Skenet som bedrog: Mai Zetterling och det svenska sextiotalet

Abstract

Mai Zetterling (1925-1994) was a popular actress in the 1940s. In the 1960s, she directed four feature films. The films ? Loving Couples (1964), Night Games (1966), The Girls (1968) and Dr. Glas (1969) ? were met with increasing hostility by Swedish critics, however, and after the 1960s, Mai Zetterling only directed two more feature films in her life, the British Scrubbers (1982) and the Swedish Amorosa (1986). In the present dissertation, the director Zetterling functions as a starting point for a critical study of the Swedish art cinema institution and its historiography. Informed by a gender perspective, the dissertation deals with the films Zetterling directed during the 1960s and their reception. It also deals with the film cultural climate in Sweden during the period, and how the image of and the narratives about Zetterling have changed over time. Zetterling's star persona as an actress and eventually her biographical legend is described and analyzed in chapter one. In 1963, a reform changed Swedish film policy and the Swedish Film Institute was founded. This influenced the national film culture, which is discussed in the second chapter. In chapters three and four, narratology and gender theory are utilised in analyses of the four films Zetterling directed in the 1960s, whereas the fifth chapter deals with the reception of them and Zetterling's position in Swedish film historiography. A major point of the dissertation is that the encounter between Zetterling and the Swedish art cinema institution in the 1960s was problematic. On a very tangible level, she was a woman who tried to make her way into a male-dominated profession. Furthermore, as a popular actress she transgressed the boundary between mass culture and modernism when she made a claim to be accepted as an art film auteur. And in addition to this, as she had left Sweden for England in late 1947 and lived abroad for the rest of her life, she was also an expatriate who turned a critical gaze on the Swedish welfare state, the familiar who became the Other.

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