At the disputationerna in film studies at the university of Stockholm in the decades – from the 1980s to the late 00’s – expect at least a question would be asked from the audience. Happy with the sarcastic sting of death, wrapped in the ostensibly gentlemannamässiga twists and turns on the unmistakable lundensiska. I know. I myself was one of many who met, when it once went.
the Author himself was as gentlemanly, in the impeccable suit, höknäst skarpskuren and with the ancient, piercing gaze where he sat far forward in the auditorium. And ancient he was, Gösta Werner, when he passed away in 2009 at 101 years of age, after a long life in film’s services.
So did he also with a lot. Co-founder of the Lund univeristy film studio in 1929, from the mid-1930s, a journalist in, inter alia, “Filmjournalen”, the co-founder of Filmpublicisternas association in 1937, the controversial contractor for the German film Ufas Swedish branch during the second world war, in 1945 the editor of the magazine Biografbladet, which under his leadership became a qualified forum for was film critic, with Bonnier’s Literary Magazine as a model.
in Addition, Werner award-winning director for the now-kanonförklarade experimentfilmen ”Midvinterblot” (1945) who is also a film director, but mainly a prolific director of beställningsfilm, including the success of ”To kill a child” (1952) after Stig Dagerman literary model – and then in the mature age be the first to pursue doctoral studies in the newly established subject of film studies in 1971, with a thesis on Mauritz stiller’s movies. Not to mention the writing of a couple of dozen books.
it is strange that it has taken so long before someone saw the potential in examining this destiny from an academic point of view. The more grateful, then, to Emil Stjernholm defended my doctoral thesis ”Gösta Werner and the film as art and propaganda” (other media archives, Lund university, sweden), in Swedish, also it is a rarity to be thankful for in these days.
It Stjernholm focusing on is how Werner, alternating theory with practice, journalism and research with assignments in the film industry, in a way that, with time, become increasingly rare with the growing professionalisation of the respective fields. He was thus in the truest sense of the pioneer and early player in the film cultural field.
Maj-Britt Nilsson, Gösta Werners film ”the Street” from 1949. Photo: Mary Evans / IBL Bildbyrå
Now, can Bourdieu’s fältbegrepp seem trite but is, in this case well-founded, because it is not used on an already ”färdigbildat” kulturfält, where various well-known contractors are fighting for space. This concept is used instead of a film’s box in the making, and how the Werners strategically position themselves (or father forward, one is tempted to say) in the field’s different areas: one moment, he gathers cultural capital within the theory (filmdebatt, skriftställarskap), in the other in practice (production, directing, etc.), competencies – the ironic, but logically enough – to the end end up in conflict with each other.
Werner was a key figure in and for the time when the Swedish film cultural field was and, not least, to his utvecklingskurva both as a writer and filmmaker is saying something about the emergence of film culture in Sweden and its various institutions at large. Werner is thus used as a sort of prism to get a glimpse at the interaction between the individual and society: how the contemporary, the historical situation and institutional practices shaped him, while he in turn shaped them.
Particular emphasis is placed on the early filmstudiomiljön in Sweden, a understuderad part of the filmvetenskapens prehistory, which Stjernholm rightly points out. But the great focus is also given to the fact that the Werners way into the film industry went through it by the nazis controlled the Ufa, during the second world war formed a Swedish production unit for the journal – and short films in Stockholm, where Werner came to work, inter alia, with local touches to their newsreels.
With fascinating detail on the basis of, inter alia, Werners voluminous personal papers, concerning both the saved and the in a suspicious way are missing, ” observes Stjernholm that Werner was a key player in the propagandakriget on Swedish cinema screens. Not unexpectedly, this came to shape the image of his filmmaking for a long time to come. Not least the ”Midvinterblot” was a watershed, by some, accused of spreading nazi children, of other acclaimed it for its bold design. The latter heard the author Peter Weiss, although he was experimentfilmare.
at the same time looking for Stjernholm avoid it as a historian been called ”presentism”, that is to say, the past is mainly explained on the basis of contemporary values. Rather, he shows, but for the sake of excuse something, on the contradictions, paradoxes and ambivalence of the Werners relation to Nazi germany’s active cultural policy in Sweden. In high level there appears to have been about a karriärism and a pragmatism bordering opportunism, not unlike the Zarah Leander accused of.
in addition, an in-depth aestheticism, which under the modernist banner seems to have come out with both the one and the other. Consider his deep admiration for the Russian, a propagandist russia and travel to the Soviet union and the film company Mosfilm, at the initiative of the soviet tourist office in 1936. It is a political ambivalence that Stjernholm tracks all the way back to the Werners membership in a radical student club in Lund, marked by a conservative novelists of craze mixed with public sympathies (incidentally, the nursery for prominent socialists such as Tage Erlander and Ernst Wigforss).
Even when Stjernholm studying Werner as a director, he focuses on context rather than highlight him as a forgotten auteur. And it is undeniably fascinating how Werner oriented in rekordårens Sweden and now propagated for the welfare state. During the 1950s, when film was the subject of great interest from both government agencies, private companies and various associations, was Werner, one of the most prolific directors of beställningsfilm.
It was for both large corporations (SJ, Gustavsberg), and non-profit organizations (Save the Children), and tellingly was the highly acclaimed ”To kill a child” a movie of an insurance company. Werner was then, like now canonized colleagues in other countries (Joris Ivens, Dziga Vertov, Robert Flaherty) its main artistic outlet in the beställningsfilmen.
Emil Stjernholm has achieved both wide and in the very best sense of the word nerdy study (tellingly are the notes over a hundred pages, pure christmas eve for calendar lovers), and has clearly succeeded in its intent: on the basis of a kultursociologisk approach to show how Gösta Werners livskurva reflects the Swedish filmkulturens development from the periphery to the center, from an unknown to the institutionalized and at the same time throw light on a negligerad Swedish cinema beyond film.
