Sweden’s early film industry was dominated by Swedish Biograph (Svenska Biografteatern), home to star directors like Victor Sjöström and Mauritz Stiller. It is nostalgically remembered as the generative site of a nascent national artform, encapsulating a quintessentially Nordic aesthetic—the epicenter of Sweden’s cinematic Golden Age. In The Life and Afterlife of Swedish Biograph, veteran film scholar Jan Olsson takes a hard look at this established, romanticized narrative and offers a far more complete, complex, and nuanced story.\nNearly all of the studio’s original negatives were destroyed in an explosion in 1941, but Olsson’s comprehensive archival research shows how the company operated in a commercial, international arena, and how it was influenced not just by Nordic aesthetics or individual genius but also by foreign audiences’ expectations, technological demands, Hollywood innovations, and the gritty back-and-forth between economic pressures, government interference, and artistic desires. Olsson’s focus is wide, encompassing the studio’s production practices, business affairs, and cinematographic conventions, as well as the latter-day archival efforts that both preserved and obscured parts of Swedish Biograph’s story, helping construct the company’s rosy legacy. The result is a necessary rewrite to Swedish film historiography and a far fuller picture of a canonical film studio.

The Life and Afterlife of Swedish Biograph: From Commercial Circulation to Archival Practices

Computers & Technology

Olsson, Jan

Networking & Cloud Computing

University of Wisconsin Press

Alfred Hitchcock: cultural icon, master film director, storyteller, television host, foodie. And as Jan Olsson argues in Hitchcock à la Carte, he was also an expert marketer who built his personal brand around his rotund figure and well-documented table indulgencies. Focusing on Hitchcock's television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-1962) and the The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962-1965), Olsson asserts that the success of Hitchcock's media empire depended on his deft manipulation of bodies and the food that sustained them. Hitchcock's strategies included frequently playing up his own girth, hiring body doubles, making numerous cameos, and using food—such as a frozen leg of lamb—to deliver scores of characters to their deaths. Constructing his brand enabled Hitchcock to maintain creative control, blend himself with his genre, and make himself the multi-million-dollar franchise's principal star. Olsson shows how Hitchcock's media brand management was a unique performance model that he used to mark his creative oeuvre as strictly his own.

Hitchcock à la Carte

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

Duke University Press Books

Alfred Hitchcock: cultural icon, master film director, storyteller, television host, foodie. And as Jan Olsson argues in Hitchcock à la Carte, he was also an expert marketer who built his personal brand around his rotund figure and well-documented table indulgencies. Focusing on Hitchcock's television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-1962) and the The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962-1965), Olsson asserts that the success of Hitchcock's media empire depended on his deft manipulation of bodies and the food that sustained them. Hitchcock's strategies included frequently playing up his own girth, hiring body doubles, making numerous cameos, and using food—such as a frozen leg of lamb—to deliver scores of characters to their deaths. Constructing his brand enabled Hitchcock to maintain creative control, blend himself with his genre, and make himself the multi-million-dollar franchise's principal star. Olsson shows how Hitchcock's media brand management was a unique performance model that he used to mark his creative oeuvre as strictly his own.

In 1941, media mogul Henry R. Luce exulted, "American jazz, Hollywood movies, American slang, American machines and patented products are in fact the only things that every community in the world, from Zanzibar to Hamburg, recognizes in common." It is as true today as it was then. From the early days of Hollywood, an insatiable demand for U.S. cultural products―in advertising, fashion, film, popular music, television, and much else―has had a profound and continuing impact across the globe. Media, Popular Culture, and the American Century explores a diverse range of Americana, where the borders between the real and the imaginary, dream and dystopia, America and the world, blur and disappear. Essays move from configurations of U.S. culture in the early 1900s to the age of Google and digital music.

Media, Popular Culture, and the American Century

Politics & Social Sciences

Bolton, Kingsley

Social Sciences

John Libbey Publishing

This book considers how public sector institutions can be transformed to better support sustainable development by exploring the concept of green inside activism and its importance for institutional change. The phenomenon of inside activism has been shown to be crucial for green policy change and this book focuses on public officials as green inside activists, committed to green values and engaged in social movement, acting strategically from inside public administration to change public policy and institutions in line with such value commitment. The book theorizes how green inside activism can contribute to a more sustainable development through institutional change. This theorizing builds on and relates to highly relevant theoretical arguments in the existing literature. The authors also consider the legitimacy of inside activism and how it can be reconciled with democratic ideals. This innovative work will appeal to students and scholars of public policy, political science and environmental politics.

Green Inside Activism for Sustainable Development: Political Agency and Institutional Change

Hysing, Erik

Reference

PALGRAVE~MACMILLAN

This study provides a meticulous account of the reception and regulation of cinema in the United States during a decade of upheaval, transition, and industrial consolidation that affected all aspects of film culture. Written in close dialogue with contemporary journalism, the volume focuses on Los Angeles film culture from 1905 to 1915. The study discusses exhibition practices, regulatory efforts and reforms, the critical role of women in all areas of film culture, and the burgeoning movement of film journalism that pivoted around the feature format and serial films. Jan Olsson makes an important contribution to both film history and urban studies on the Progressive Era as it took place within a multiethnic city predicated on Midwestern sensibilities.

Los Angeles Before Hollywood: Journalism and American Film Culture, 1905 to 1915 (National Library of Sweden)

National Library of Sweden

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Olsson, Jan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Olsson, Jan

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Olsson, Jan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Life and Afterlife of Swedish Biograph: From Commercial Circulation to Archival Practices

Hitchcock à la Carte

Hitchcock à la Carte

Media, Popular Culture, and the American Century

Green Inside Activism for Sustainable Development: Political Agency and Institutional Change

Los Angeles Before Hollywood: Journalism and American Film Culture, 1905 to 1915 (National Library of Sweden)