The Cultural Practice of Immigrant Filmmaking

Front matter

Minor Immigrant Cinemas in Sweden 1950-1990

LARS GUSTAF ANDERSSON AND JOHN SUNDHOLM

The Cultural Practice of Immigrant Filmmaking Minor Immigrant Cinemas in Sweden 1950-1990

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

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 Sjöströms and Greta Garbos 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 Sjóman 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 Larssons ‘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 peoples 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 Séderbergh 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.

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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 Ozer, Reza Bagher, Sergio Castilla and Synnóve Ozer. 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 Sweder (2017).

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 films 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.

Fe has usually been approached as an object, a finalized artefact. It is, however, an

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).! Another critic wrote that a project like Veras 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.

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 for film (The Independent Film Group, 1950-72), Filmverkstan (The Stockholm Film Workshop, 1973-2001), Cineco (Cinecooperativo, 1976-83), Kaleidoscope (1981-88), and Tensta filmforening (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? The Stockholm Film Workshop became one of the most important institutions for independent, substandard (16 mm) shortfilm 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 Ozer who was the driving force and central person behind Kaleidoscope. Ozer 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 Deleuzes 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 Branigans 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.* 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 womens 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 Jamess 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.? 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 or (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). Gunnings 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-àvis 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-ops first films were found-footage work.

In his adoption ofthe 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 Morriss 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.”

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 ofthe 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 Óffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft.’ 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 Habermass 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 Habermass 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.

Habermass 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 Habermass astute analysis of a political and cultural community in crisis, Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge published Óffentlichkeit und Erfahrung as a direct response to Habermas.? Negt and Kluges 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 Habermass 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.