Sweden’s early film industry was dominated by Swedish Biograph (Svenska Biografteatern), home to star directors like Victor Sjöström and Mauritz Stiller. It is nostalgically remembered as the generative site of a nascent national artform, encapsulating a quintessentially Nordic aesthetic—the epicenter of Sweden’s cinematic Golden Age. In The Life and Afterlife of Swedish Biograph, veteran film scholar Jan Olsson takes a hard look at this established, romanticized narrative and offers a far more complete, complex, and nuanced story.

Nearly all of the studio’s original negatives were destroyed in an explosion in 1941, but Olsson’s comprehensive archival research shows how the company operated in a commercial, international arena, and how it was influenced not just by Nordic aesthetics or individual genius but also by foreign audiences’ expectations, technological demands, Hollywood innovations, and the gritty back-and-forth between economic pressures, government interference, and artistic desires. Olsson’s focus is wide, encompassing the studio’s production practices, business affairs, and cinematographic conventions, as well as the latter-day archival efforts that both preserved and obscured parts of Swedish Biograph’s story, helping construct the company’s rosy legacy. The result is a necessary rewrite to Swedish film historiography and a far fuller picture of a canonical film studio.

Jan Olsson is professor emeritus of cinema studies at Stockholm University. The author of Hitchcock à la Carte and the founding editor of Aura: Film Studies Journal, he has published widely on multiple aspects of film and media studies.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

 

Concepts and Considerations: An Introduction

1 Business and Economics

2 Starting Up the Lidingö Studio

3 Novel Production Practices: 1913

4 Productions and Alliances: 1914–1916

5 Conceptual Indicators of Changes in Film Style

6 From “Nonsense to Film Art: Historiographic Negotiations

7 Critical Recognition and Commercial Misgivings: Responses from Key Markets

8 Crossroads: From Lidingö to Berlin via Dalecarlia and London

9 Archival Practices: From the Swedish Film Society and First-Generation Scholarship to the Swedish Film Institute

Conclusion




Appendix 1. Intertitles and Other Indications of Temporal Shifts Between Reels in Films from 1912 to 1916

Appendix 2. Svensk Filmindustri’s Educational Department Catalogs

Appendix 3. Directors at the SB Studio (Apart from Sjöström and Stiller)

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index