices of the Film Institute you will start beside a golden plaque that announces the ‘Ingmar Bergman Archives inscribed on UNESCO Memory of the World Register 2007’.

3 During the first years of the millennium the question of cultural diversity and ethnicity has been prevalent in the Swedish public sphere, for example expressed in the Government’s bill Mångfald är framtiden (‘Diversity is the future’), bill no. 2007:50. Also, the Swedish Film Institute has developed an interest in handling these issues. In 2016 the government’s bill Mer film till fler – en sammanhållen filmpolitik (‘More film for more people – a cohesive film policy’), bill no. 2015/16:132, was submitted to Sweden’s Parliament. The political vision of the bill has been transposed to seven policy goals that will guide the work. Goal no. 6 states that ‘gender equality and diversity are hallmarks in the area of film’. See http://www.filminstitutet.se/en/about-us/filmpolitiken/a-fully-governmental-film-policy--bill.

4 The programme at Göteborg International Film Festival in 2015 included the following films: Pinochet: Fascista, asesino, traidor, agente del imperialismo (Castilla, 1974); Hägringen (Álvarez, 1981); La espera (Braniff, 1989); Jordmannen (Özer, 1980); Gränser (Borders) (Tosun, 1997) and Fem minuter för Amerikas döda/Pichqa minutukuna ilaqtanchispi wanuqkunamanta (Galindo, 1992). The first two were projected in digital format whereas the rest were shown in 16 mm.

5 Hägringen and Jordmannen were screened within an immigrant retrospective at 59. Nordische Filmtage Lübeck, 3 November 2017, curated by Jörg Schöning.

6 The Swedish Film Institute has different categories for its project to digitize the Swedish film heritage: (1) Digital adaptation, i.e. adapting a digital copy for projection in a proper cinema; (2) Digitalization, i.e. scanning and archiving in order to preserve a copy for future restoration; (3) Digital copy, i.e. making a copy of an existing print by minimal restoration; (4) Digital restoration, i.e. the standard procedure behind making a film available in digital format (cleaning, repairing, colour grading and timing, etc.); (5) Full digital restoration, i.e. restoring the film in detail (frame by frame if necessary). This is rarely done and only if the original is in very bad condition or if the film is judged to be of great public interest. During the years 2014 to 2016, only six films were fully digitally preserved (out of 247), and six were made into digital copies. Out of those six digital copies, four were immigrant films that we had suggested. SFI Report: ‘Digitaliseringen och tillgängliggörandet av det svenska filmarvet’ (‘Digitization and the availability of the Swedish film heritage’) (2017), https://www.filminstitutet.se/globalassets/_dokument/rapporter/rapport-digitaliseringen-och-tillgangliggorandet-av-det-svenska-filmarvet.pdf.

7 Kessler’s use is, in turn, inspired by Jean-Louis Baudry’s early essays on what became known as apparatus theory in English (Baudry 1986; Kessler 2006).

Conclusion

Immigrant Filmmaking as Minor Cinema Practice

We started this book by claiming that film has usually been approached as an object and not as another point in the cultural process of cinema as a whole. A process that extends from experience and articulation to finalizing an object, which in turn will be changed and revised to commence an afterlife in the archives and through other means of storing and distribution. The aim of our research project has thus been to both argue that this is the case and to uphold such a process for the films that we have studied. Not only are films part of an ongoing practice, but so is research, and both are ways of acting in the world. We want to underscore how important this assumption is for the understanding of the practices of minor as well as major cinema. This starting point conditions our work in many ways, from our view of film history to an assumption of film theory and film studies as something that has – or should have – political and practical consequences.

Our primary aim is not to write a history of minor immigrant filmmaking in Sweden. As Dipesh Chakrabarty has claimed in his thought-provoking book on how to write the history of subaltern or minority groups, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000), ‘[h]istory is a subject primarily concerned with the crafting of narratives’ (Chakrabarty 2000: 98). Instead, we have shown that the minor immigrant cinemas are different, although they have risen from the same problematics, in asking: how to deal with your new situation through cinematic means? How to enable an articulation on own terms? And, finally, how to communicate these efforts, trajectories and practices further? Hence, we have introduced no interpretational grid that would explain the films, but instead a provisional vocabulary in order to give the films, filmmakers and practices visibility and meaning. But, before doing that, a territory must be defined and an approach taken in order to guarantee that each and every film, filmmaker and participant will be constituted on their own terms. This is why we have introduced the term ‘minor cinemas’, following David E. James’s approach, because such a point of departure is rather more descriptive than critical-philosophical, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s original definition was. Still, we claim that the latter contains an important starting point for studying cultural production, and in particular the premises of cultural production in a minority situation. A problem is, however, that later applications and interpretations have usually led to a celebration of the marginal as such, establishing the minor as an antagonistic position per se. For us, minor cinemas describe a fact of how certain film cultures are minor not necessarily because they stand in opposition to the major. Nevertheless, the position of minor immigrant cinemas implies certain characteristics that make them critical, namely: (a) that minor cinemas are not part of the current hegemony; (b) that there cannot be a divide between the individual and the social; and (c) thus, there is no possibility for an individual enunciation that could be separated from a collective enunciation. This is most clearly expressed through the use of the clay doll in Muammer Özer’s Jordmannen, but is also embedded in the aesthetics of Peter Weiss’s Studie 1.

When minor or exilic are introduced into the theoretical vocabulary, a normative perspective usually follows, which creates a direct relation between premises of production and product through the use of textual analysis. In order to avoid such a mechanical shortcut for an analysis, we have introduced Zuzana M. Pick’s early work on exilic cinema. In her essays she makes the argument that all filmmakers have to reassess their practice because of their deterritorialization, and thus the outcome is not predestined in any way. As we have shown, this was the case for someone like Sergio Castilla, but also how the Tensta Film Association worked, always changing style and content depending on the context and premises of production. Castilla, on the other hand, moved from accented-experimental filmmaking in the tradition of third cinema to political animation and documentaries. Myriam Braniff is yet another example who was minor in two ways – both as an immigrant and as a female filmmaker among mostly male immigrant filmmakers – who, despite this (or perhaps because of it) created her own trajectory, which was neither exilic nor diasporic as such but marked by what Pick calls the subjective paradox of exile. Braniff’s La espera, while at the same time forgetting and remembering the facts of exile, is thus an example of an ongoing renegotiation of subjectivities related to the objectivity of the factual exile and its biographical, political, geographical and thus mobile conditions.

Since our research project on Swedish experimental film culture, we have been engaged in various ways in writing the history of minor cinemas in Sweden. Although this project is not primarily a historiographic one we do indeed contribute to the writing of minority histories, but in what Chakrabarty describes as the ‘good’ way: ‘expanding the scope of social justice and representative democracy […] stay[ing] with heterogeneities without seeking to reduce them [minority pasts] to any overarching principle that speaks for an already given whole’ (2000: 107). Hence, a history without a coherent narrative. This is also our core criticism of Hamid Naficy’s theory of an accented cinema and the different interpretations and applications his theory has given rise to. It subsumes the exilic and diasporic as such into its sprawling narrative in the mission of giving a set of films a meaning. Our aim is to show the diversity in the output although the films grew out of a similar situation, and according to a politics of recognition we give them attention by offering different readings of the diverse body of works in order to stress how many of the films address and follow the aesthetics of accented cinema, or use fabulation as an aesthetic device for projecting a context and a public. But, these theoretical perspectives are not able to encompass the films as such. It is, however, the merit of both Naficy’s and Rodowick’s theories that they provide suggestive interpretational contexts, something that Swedish society lacked at the time of the making of the films. That this was the case can be seen from the reception of both immigrant feature films from the 1980s, such as Luis R. Vera’s Consuelo or Özer’s Splittring, the refusal to show Guillermo Álvarez’s Hägringen, as well as the minor immigrant films of the Tensta Film Association. Yet, the frameworks of Naficy and Rodowick are normative, critical and impure, to use Edward Branigan’s characterization, which in turn limits them. Naficy’s claim for the general validity for his theory of an accented cinema is therefore incorrect.

As we have shown, paradigmatic exilic films such as Cineco’s Hägringen or the Tensta Film Association’s Vill du följa med mig Martha? do not fully follow an accented style, although both are accented films when it comes to content. Rodowick, on the other hand, does establish a conscious critical reading apparatus with his approach to fabulation that shows its usefulness when it comes to an analysis of the potential of an aesthetics to produce and project the dilemma of the immigrant filmmaker: how to negotiate a space for oneself and produce locality in Arjun Appadurai’s sense, creating a context for both producer and public? This is a thread that may be followed through most of the films that we have analysed, from Weiss’s Studie 1 to Braniff’s La espera and César Galindo’s Fem minuter för Amerikas döda/Pichqa minutukuna ilaqtanchispi wanuqkunamanta. Extending from questions of personal, corporeal identity, desire and place to the retrieval of history from colonial powers, all in the name of finding a new context for new groups of people who find themselves in new territories. But, when such a becoming does not take place, as in Vill du följa med mig Martha?, in which the space and public are already given, the film becomes incorporated into the established public sphere and consequently cheered by local politicians.

It might come as a surprise and seem like an outdated move to re-actualize the post-Habermasian theories of Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge from the 1970s, especially when the various contemporary post-theories have stressed transnationality and counterpublics. However, as we have shown, the films, the people, and the organizations were not introduced and established primarily as counterparts. That they were minor was simply a fact, and though they often aimed at being included in the major, this was not an end in itself. The theories on transnational public spheres are still established in the vein of Habermas, asking where the public sphere is possible in the global media world of today, whereas theories on subaltern counterpublics imply a political analysis in which the minor groups also claim power. Our study shows that these binary options were not on the agenda of the dedicated immigrant filmmaker who made film out of necessity and self-will. The associations and organizations of minor immigrant cinemas that we have presented and studied – Cineco, Kaleidoscope, the Stockholm Film Workshop, the Independent Film Group and the Tensta Film Association – do not make any other claims than to be able to make films that will be recognized and acknowledged for what they are – minor cinema in Tom Gunning’s sense.

It is the merit of Negt’s and Kluge’s work – through their emphasis on living context and experience – that they introduce a perspective that stresses the need to get organized if you are in the margins of the society and how such an organization enables the process of an experience that may be articulated on its own terms. Organization in such a context should thus not be understood as something static and merely technical, but as a way of organizing and articulating your collective experience. This implies the establishing of a context and a public, a becoming of both producer and public. It is this process that the concept of fabulation may cover. The search for a self and a collective characterizes both organizations like the Tensta Film Association or Kaleidoscope and such diverse films as Tensta’s Monos, Maureen Paley’s Interference, Reza Bagher’s Havet är långt borta and Braniff’s La espera.

Accordingly, we claim that film and filmmaking constituted a cultural practice because they represented a way for the immigrants to find a context for themselves. Film was also a language that was beyond national languages, which made it possible to negotiate and articulate who you were and where you were and to address an audience struggling with similar questions, although you spoke neither Swedish nor English. A common trait in many of the films that we have analysed is their multilingual character and use of an accented Swedish. This fact further distanced the work from the common audience and the established public sphere, which is the reason why we also considered it important to make subtitles for the new digital copies that have been distributed as a result of our research.

To analyse the work and give it visibility through interpretation and writing is not enough if you have as your aim to also intervene in film culture. To establish a language that is able to give the immigrant filmmakers, their films and their work significance is not sufficient if the aim is to have an influence on national film historiography, to highlight transnational strands and to acknowledge those immigrant filmmakers who made films in Sweden under demanding conditions. Because the archive is a locus of power, it is here that historical objects are constituted and confirmed through the archival dispositifs. Thus, the last chapter presents the actual work that we have done on collecting the films and how to include them in archives so they may receive the status of proper historical artefacts. However, we have not stopped there, and also worked to screen and programme the work, convinced that it is in the encounter with an audience that a film actually happens, takes place, produces new experiences and meanings, makes a difference and creates history anew.

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Wilson, R. and Dissanayake, W. (eds) (1996), Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, Durham: Duke University Press.

Wong, C. H.-Y. (2011), Film Festivals: Culture, People, and Power on the Global Screen, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Wright, R. (1998), The Visible Wall: Jews and other Ethnic Outsiders in Swedish Film, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

——— (2005), ‘“Immigrant film” in Sweden at the millenium’, in A. Nestingen and T. G. Elkington (eds), Transnational Cinema in a Global North, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, pp. 55–72.

Zabeti, B. S. (2005), ‘Intervju med filmregissören Reza Bagher: Ångest i kvadrat’, Darvaq, 3, pp. 4–6.

Zalipour, A. (2016), ‘Interstitial and collective filmmaking in New Zealand: The case of Asian New Zealand Film’, Transnational Cinemas, 7:1, pp. 96–110.

Filmography

Álvarez, Guillermo (1980), Underjordiskt sällskap (Underground Company), Sweden: Cineco and Filmverkstan. 16 mm, 28 min. Distributed by: Stiftelsen Filmform.

——— (1981), Hägringen (The Mirage), Sweden: Cineco. 16 mm, 38 min. Distributed by: Stiftelsen Filmform.

Assadi, Saeed (1984), Hägring (Mirage), Sweden: Arash Film Productions & Distributions, Kulturama. 16 mm, 118 min.

Bagher, Reza (1983), Havet är långt borta (The Sea is Far Away), Sweden: Filmverkstan. 16 mm, 13 min.

Braniff, Myriam (1989), La espera (The Waiting), Sweden: Filmverkstan. 16 mm, 13 min.

Carayannis, Menelaos (1981), En gammal melodi (An Old Tune), Sweden: Filmverkstan. 16 mm, 7 min.

——— (1984), Löftet (The Promise), Sweden: Filmverkstan. 16 mm, 36 min.

——— (1986), Mörkrets ljusa sida (The Bright Side of Darkness), Sweden: Järva Kulturkommitté. 16 mm, 32 min.

Castilla, Sergio (1973), La historia (The History or The Way of Lovers), Chile and Sweden: Sveriges Radio AB. 35 mm, 74 min.

——— (1974), Pinochet: Fascista, asesino, traidor, agente del imperialismo (Pinochet: Fascist, Murderer, Traitor, Imperialist Agent), Sweden: Stiftelsen Svenska Filminstitutet. 16 mm, 4 min.

——— (1974), Quisiera tener un hijo (I Wish I Had a Son), Sweden: Stiftelsen Svenska Filminstitutet. 16 mm, 9 min.

——— (1975), En chilensk flicka i Sverige (A Girl from Chile in Sweden), Sweden: Sveriges Radio AB. 16 mm, 29 min.

Galindo, César (1987), Un Diá la Arena (A Day in the Desert), Sweden: SIDA. 16 mm, 17 min.

——— (1989), För gulds skull (For the Sake of Gold), Sweden: Runa Film, Cesar production and Sveriges Television. 16 mm, 46 min.

——— (1990), Huset Matusita/Casa Matusita, Sweden: Runa Film, Garantinämnden för kort-och barnfilm and Filmverkstan. 16 mm, 13 min.

——— (1992), Fem minuter för Amerikas döda/Pichqa minutukuna ilaqtanchispi wanuqkunamanta (Five Minutes for the Souls of America), Peru and Sweden: Filmverkstan and Runa Film. 16 mm, 5 min.

——— (1992), Cholo Soy (I am an Indian), Peru and Sweden: Filmverkstan and Runa Film. 16 mm, 5 min.

Nelson, Gunvor (1983), Frame Line, Sweden, 16 mm, 22 min. Distributed by: Stiftelsen Filmform.

——— (1987), Light Years, Sweden. 16 mm, 28 min. Distributed by: Stiftelsen Filmform.

——— (1988), Light Years Expanding, Sweden, 16 mm, 25 min. Distributed by: Stiftelsen Filmform.

——— (1990), Natural Features, Sweden, 16 mm, 30 min. Distributed by: Stiftelsen Filmform.

Özer, Muammer (1978), Ensamhet (Loneliness), Sweden: Filmverkstan. 16 mm, 20 min.

——— (1980), Jordmannen (Toprak Adam or The Earthman), Sweden: Filmverkstan. 16 mm, 27 min. Distributed by: Stiftelsen Filmform.

——— (1988), Splittring (Breakup), Sweden: Devkino. 16 mm, 94 min.

Paley, Maureen (1977), Interference, Sweden: Filmverkstan. 16 mm, 7 min.

Sapiaín, Claudio (1978), Främlingar (Foreigners), Sweden: Lennart Olsson Film AB and Sveriges Radio. 16 mm, 54 min.

Tosun, Bahadir (1997), Gränser (Borders), Sweden: Filmverkstan. 16 mm, 2 min.

Tsokas, Babis (1974), Monos (Alone), Sweden: Tensta Filmförening. 16 mm, 17 min. Distributed by: Stiftelsen Svenska Filminstitutet.

——— (1974), Dilemma, Sweden: Tensta Filmförening. 16 mm, 12 min.

——— (1978), Parallell (Parallel), Sweden: Tensta Filmförening. 16 mm, 19 min.

——— (1980), Vill du följa med mig Martha? (Do You Want to Join Me, Martha?), Sweden: Tensta Filmförening. 16 mm, 23 min. Distributed by: Stiftelsen Svenska Filminstitutet.

——— (1982), Betongen som blommar (The Concrete that Blooms), Sweden: Tensta Filmförening. 16 mm, 31 min.

——— (1986), Avskedet (The Farewell), Sweden: Tensta Filmförening. 16 mm, 30 min.

——— (1987), Hemkomsten (The Homecoming), Sweden: Tensta Filmförening. 16 mm, 43 min.

——— (1988), Middagsgästen (The Dinner Guest), Sweden: Tensta Filmförening. 16 mm, 50 min.

——— (1989), Vi måste göra något (We Have to Do Something), Sweden: Tensta Filmförening. 16 mm, 30 min.

Vera, Luis R. (1986), Fullbordat faktum/Hechos Consumados (An Accomplished Fact), Sweden: Stiftelsen Svenska Filminstituet and Luis R. Vera. 16 mm, 100 min.

——— (1988), Consuelo, Chile and Sweden: Stiftelsen Svenska Filminstituet, Arauco Films, FilmStallet AB, Sveriges Television AB TV2, Andres Martorell y Cia Ltda, Exat AB & Co. KB and Latino Film HB. 35 mm, 105 min.

Weiss, Peter (1952), Studie 1 – Uppvaknandet (Study 1 – Awakening), Sweden: Svensk Experimentfilmstudio and Arbetsgruppen för film. 16 mm, 6 min. Distributed by: Stiftelsen Filmform. Also in (2012), Peter Weiss. Filme, DVD, Germany: Vorgestellt von Harun Farocki. Filmedition Suhrkamp.

——— (1959), Hägringen (The Mirage), Sweden: Svenska AB Tonefilm, Peter Weiss, Gustaf Mandal, Helge Bylund and Éduoard Laurot. 35 mm, 82 min. Distributed by: Svea Film HB.

Names Index

A

Akerman, Chantal, 22, 26, 83

Akomfrah, John, 54

Albergo, Gianni, 97

Allende, Beatriz, 30, 33n10

Allende, Salvador, 30, 33n10

Álvarez, Guillermo, 6, 16, 49, 50, 51, 53, 54, 61, 78, 93–7, 108, 120, 126

Angelopoulos, Theo, 101, 103

Anger, Kenneth, 73, 74

Appadurai, Arjun, 11–12, 61, 135

Assadi, Saeed, 17, 39, 62, 63

B

Bagher, Reza, 16, 39, 54, 97–100, 103, 107, 136

Bakøy, Eva, 25

Ballesteros, Isolina, 12, 22–3

Bark, Jan, 46, 48, 49, 86, 89, 100, 101

Barth, Max, 42

Baudish, Paul, 38

Bayraktar, Nilgûn, 12, 22, 24

Behdad, Ali, 9, 26

Bengtsson, J. C., 75

Benning, Sadie, 26

Berghahn, Daniela, 13, 21–2

Bergman, Ingmar, 47, 49, 123

Bergman, Ingrid, 38

Black Audio Film Collective, 54

Blanco, Guillermo, 105, 107

Blomberg, Erik, 38

Boman, Barbro, 43

Bordwell, David, 24

Bourdieu, Pierre, 48, 62

Braniff, Myriam, 16, 52, 54, 100, 94, 104–8, 134, 135, 136

Branigan, Edward, 6, 7, 121, 135

Bräuchler, Birgit, 13

Brown, William, 26, 27

Buñuel, Luis, 73

Burbeck, Eivor, 43

Bussi, Hortensia, 30, 33n10. See also Allende, Salvador

Butler, Alison, 26, 27, 69

Buzzi, Willy, 42

Byström, M., 38, 39

C

Carayannis, Menelaos, 16, 53, 54, 60, 94, 100, 103, 104

Carlsund, Otto, 38

Castilla, Sergio, 30–32, 95, 108, 109, 134

Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 133, 134

Cherchi Usai, Paolo, 122

Cichecki, Karol, 47

Cineco (Cinecooperativo), 5, 6, 11, 16, 49–51, 118, 123, 128, 135

activist perspective, 61

festivals, 54, 63

Hägringen (film), 59, 93–7, 135

minor immigrant filmmaking, 37, 52, 53

Stockholm, 77

Underjordiskt sällskap (film), 79

Cinematheque (Stockholm), 53, 97

Cinémathèque Française (Paris), 71

Cortázar, Julio, 50

Couldry, Nick, 14

D

Dagens Nyheter (newspaper), 62, 111

Dalí, Salvador, 73

Danish Film Workshop, 45

de Certeau, Michel, 37, 129

Deleuze, Gilles, 6, 27, 74. See also Guattari, Félix

Deleuze and Guattari, 7, 8, 9, 16, 25, 26, 37, 60, 61, 69, 85, 133

Deren, Maya, 38

Devkino, 62, 64n18, 89

DI (Dramatiska Institutet) (University College of Film, Radio, Television, and Theatre), 51, 57, 81

Doll Castillo, Darcie, 106

Domec, Lilian, 122

Doxtater, Amanda, 13

Durovicova, Natasa, 12

E

Eggeling, Viking, 38

Egoyan, Atom, 22, 23

Einarsson, Oddvar, 48

Ekman, Gösta, 38

Engström, Robert, 100

F

Fares, Josef, 39

Film Culture (journal), 44

Filmform, 6, 40, 120, 121, 123. See also Independent Film Group

Filmfront (journal), 40, 42, 44

FilmTeknik, 118, 126

Flies, Irena, 48

Fonda, Jane, 32

Fossati, Giovanna, 117–19, 125, 128

Fraser, Nancy, 59, 129

Freddie, Wilhelm, 73, 75

Frohnert, P., 38, 39

Frow, John, 23

G

Galindo, César, 16, 49, 100, 110 fig. 13,

Fem minuter för Amerikas döda/Pichqa minutukuna ilaqtanchispi wanuqkunamanta (film), 108–11, 110 fig. 13, 135

Garbo, Greta, 38

Geranis, Manuel, 81

Grede, Kjell, 46

Grönstrand, Per Olov, 41

Guattari, Félix, 7, 33n4. See also Deleuze, Gilles

Deleuze and Guattari, 7, 8, 9, 16, 25, 26, 37, 60, 61, 69, 85, 133

Gunning, Tom, 8, 26–7, 73, 135

Guzmán, Patricio, 30

Gyllenberg, Carl, 41

H

Habermas, Jürgen, 9, 10, 59, 60, 63, 135

Halfen, Daniel, 47

Hamer, Bent, 47

Hansen, Miriam, 10

Hanson, Lars, 38

Hatoum, Mona, 22, 83

Hillarp, Rut, 40, 41, 43

Hjort, Mette, 13

Holmgren, Ola, 71, 73

Hultén, Pontus, 40

Huss, Markus, 72

I

Independent Film Group, 5, 6, 11, 16, 37, 49, 53, 62, 63, 71, 98, 135. See also Filmform

creation of, 38, 40–44

Stockholm Film Workshop, 48

Iordanova, Dina, 13

J

James, David E., 7, 8, 9, 25, 41, 60, 70

Jameson, Fredric, 60

JanMohamed, Abdul R., 12

Järva Kulturkommitté (cultural committee), 56, 81, 85, 101

Jönsson, Nils, 40, 43

K

Kafka, Franz, 7, 8, 42

Kafkas, Yildiz, 47

Kaleidoscope, 5, 6, 11, 16, 37, 39, 49, 51–6, 55 fig. 5, 56, 61, 63, 97, 98, 123, 135. See also Özer, Muammer

festivals, 6, 14, 54, 55 fig. 5, 93, 97, 98, 101, 123

Kambanellis, Iakovos, 103

Karim, Baker, 39

Kefalas, Christos, 81

Kessler, Frank, 128

Kluge, Alexander, 10–11, 16, 37, 42, 44, 46, 49, 54, 60, 61, 85, 135

Konsthall C (gallery), 125, 126 fig. 5, 127, 129

Kusturica, Emir, 22

L

L’âge du cinéma (journal), 44

Lambert, Jean-Clarence, 42, 43, 44

Larsson, Charlotte, 107

Larsson, Ingvar, 70–71

Laub, Michael, 48

Laurot, Edouard, 44

Leander, Zarah, 38

Le Grice, Malcolm, 9

Lennartsson, Eva-Lisa, 71

Lindgren, Arne, 40, 41

Lindquist, Ursula, 13

Lionnet, Francois, 12

Livada, Mihail, 37, 38, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 54, 71

Lloyd, David, 12

Loshitzky, Yosefa, 22, 24

Lucas, Gavin, 128

Lundkvist, Artur, 42

Lunnestam, Henry, 40

Lys, Lya, 73

M

Marciniak, Katarzyna, 12, 21

Marks, Laura U., 13–14

Martin-Jones, David, 13

Mekas, Jonas, 22

Minh-ha, Trinh T., 22

Moderna Museet, 40, 44

Morales, Luis Abanto, 111

Morris, Meaghan, 8, 9, 26

N

Naficy, Hamid, 14, 26, 28, 81

accented cinema, 21–5, 76, 82, 83, 85, 95, 100, 106–7, 112, 134, 135

An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Naficy), 12, 15, 21–5, 26, 28, 29

exile, 8, 15, 24, 26, 28, 29, 102

Nair, Mira, 22

National Library, 119, 120, 123, 124, 125, 127

Negt, Oskar, 10–11, 16, 37, 42, 44, 46, 49, 60, 61, 85, 135

Nelson, Gunvor, 47–8

Nemes, Endre, 42

Newman, Kathleen, 12

Nutley, Colin, 39

O

Oland, Warner, 38

Olsén, Nils, 41

Özer, Muammer, 16, 49, 54, 59–63, 77. See also Kaleidoscope

Álvarez, Guillermo, 53, 61, 78

Jordmannen (film), 89–3, 90 fig. 10, 118, 120, 134

Kaleidoscope, 6, 37, 51–2, 56, 123

Löftet (film), 101

Splittring (Breakup) (film), 39, 134

Tsokas, Babis, 79

Vill du följa med mig Martha? (film), 81

Özer, Synnöve, 16, 51–2, 62, 89, 91, 126 fig. 15

P

Paley, Maureen, 16, 47, 86–9, 91, 136

Palme, Olof, 30, 59

Panamas, Petros, 81, 103

Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 74, 99

Peters, John Durham, 14, 15

Petrie, Duncan, 13

Pick, Zuzana M., 15–16, 37, 44, 69, 81, 85, 109, 112

exile, 29, 30, 32, 61, 70, 107, 134

Pinochet, Augusto, 30, 31

Pisters, Patricia, 74

Postill, John, 13

R

Ramirez, Pedro, 101

Reuterswärd, Carl Fredrik, 40, 43

Ricoeur, Paul, 129

Robertsson, Anne, 43

Rodowick, D. N., 7, 16, 27–8, 69–70, 76, 80–81, 85, 112, 126, 134, 135

Roselius, Magnus, 32

Ruiz, Raúl, 29

Ruthrof, Horst, 25

Ryall, Solveig, 47

S

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 17, 100, 118, 125, 127

Schein, Harry, 62

Schütz, Adolf, 38

SEF (Svensk experimentfilmstudio) (Swedish Experimental Film Workshop), 40, 44

Seiden, Fern, 52

Shih, Shu-mei, 12

SIDA (Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency), 31, 95

Simma, Paul-Anders, 54

Sjöström, Victor, 38, 123

Skepi, Karafil, 80

Smets, Kevin, 13

Social Democratic Party, 30, 56

Söderbaum Christina, 38

Solanas, Fernando, 29

Solarides, Dimitrios, 81

Staiger, Janet, 24

Sternberg, Claudia, 13, 21

Stiller, Mauritz, 38, 123

Stites Mor, Jessica, 12

Stockholm Film Workshop, 5, 6, 16, 39, 45–9, 60, 62, 122–5, 135

Álvarez, Guillermo, 50, 51

archives, 119–20, 125, 128

Bagher, 100

Braniff, Myriam, 104

Carayannis, Menelaos, 101

Casa Matusita (film), 108–9

distribution, 56

Galindo, César, 108, 109, 111

genres, 88

Greek immigrant filmmaking, 81

Jordmannen (film), 52, 89

Underjordiskt sällskap (film), 97

Weiss, Peter, 42

With a Black Mark (film), 53

Streible, Dan, 124

Suner, Asuman, 25, 29

Swedish Film Institute (SFI), 3, 5, 6, 31, 43, 45, 46, 48, 49, 61, 62, 119–20, 122–7,

Swedish Public Television (SVT), 3, 5, 6, 31, 45, 46, 48, 49, 51, 54, 61, 86, 89, 97, 105, 108, 120,

Swedish Women’s Film Association (Svenska kvinnors filmförbund), 107

T

Tarkovsky, Andrei, 22

Taslimi, Susan, 39

Tassopoulos, Atanas, 81

Tensta Film Association, 5, 6, 16, 56–9, 63, 86, 101, 123, 128, 134, 135

Betongen som blommar (film), 58–9, 58 fig. 6, 120

distribution, 11

minor immigrant filmmaking, 37

Monos (film), 77–81, 125–6, 136

production, 11, 57, 58, 118

Vill du följa med mig Martha? (film), 81–5, 120, 135

Theunissen, Michael, 12

Thiassos (theatre), 102, 103

Thompson, Kristin, 24

Tigervall, Carina, 13

Tsalikis, George, 81

Tsokas, Charalampos (Babis), 6, 16, 37, 54, 85

archives, 120, 123, 125–6

Monos (film), 16, 77–81, 125–6, 136

Tensta Film Association, 56–9, 58 fig. 6, 63, 77–81, 84, 101

Vill du följa med mig Martha? (film), 16, 81–5, 120, 135

V

Veidt, Conrad, 74

Vera, Luis R., 54, 104

Consuelo, 3–4, 4 fig. 1, 13, 39, 44, 62, 134

Vertovec, Steven, 12

Vidal, Belén, 13

W

Wiene, Robert, 74, 75

Weiss, Peter, 42–4, 78, 81, 91, 98, 107, 114n18, 120

Avantgardefilm (Weiss), 42, 73

avant-gardism, 16, 42

exile, 42, 44, 71, 72, 73, 77

Independent Film Group, 38

Studie 1 (film), 70–77, 83–4, 86, 94, 95, 134, 135

White, Patricia, 26

Widerberg, Bo, 97

Williams, Raymond, 24

Wright, Rochelle, 13,

Z

Zalipour, Arezou, 24

Film Index

B

Betongen som blommar (The Concrete that Blooms), 57, 58, 58 fig. 6, 59

C

Casa Matusita, 108–9

Cholo Soy (I am an Indian), 111

Consuelo, 3–4, 4 fig. 1, 13, 39, 44, 62, 97, 104, 134–5

E

En chilensk flicka i Sverige (A Girl from Chile in Sweden), 31

En gammal melodi (An Old Tune), 64n17, 101, 103

F

Fem minuter för Amerikas döda/Pichqa minutukuna ilaqtanchispi wanuqkunamanta (Five Minutes for the Souls of America), 16, 108–11, 110 fig. 13, 112, 120, 121, 121 fig. 14, 135

För gulds skull (For the Sake of Gold), 108

H

Hägring (The Mirage), 17, 39, 42, 51, 53, 59, 62, 71, 78, 82, 83–7, 86 fig. 11, 99, 112, 120, 121, 124, 125, 126, 127, 129, 135

Havet är långt borta (The Sea is Far Away), 97–9, 100, 103, 112, 120, 121, 136

I

Interference, 16, 86–9, 120, 121, 125, 127, 136

J

Jordmannen (Toprak Adam or The Earthman), 16, 52, 78, 89–93, 93, 95, 97, 112, 118, 120, 121, 126 fig. 15, 129, 134

L

La battalla de Chile (The Battle of Chile), 30

La espera (The Waiting), 16, 104–8, 112, 120, 121, 134, 135, 136

La historia (The History or The Way of Lovers), 30, 31, 32, 109

Löftet (The Promise), 16, 54, 94, 101–4, 120, 121, 126 fig. 15, 127, 129

M

Monos (Alone), 16, 57, 77–81, 79 fig. 8, 83, 84, 96, 118, 120, 121, 124, 125, 126, 129, 136

P

Pinochet: Fascista, asesino, traidor, agente del imperialismo (Pinochet: Fascist, Murderer, Traitor, Imperialist Agent), 31

Q

Quisiera tener un hijo (I Wish I Had a Son), 31, 32

S

Splittring (Breakup), 39, 62, 97, 134–5

Studie 1 – 18 Uppvaknandet (Study 1 – Awakening), 16, 42, 44, 70–77, 72 fig. 7, 78, 80–81, 83, 84, 86, 87, 89, 94, 95, 99, 100, 112, 120, 134, 135

U

Underjordiskt sällskap (Underground Company), 50, 50 fig. 4, 51, 54, 79, 97

V

Vill du följa med mig Martha?, 16, 57, 58, 59, 81–5, 84 fig. 9, 97, 112, 120, 121, 135

Subject Index

16 mm film, 6, 17, 31, 40, 86, 108, 118, 120, 125

camera, 51, 57, 77

35 mm film, 3, 30

A

accented cinema, 15, 21–5, 26, 28, 37, 69, 76, 83, 85, 90, 93, 94, 95, 97, 100, 104, 107, 112, 134. See also Naficy, Hamid

An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Naficy), 12, 15, 21–5, 26, 28, 29

Albania, 80

animation, 45, 52, 88, 90, 134

archival practices, 5, 7, 12, 17, 25, 111, 117–22, 123, 125–9, 136

artefacts, 3, 6, 17, 117, 118, 119, 121–2, 123, 124, 125, 138, 129, 136

associations, 5, 6, 9, 11, 12, 16, 37, 52, 56, 61, 112, 122, 135

Austria, 38

auteur approach, 23, 24, 25, 29, 41, 42, 104, 118, 123, 124

avant-garde film, 7, 8, 15, 26–7, 38, 44, 47, 71, 77, 81, 86, 89, 98, 128

B

Baltic states, 38

Berlin, 38

C

children, 31, 32, 33, 54, 56, 72, 80, 92, 98

Chile, 3, 4, 16, 30, 31, 32, 38, 39, 101, 104, 108

exile, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33n6, 70

Valparaiso, 3, 4

class, 8, 10, 52, 56, 60

close-ups, 73, 74, 75, 78, 82, 91, 93, 105, 106

Cold War, 3

Colombia, 16, 51, 97, 126

corporeality, 75, 88, 89

counterpublics, 61, 63, 135

Cuba, 3

D

Denmark, 38, 45

deterritorialization, 28, 60, 72, 78, 95, 101, 112

and diaspora, 22, 24

in exile, 24, 81, 134

fabulation, 70, 89

of language, 7, 8, 25–6, 60, 70

refugees, 76

dialogue, 10, 42, 53, 63, 70, 80, 81, 94, 98, 100, 102, 115, 127

diaspora, 22, 44, 82

audiences, 14

cinema, 13, 21, 22, 24

and exile, 3, 21, 28, 91, 107, 134

filmmaking, 22, 23, 28, 29–30, 85

Latin American filmmaking, 109

and migration, 12–15, 22

public spheres, 11

digital copy, 5, 117, 118, 120, 121, 123, 124, 125, 128, 129, 136

displacement, 21, 22, 24, 83, 94, 95

dispositif, 118, 119, 124, 125, 127–9, 136

distribution, 11, 37, 40, 48, 51, 53, 56, 59–60, 62, 69, 117, 120–21, 122, 123, 128, 129, 133

documentary, 27, 31, 32, 41, 43, 47, 48, 50, 51, 52, 58, 59, 70, 76, 90, 97, 101, 108

Nordisk panorama, 111

E

Eastern Bloc, 3, 47, 50

editing, 31, 43, 45, 48, 57, 58, 58 fig. 6, 71, 77, 80, 81, 89, 90, 95, 103, 107, 108. See also montage

England. See United Kingdom

Erfahrung (experience), 10. See also Lebenszusammenhang (living context)

ethnographic work, 13, 14

European Union, 39

exile, 12, 14, 61, 75–6, 89

Chile, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33n6, 70

deterritorialization, 81

and diaspora, 3, 15, 24, 28

displacement through, 22

film workers, 38, 39, 102, 107

Greek filmmakers, 102, 103

Latin American filmmakers, 47, 104

Naficy, 24, 26, 28, 102

Pick, Zuzana M., 29, 107, 134

reterritorialization, 75

Weiss, Peter, 42, 44, 71, 72, 73, 77

experimental film culture, 40–44, 49, 117, 122, 125, 134

F

fabulation, 27–8, 69, 70, 75, 76, 80, 84, 85, 89, 90, 91, 107, 111, 112, 126, 134, 135, 136

feminism, 82–3, 84, 86, 87, 89

festivals, 32, 53, 71, 101

Kaleidoscope, 6, 14, 54, 55 fig. 5, 93, 97, 98, 101, 123

Göteborg, 63, 101, 121 fig. 14, 127

Nordisk panorama, 111

Stockholm Film Festival, 122

Uppsala, 63, 97, 105

film critics, 3, 4, 62

film grammar, 77, 78, 81, 93, 94, 97, 99, 103, 105, 106, 112, 118

film history, 3, 7, 8, 15, 16, 102, 117, 122, 133, 134

film school, 3, 51, 52, 89, 108

film stock, 57, 71, 73, 74, 77, 89, 105, 120

film studies, 8, 10, 12, 13, 15, 17, 21, 26, 28, 61, 97, 101, 133

film theory, 5, 6–7, 12, 15, 17, 25, 47

Finland, 38, 43, 51, 52, 89, 91

flashback, 94, 95, 96

France, 38, 108. See also Paris

G

Germany, 10, 32, 38, 42, 43, 52, 71, 91, 120

Gothenburg, 39

Greece, 16, 38, 39, 47, 50, 51, 80, 82, 101, 102, 103, 104,

H

Hollywood, 9, 23, 24, 25, 38, 52

I

identity, 13,14, 21, 23, 25, 29, 44, 87, 89, 111, 135

interstitial filmmaking, 21, 22, 24, 27, 28, 69, 82, 107

Iran, 16, 38, 39, 47, 97

Italy, 38, 48, 52, 97

L

language, 6, 16, 41, 53, 69, 70, 72, 73, 74

Deleuze and Guattari, 8, 9

deterritorialization of, 7, 15–16, 70

English, 33n8, 48, 53, 127, 136

fabulation, 17

film as a language, 5, 8, 39, 70, 71, 75, 136

film theory, 7

German, 10, 73

and immigrants, 53, 54, 60, 61, 81–2, 83, 87, 95, 100

national languages, 5, 136

Spanish, 94, 95, 97, 105, 109, 110, 127

Swedish, 14, 27, 53, 73, 83, 89, 91, 92, 93, 100, 102, 104, 105, 114n17, 136

translation, 53

Turkish, 52, 89, 92

and violence, 100

Latin America, 3, 30, 39, 50, 95, 109, 111

Lebenszusammenhang (living context), 11, 42. See also Erfahrung (experience)

locality, 7, 11–12, 14, 15, 61, 69, 70, 76, 87, 98, 112, 135

London, 86

London filmmaker’s co-op, 9

Los Angeles, 7, 23

M

Malmö, 39, 97

materiality, 13, 87, 88, 89

migration, 11, 12–15, 21, 22, 38, 39, 44, 61, 76, 93, 107

minor cinema, 6, 16–17, 18n4, 25–7, 39, 42, 43, 45, 61, 63, 69, 105, 118, 123, 124, 127, 128, 135

Deleuze and Guattari, 16, 25

deterritorialization, 8, 72

James, David E., 9, 11, 25, 60

minor literature, 7, 8, 15, 26, 27, 60

mise-en-scène, 94, 95, 98, 102, 103

modernism, 71, 72, 89

modernity, 11–12, 61, 70

montage, 92, 99, 103. See also editing

music, 77, 78, 80, 83, 89, 102, 104, 105, 109, 110, 111, 120

N

narration, 71, 75, 76, 83, 90, 106. See also voice-over

New German Cinema, 54

nomadism, 14, 15, 38

Norway, 35, 38, 47

P

Paris, 30, 32, 38, 40, 48, 49–50, 71, 73, 101, 108

pedagogy, 11, 46, 48, 49, 128

Peru, 16, 108, 109, 111,

Poland, 38

policy, 3, 5, 45, 46, 49, 56, 124, 125

public sphere, 10–11, 16, 37, 42, 44, 46, 48, 53, 59, 60, 61, 84, 85, 87, 112, 129, 135, 136

R

refugees, 38, 39, 75–6

Chile, 3, 4, 38, 39, 104, 107

Greece, 39, 101, 113n6

Iran, 17

Latin America, 30, 39

political refugees, 30, 38, 101, 104

Romania, 40

Second World War, 38

Spain, 39

representation, 4, 10, 13, 14, 16, 29, 59, 129

Romania, 43

Russian Empire, 38, 52

S

sexuality, 75, 76, 88, 106

shorts, 31, 32, 42, 43, 45, 51, 63, 71, 88, 89, 97, 101, 109, 111, 124

silent cinema, 38, 71

sound, 45, 57, 70, 72, 74, 76, 77, 80, 87, 88, 99, 106, 110, 114n18, 125

non-synchronized sound, 78, 83, 98, \100

synchronized sound, 78, 81, 83, 94

transition to, 38

soundtracks, 71, 72, 74, 76, 77, 78, 79–80, 94, 98, 99, 102

Spain, 39, 50, 51, 110

Stockholm, 3, 30, 32, 38–43, 47, 51, 52

Cinematheque, 53

immigrant neighbourhoods, 56, 59

the slab (Sergel’s Square), 78, 92, 94, 96

Stockholm University, 41, 47

suburbs of, 6, 56, 62

underground, 50, 51

youth recreation centres, 57

subjectivity, 10, 22, 29, 83, 87, 88, 118, 129

intersubjectivity, 7, 23

suburbs, 6, 56, 62, 78, 80, 96, 101, 102, 103, 112, 127

Super 8 film, 51, 86, 123

surrealism, 42, 44, 71, 73, 91

T

television, 23, 32, 39, 44, 57, 58, 62, 63, 87, 88, 89, 93, 97, 101, 103, 107, 120, 123

Third Reich, 38, 42

transnational cinema, 5, 12, 13, 14, 17, 23, 24, 25, 124, 136

Turkey, 16, 38, 47, 52, 56, 91, 92

U

U-matic transfer, 5, 120, 122, 125. See also digital copy

United Kingdom, 52, 86, 89

United States, 45, 47, 52, 86, 89

Uppsala, 63, 97, 105

V

violence, 106–9, 111

voice-over, 29, 78, 87, 88, 91, 92, 95, 109, 110. See also narration

W

women filmmakers, 6, 45, 48, 81, 82, 83–4, 107

women’s cinema, 7, 8, 26, 27

women’s movement, 47, 59, 84, 85

workshops, 5, 6, 11, 16, 37, 41, 46, 53, 61

World War II, 38, 43, 77, 103

X

Xeroxing, 86, 87, 88

Y

Yugoslavia, 38, 39