Abstract
This paper proposes a reevaluation of the relationship between Swedish feature films and World War I during the years 1914–18, suggesting that a widespread visual repertoire of war imagery circulating in Europe and Sweden through the illustrated weeklies and cinema newsreels created a production and exhibition context in which various visual tropes from the war formed a baseline, taken-for-granted cultural framework for the meaning of Swedish films, even though Sweden was not directly involved in the conflict. The paper chooses as its main case study Victor Sjöström’s 1917 film Berg Eyvind och hans hustru in order to suggest ways in which the film’s insistent verticality and location shooting in the wilds of Northern Sweden was in dialogue with the pervasive wartime visual repertoire of trench warfare and no-man’s land. Furthermore, when the film was exhibited in Germany and France after the war, the strong affective response of continental critics to the “primitive” natural landscapes can also be read in the context of a new imagination of landscapes that were devastated by and subjugated to technology, which was the constantly reinforced message of the circulating visual repertoire of the war.
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