- Welcome Home, Mr Swanson: Swedish Emigrants and Swedishness on Film by Ann-Kristin Wallengren, and: Välkommen hem Mr Swanson: Svenska emigranter och svenskhet på film by Ann-Kristin Wallengren
Ann-Kristin Wallengren’s fascinating study on Swedish and American films made during the classic era delves into a previously underexplored territory in the scholarship. Between 1850 and 1940, more than 1.2 million Swedes left their homeland. Per capita, only Ireland and Norway lost a higher proportion of their populations. Yet as many as 20 percent of these Swedish emigrants would eventually repatriate back to Sweden. A professor of film studies at Lund University, Wallengren explores dozens of films from the 1910s through the 1950s that narrativize these migrations and transnational identities. She investigates the mercurial mutability of both Swedish and American cinematic imaginaries over the decades under discussion. This engaging study looks not only at feature-length fiction films but also at short subjects, travelogues, documentaries, and [End Page 309] advertising films of the period. The breadth and thoroughness of the book’s archival research is impressive throughout.
The short introductory chapter sets up the historical and theoretical underpinnings of the project’s national, transnational, and emigrant/immigrant identities on film, contextualizing the book within the larger history of Swedish mass immigration to urban and rural enclaves in America. It also references emblematic figures within cultural studies (Benedict Anderson, Stuart Hall, Hamid Nacify, et al.), as well as a range of prior scholars on Swedish and Swedish-American culture (Birgitta Steene, Per Olov Qvist, Anne-Charlotte Harvey, and H. Arnold Barton, among others). The second chapter builds further in this direction, exploring the intertwined early twentieth-century parallel narratives of Sweden’s loss of population to emigration with a concurrent, modern nationbuilding project that would culminate in the welfare state, or folkhem (folk home), as it is known in Sweden. Silent Swedish propaganda films such as Emigrant, aka Amuletten (Gustaf Lindgren, 1910) were made with the cooperation of the National Society Against Emigration and warned naïve Swedes against the criminal dangers and deadly traps that awaited them in the new world. A number of such films from the 1910s and 1920s are now lost, but Wallengren finds that such films implied that either death or a career as a criminal was the destiny awaiting the films’ emigrant characters.
Chapter 3 turns to the 1930s, a decade in Swedish sound cinema that was marked by a large number of so-called “pilsner films,” that is, frothy escapist comedies. During the Great Depression, a large number of Swedish Americans repatriated to the old country, or returned to visit. Wallengren explores the ubiquitous, ambivalent presence of returning Swedes in a host of comedies and satires. These boastful Americanized Swedes are often negatively marked by their tastelessness (for example, hideous large-checkered suits, ugly glasses, and gum-chewing), yet the films also reveal a certain envy of these returning “dollar millionaires,” who had experienced apparent success in Yankeeland. The author notes a more conciliatory attitude toward America and Swedish Americans after the Second World War, most emblematically in the film Jens Månsson i Amerika (1947), starring the hugely popular comic actor Edvard Persson.
The fourth chapter looks at the circulation of Swedish films within Swedish America. Culling articles and reviews in Swedish American newspapers of the period (Nordstjernan in New York, Svenska Amerikanska Posten in Minneapolis, Svenksa Pacific Tribunen in Seattle, et al.), Wallengren reconstructs the distribution, exhibition, and reception networks of a diverse range of Swedish films imported to Swedish American enclaves. For example, travelogue films of the 1910s and 1920s like Sverige i bilder [End Page 310] were designed principally for the Swedish diaspora abroad and were largely constructed as idyllic, nationalistic, and culturally conservative views of the homeland. Wallengren also examines how classic fiction films from Sweden’s golden silent age traveled in America, as well as subsequent Swedish...