Docent Mats Jönsson
Institutionen för kulturvetenskaper
Göteborgs universitet

2010-2016

Purpose of the project and any changes in the purpose during the project period

The main purpose, "to map the style and function of SF-journalen 1930-1960", was achieved. Yet, the project became more transnational and interactive than originally intended. Its overall ambition to "open up for future, internationally anchored, research projects about audiovisual representation of actuality" was also accomplished - mainly thanks to an international research network (The Newsreel Research Network, TNN), which I initiated and developed within the framework of the project.

The three most important results from the project and an account of these results

Result 1. New information about Svensk Filmindustri (SF) and SF-journalen as a central institution and contender within the media landscape
The project has resulted in new valuable information about how SF has cooperated intimately within political, commercial, and medial elites, how the company skilfully marginalized collaborators and opponents within the domestic and international film industry, and how SF rhetorically, stylistically, and ideologically created newsreels according to explicitly pronounced purposes and instructions. For instance, new information and evidence about the ways in which SF:s monopoly within the domestic film industry affected and partly determined the extent of foreign newsreel on Swedish soil have been found. All such activities naturally strengthened the brand SF, which was the single most important task for the, in real economic terms, fairly unsuccessful newsreel genre. The in-depth analyses of SF:s short film section have been central in achieving these results. This section constituted an unusually successful and for the legitimacy of the film medium and SF very prestigious part of the organisation. Here, a few, internally trusted, and among the media industry and the general public highly well-known male members were responsible for editing, commenting, and producing the nationally saturated SF-journalen.

Result 2. Swedish and international contributions to news media research
Thanks to all the contacts I have established and nurtured during the project, I was able to initiate the first international network for newsreel research in the autumn of 2012. Today, The Newsreel Research Network (TNN) consists of about 40 researchers from research and archive institutions in twelve different countries, among them from Yale and Stanford University, from Sorbonne, University College of London, British Library, as well as from the rest of Europe and Scandinavia. To date, the research within TNN has been presented and compared at four minor conferences and three seminars. For the moment, and together with a web designer, I am creating a home page for TNN, which will be launched at its next conference in Stuttgart in March 2016. The unexpectedly large interest in TNN constitutes one of the most important and long-lasting results of the project. It also meant that my originally fairly limited national focus on SF and SF-journalen expanded towards more international and comparative areas of research.

Result 3. Inventory and usage of previously unexplored private archives
A substantial part of the results were realized thanks to formerly non-investigated private archives. The third important result of the project concerns these, in many cases, uncharted territories. When I found the hidden collections and scattered material, the project went into a new phase that lead to different questions and new answers. For instance, some of the private archives revealed private copies of stately and commercial documents that do not exist in any of the official collections in the traditional archives. Secret SF-documents during the Second World War constitute one such example. Another deals with private correspondence between media contenders in and outside of Sweden during the entire length of the period under study, while a third consists of last-minute notes in the scripts of the newsreels offering new insights into the meticulous ways in which the editors worked with the material. These private archives proved even more valuable and important when it became clear that Svensk Filmindustri still refuses to open its company archive to researchers.

New research issues that have been generated through the project
One new overall question that has been generated by the project deals with the understanding of news and the concept of news more generally, leading to sub-questions such as: What has been regarded as news and newsworthy at different points in time and in different countries? Has the development of the film medium been influenced by or itself influenced the form and content of news? Has the status of the film medium and the film industry changed because of or thanks to the newsreel genre? Consequently, the mission of the project can partly be described as an attempt to place the specific type of news representation in the unexplored newsreel into the overall history of news media.

The process of creating new comparative questions also needs to be highlighted. New questions to the material have dealt with newsreel in different countries during similar or different period, the ways in which one and the same event is represented visually similar or identical while the commentaries and sound substantially differ. One such project that TNN is working with for the moment deals with the ways in which the Suez crisis was represented in newsreels from various nations.

New questions linked to the possibilities, dangers and pedagogical usefulness of digital archiving in future film- and media research have also surfaced and partly been answered with the example of the newsreel genre.

International connections of the project
Apart from the creation of and still on-going work with the abovementioned TNN, the project has mainly established international connection through my active participation in different project such as the EU-financed Interreg-project "Centre for Scandinavian Studies Copenhagen-Lund". It was within this project that I met and began working with my two closest Scandinavian colleagues, and with whom I have written internationally published articles on newsreel. I have also established international connections via thanks to my active participations in and being invited to projects, conferences, and networks. I have also regularly invited international scholars to Sweden and Scandinavia.

Research communication measures outside the academic community
Throughout the project, I have made public lectures, interviews in radio, and open seminars.

The two most important publications from the project and an account of these publications

The first publication is a theme issue of the British publisher Intellect's peer reviewed periodical Journal of Scandinavian Cinema (vol 2, nr 3, Bristol: Intellect Press 2012, ISSN 2042-7891), where I occurred in two co-authored texts. The first, "Nazi Newsreels in the North: The European Masterplan and its Nordic Inflictions", was written together with two of prominent experts on newsreel in Scandinavia, Professor Tore Helseth from Norway and Doctor Lars-Martin Sørensen from Denmark. The second text, "German Film Distribution in Scandinavia during World War II", was written together with the abovementioned Sørensen as well as with the European authority on newsreel Roel Vande Winkel (also co-editors of TNN:s upcoming book on newsreel) and the father of Nordic Film Studies, Professor Bjørn Sørenssen.

The second publication consists of a case study of SF-journalen, which occurs in an anthology published by the National Library of Sweden (KB) in 2012. The book, "'Skosmörja eller arkivdokument?' - Om filmarkivet.se och den digitala filmhistorien", includes thirteen case studies from a partly RJ-financed conference that I organized together with the head of research at KB, Pelle Snickars, as well as with representatives from The Swedish Film Institute and Stockholm University. My chapter focuses one specific SF-journalen newsreel from 1953. It was the first in colour and depicts the 700-years anniversary of Stockholm city. The chapter is partly a complement to my sections in the introduction to the book, in which some of the institutional history of Svensk Filmindustri, its Short Film Section, and the entire Swedish film industry are described and put into context. It was during the work with this text that I first found some of the private archives that later would prove invaluable for the project.

TNN:s abovementioned and upcoming book, International Companion to Newsreel Studies, also needs to be mentioned here. (A cope will be send to RJ.) In it, I write part of the introduction as well as a separate chapter about SF-journalen that is written together with a Swedish doctoral student. In the spring of 2016, I will also publish a chapter in Blackwell's Companion to Nordic Cinema, in which SF is a central media institution.

The publication strategy of the project, with comments.
Orginally, the project was scheduled to be finalized with a monograph. Due to the scale of the material, the international links of the results and today's bibliometric assess-system, I have thus far chosen to mainly publish in international peer-reviewed periodicals and anthologies. Also, I am constantly trying to secure open access to all my publications. For instance, the anthology "Skosmörja eller arkivdokument?" was published in the book series "Mediehistoriskt arkiv", which makes all of its publications freely accessible as pdf-files on its homepage. Finally, I intend to construct the homepage of TNN as an interactive arena on which published research about and digitized examples of newsreels are posted, commented upon, and reedited, mainly in order for them to be freely used in future education.

Own homepage
http://www.gu.se/omuniversitetet/personal/?userId=xjomaf&departmentId=051120

Publikationer

MONOGRAFI 

1. Visuell fostran: Film- och bildverksamheten i Sverige 1939–1945, Lund: Sekel förlag, 2011, 219 s. ISBN 978-91-85767-78-6



ANTOLOGIER


a) Redaktörskap

1.  Mats Jönsson och Pelle Snickars (red.), Skosmörja eller arkivdokument": Om filmarkivet.se och den digitala filmhistorien, Stockholm: Kungliga biblioteket, 2012. ISBN 978-91-88468-27-7 http://mediehistorisktarkiv.se/wp- content/uploads/2014/04/22._SkosmAPrja_eller_arkivdokument.pdf

2. Ciara Chambers, Mats Jönsson och Roel Vande Winke (red.), International Companion to Newsreel Studies, London: Palgrave McMillan, kommande 2016/2017.



b) Refereegranskat bidrag

1. ”Svenskt nationaldagsfirande under kalla kriget: Om sannfärdigheten i en SF-journal från 1953”, "Skosmörja eller arkivdokument": Om filmarkivet.se och den digitala filmhistorien, red. Mats Jönsson och Pelle Snickars, Stockholm: Kungliga biblioteket, 2012. ISBN 978-91-88468-27-7

2. ”Introduktion: Filmens arkiv” (med P Snickars), , Skosmörja eller arkivdokument": Om filmarkivet.se och den digitala filmhistorien, red. Mats Jönsson och Pelle Snickars, Stockholm: Kungliga biblioteket, 2012. ISBN 978-91-88468-27-7

3. “Innocence by Association?: Everyday Nazism on DVD”, Imagining Mass Dictatorships: The Individual and the Masses in Literature and Cinema, red. Michael Schoenhals och Karin Sarsenov, London: Palgrave McMillan, 2013.

4. ”’Liknande uppdrag med omvänd prioritering’: Ny svensk filmforskning och filmarkivet.se”, Den nya svenska filmen: Kultur, kriminalitet och kakafoni, red. Erik Hedling och Ann-Kristin Wallengren, Stockholm: Atlantis, 2014.

5. ”The Swedish Model Non-Fiction Film Culture circa 1920–1960: Pragmatic Governance and Consensual Solidarity in A Welfare State”, The Blackwell Companion to Nordic Cinema, red. Mette Hjort och Ursula Lindqvist, Oxford: Blackwell’s, kommande 2016.




ARTIKLAR


Refereegranskad

1. ”Nazi Newsreel in the North: The European Masterplan and its Nordic Inflictions” (Med Lars-Martin Sørensen och Tore Helseth), Journal of Scandinavian Cinema, vol 2, nr 3, Intellect, 2012.

2. ”German film distribution in Scandinavia during World War Two” (med R Vande Winkel, L-M Sørensen och Bjørn Sørenssen), Journal of Scandinavian Cinema, vol 2, nr 3, Intellect, 2012.

3. ”Regarding Human Violence: The Hard Impact of Cinematic Soft Power”, Short Film Studies, vol 6, nr 1, Intellect, 2015.