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"As film stars, actresses have throughout film history contributed to the film industry's glamorous surface, providing audiences with visual attraction and different representations of femininity. To talk about women in film as "invisible" may thus seem odd or even wrong. This book, however, is concerned with the paradox that on the other side of the camera, women are clearly underrepresented. This is true of contemporary film culture, and has been true historically, despite significant variations between countries/geographical areas, historical time periods and different roles/professions in film production, distribution and exhibition. This anthology recovers forgotten aspects of women's work and memory, tracing women's film work through the lens of Swedish film history, with a few forays into international film ventures. Using a variety of methods and approaches, including careful study of previously neglected archival material, lived experiences, interviews, and theoretical reflections on feminist historiography, the book explores themes of women's agency and (lack of) visibility in a cultural context very different to Hollywood, thus providing readers with a healthy counterweight to the dominance of Anglo-American material in film scholarship published in English. The articles deal with women's agency in a wide range of roles, in film production, exhibition and criticism, but also with new perspectives on stars/actresses and their agency, and including LGBT and queer identities.
The research presents material evidence of women's involvement in film culture being obscured and ignored because of its status as "women's work", and/or of marginal rather than mainstream interest. The book is divided into two parts, where the first part collects chapters that cover neglected dimensions of silent film culture and the use of archival film as cultural memory in documentary work from various time periods, whereas the second part of the book is focussed mainly on films and filmmaking in the 1970s and 1980s."

In the aftermath of the MeToo movement, during an ongoing pandemic, and in the midst of repeated demands for a 50/50 split between men and women in above-the-line positions, this book analyzes and interrogates the politics of gender focusing on the Swedish film industry, often considered to be the most "gender equal" film industry worldwide. While this gender equality (with a considerable proportion of women behind the camera) is much due to policies carried out of the state funded Swedish Film Institute, women filmmakers in Sweden still struggle with the same problems as do women in other national film industries. These problems entail having smaller production and distribution budgets than men and working in an environment involving recurring scandals of gender discrimination and sexual harassment. This open access book looks behind the statistics and explores the often complex cultural, legal, and political conditions under which women have entered a male-dominated industry and discusses women's strategies and efforts to promote change while providing evidence on how women's presence has challenged the industry by provoking critical reactions and introducing new ways to portray women on screen. Using a wide range of different sources (e.g. archival material, laws, contracts, films, biographical materials, and interviews), the book tells the history of the rise of gender equality efforts undertaken by the Swedish Film Institute and investigates women's possibilities to manage the rights to their work. It offers compelling portraits of pioneering women who have worked in or in relation to the industry and looks at the experiences of women currently working in the film industry. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Örebro universitet.

Swedish children's films frequently deal with issues of nation and ethnicity, specifically with "Swedishness". This may be most obvious in films based on the works of Astrid Lindgren, which abound with nostalgic images of the national culture and landscape. However, films about contemporary Sweden, such as Kidz in da Hood (Förortsungar, 2006) address these issues too. Kidz in da Hood is about children in the ethnically diverse suburbs of Stockholm and it tells the story of a young fugitive, Amina, who is cared for by a young bohemian musician. It is, interestingly, a remake of one of the first Swedish children's films, Guttersnipes (Rännstensungar, 1944). In this article I argue that Kidz in da Hood is a contradictory piece, in the sense that it both celebrates and disavows "Swedishness", as it substitutes the class conict of Guttersnipes for ethnic conflict.

This research is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at Malmö Queer Film Festival and Cinema Queer Film Festival in Stockholm, between 2017-2019. It explores the relevance of queer film festivals in the lives of LGBTQIA+ persons living in Sweden, and reveals that these festivals are not simply cultural events where films about gender and sexuality are screened, but places through which the political lives of LGBTQIA+ persons become intelligible. The queer film festivals perform highly contextualized and diverse sets of practices to shape the LGBTQIA+ discourse in their particular settings. This thesis focuses on salient features of this engagement: how the queer film festivals define and articulate "queer", their engagement with space to curate "queerness", the role of failure and contingency in shaping the queer film festivals as sites of democratic contestations, the performance of inclusivity in the queer film festival organization, and the significance of these events in the lives of the people who work or volunteer at these festivals. The thesis combines an ethnographic approach with post-structuralist discourse theory and insights from other fields, including the growing academic discipline of film festival research, to de-construct the entrenched meanings, representations and ideologies that are embedded in signifying practices performed at the festival. A recurring theme of this research is the way LGBTQIA+ persons living in Sweden find themselves abandoned and vulnerable in contemporary Swedish society. The thesis proposes that the queer film festivals become relevant through re-constructing the precariousness of LGBTQIA+ lives in Sweden, by engaging in various forms of micro-activism. The research describes how participants engage in micro-activist practices, bringing together people who become collectively aware that things can change. It unpacks the internal tensions between the various identity groups present at the festival, shows how these festivals struggle to construct a LGBTQIA+ community, and outlines the ways in which queer film festivals can be understood beyond the prism of identity politics. Through a detailed study of the two festivals, the thesis suggests a multi-faceted illustration of how micro-activism is performed in a post-rights society such as Sweden.

'Movies that exist merely to tell entertaining lies'?: Biography on Film; Thomas S. Freeman and David L. Smith -- Filming a Legend: Anthony Mann's El Cid (1961); Thomas S. Freeman -- Joan of Arc through medieval eyes and modern lenses: Dreyer 1928 and Bresson 1962; Elisabeth van Houts -- Blood, lust and the Virgin Queen: Helen Mirren's Elizabeth I; William B. Robison -- Shakespeare in Love and Anonymous: Two Films More or Less About Shakespeare; David Bevington -- That Hamilton Woman (1941); Samantha A. Cavell -- Twelve Years a Slave and the 'Unthinkability' of Enslaved Autobiography; Sean M. Kelley -- Abraham Lincoln and National Reconciliation in Lincoln; Kate Masur -- The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960); David L. Smith -- Infectious Enthusiasm: The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936); Bart K. Holland -- Filming and Formatting the Explorer Hero: Captain Scott and Ealing Studios' Scott of the Antarctic (1948); Klaus Dodds -- Inside JFK's White House: the Myth of John F. Kennedy and Thirteen Days (2000); Andrew Priest -- Power and its Loss in The Iron Lady; Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and Jon Lawrence -- Index