© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved
Rune Waldekranz: Swedish pioneering film historian
By the turn of the millennium, as cinema had celebrated its hundredth birthday and New Historicism had been established as a central methodological approach to film studies, the legacy left behind by the classical film historians of the first generation – Jean Mitry, Georges Sadoul – had also been critically revisited.1 The globalizing general surveys of the historians of the old school, with their underlying teleological assumption that the new film medium had gone from strength to strength, suddenly appeared naive and simplistic with the emergence of new perspectives in film history – of micro-histories as well as of technological approaches to the medium. Moreover, with the establishment of new technologies like the VCR, which provided easy access to older film material, the many lapses of memory in the historical textbooks and the obvious misinterpretations that followed, the history of cinema obviously needed to be rewritten, and the early historians were often reduced to the role of springboards in academic texts, in order to demonstrate that much needed to be revised.
However, in the writing of film history, not only have there been significant shifts between historical paradigms, but there are also obvious language barriers, which means that several global histories of cinema have actually remained local, in the sense that they have only been accessible to the few who are in command of a minority language. Such is the case of the Swedish film historian Rune Waldekranz (1911–2003). Born only fifteen years after cinema came to Sweden, he shared with both Mitry and Sadoul the condition of being almost of the same age as the new medium. With a monumental film history in three volumes, from the beginnings to 1990 (2601 pages in all), Waldekranz is one of the most important first-generation historians.2 However, his work is all the more interesting as it covers a wide range of fields within film culture, from film criticism, via scriptwriting and production, to academia.
As a young academic, Waldekranz started his career as a leading film critic in the late 1930s in Svenska Dagbladet, one of the most important Stockholm-based daily papers. As a critic, and writing under the signature Roderick, he was notable both for his enthusiasm and for his well-intentioned and yet often quite severe judgments if a film had nothing fresh or innovative to offer. ‘Roderick’ in fact was one of the truly original voices in Swedish film culture at the time, both internationally oriented and very familiar with Swedish and Nordic national cinemas and their specific traditions. It should therefore have come as no surprise that in 1942 Anders Sandrew – founder of the second largest Swedish film production company – recruited the thirty-one-year-old Waldekranz and made him chief of production. He stayed at the Sandrew company for more than twenty years, including the year when the famous Swedish film reform was launched, 1963, in which new policies for state subsidies were established and the Swedish Film Institute was founded.
During his years with Sandrew, Waldekranz became one of the legendary producers of Swedish film history. He acted as production manager for no less than 67 films, of which he himself produced more than 50. He also acted as scriptwriter for eight films, either alone or with Anders Henrikson under the signature ‘de Canaille’ and ‘de Quelque Fleurs’, a travesty of the well-known French authorial duo from the late nineteenth century, Gaston de Caillavet and Robert de Flers. However, Waldekranz also became a pioneer in the launching of international co-productions – a new trend in 1950s Swedish cinema – as well as of Swedish films intended for an international audience. In 1950, he went to Hollywood with two other Swedish producers to visit MPAA (Motion Pictures Association of America), and he returned with the conviction that now was the right time for a new golden age of Swedish cinema. Among the first films he produced was Alf Sjöberg's adaption of Strindberg's Fröken Julie (Miss Julie, 1950) – a project launched by Waldekranz – which has become one of the classics of Swedish cinema, as well as a good example of the new film wave aimed at international audiences. Waldekranz was also the producer of two Bergman films, Gycklarnas afton (Sawdust and Tinsel, 1953) and Kvinnodröm (Dreams/Journey into Autumn, 1955), as well as of Mai Zetterling's first feature, Älskande par (Loving Couples, 1964).
Waldekranz himself has written on these years and on his own role in Swedish film culture in the preface to the fifth volume of the Swedish Filmography.3 It may seem inappropriate from a scholarly point of view for someone so involved in the film culture of the time to write such a preface. Waldekranz, however, is far from glorifying his own work at the expense of others; on the contrary, he scrupulously accounts for his former competitors’ works during the decade. In a characteristically modest voice, he admits that he had been wrong in predicting a new golden age, but still argues that his prediction was not entirely mistaken, since it was during the 1950s that Ingmar Bergman first reached out to an international audience. He concludes, however, in a rather grander register: ‘This is indeed no unimportant matter – a royal oak, with its rich and powerful foliage, had taken root and found power of growth in the barren soil of Swedish film.’4
In 1964, Rune Waldekranz became founding director of Sweden's first film school, part of the Swedish Film Institute and established as a result of the film reform, a hothouse with the aim of fostering a new generation of directors. The film school thus was a vital part of the so-called new wave of Swedish cinema in the 1960s. The winding up of the film school by the end of the decade, when it was transferred to the Dramatic Institute, may have contributed to Waldekranz's choice of a further new field of activities. After having completed his licentiate thesis in 1969, devoted to the first ten years of Swedish cinema from 1896 to 1906, Waldekranz was finally appointed the first full professor of film studies in Sweden at Stockholm University in 1970, his department being situated at the newly built Film House, together with the Swedish Film Institute and several other practical and theoretical institutions related to theatre and film culture. Here, he played a central role in establishing the new academic subject of cinema studies, with a double focus from the beginning, both on individual films or directors and on cinema culture in general. In this function, he also supervised many scholars from the first Swedish generation of academics within cinema studies, such as Jan Olsson from Lund University, who defended his doctoral thesis in 1979 and later became one of Waldekranz's successors as Professor at Stockholm University. Even after Waldekranz's retirement as professor, he returned as supervisor for several dissertations, thus contributing actively to the development of the new discipline across several decades. Waldekranz also continued to play a vital part in the Swedish Film Academy to the end of his life.
To evaluate Waldekranz’s importance as film historian is no easy task. His monumental film history is divided into three parts: the first deals with the pioneering age 1880–1920; the second, called ‘The Golden Age’, spans 1920–40; and the third volume covers world cinema in the period 1940–90 – a quite impossible task. The best volume among the three is without a doubt the first. Waldekranz himself had devoted most of his own research to this period, and although he sometimes adopts a traditional teleological perspective, his discussions are remarkable, especially of what he calls ‘cinema before cinema’, but also of the different aspects of the early years of cinema's establishment, from the first attempts of the ‘period of craftsmanship’ to the ‘first industrial epoch’. Although the book is written in a traditional way, as a seamless account of a series of causal developments, it is striking to what extent Waldekranz succeeds in rendering many of the complexities and contradictions of early film history. With the second volume, however, a slight change of perspective can be noted. Here, the cinephile seems to take over from the scholar. It was during these years that Waldekranz himself discovered the film medium, and this love for cinema appears throughout the book. As a learned filmgoer, he seems to be someone who goes to the movies out of passion rather than out of scholarly interest. Here, the perspective is less reflective and perhaps slightly less original than in the first volume, and more the work of a great storyteller who wants to communicate his version of film history. It still remains fascinating though, not least because of its deeper studies of certain periods – ‘the roaring twenties of Hollywood’ or the ‘German painterly school’, to take only two examples. The choice of periods may remain quite conventional, but nevertheless the different periods which are dealt with are presented in a very personal way. This is really Waldekranz's own film history, and it may therefore also be read from a meta-perspective: which films or periods had particularly impressed him? However, in the third volume, Waldekranz definitely tends to lose his focus in the overwhelming mass of facts concerning countries, directors and developments. Badly copy-edited, due to the publisher's hurry to get it out in 1995 for the celebration of 100 years of cinema, it was also badly received by the critics – indeed a sad finale for a man who devoted his entire life to film.
To do justice to the innovativeness of Waldekranz's work, it becomes clear that one should turn to his studies of early cinema. His unpublished licentiate thesis, ‘Living Pictures: film and cinema in Sweden 1896–1906’, which seeks to investigate and describe the pioneering years when the film medium was established, is no less than a scholarly masterpiece.5 It covers a range of perspectives, from sophisticated archival history to an analysis of the relations between film and its audiences as well as society in general. During the past decade, the revival of interest in early cinema has led later Swedish scholars to rediscover and re-evaluate the importance of this early work. A later book, Så föddes filmen (The Birth of Cinema), is also a minor classic in its contextualizing of early cinema avant la lettre, before the new historians made it their task, both in relation to entertainment culture and to modern technology, to theatre melodrama and to pre-cinema.6 In the last essay that Waldekranz published, for the centenary of cinema, he returns to the question at the heart of his own work: the new film medium and its relation to modernity, or as he put it, to the age of technics.7 Whether it is rockets, motor vehicles, trains, aviation or even computers, cinema seems to have enjoyed a privileged relationship with them all, revealing an important aspect of the medium in itself: that it lends itself to intimate relationships with all possible modern technical devices. Towards the end of the article, Waldekranz speaks prophetically of this ‘hitherto only anticipated world’, which, according to him, will nevertheless leave room for the collective experience of moving images within the institution of cinema.
It remains clear that Waldekranz in many respects appears as a strikingly modern historian. Many of his works in fact anticipate discussions that later historians claim to have invented. His analysis of the history of early cinema and its complex connections to modernity is both precise and profound. For everyone who has read (or has had linguistic access to) Waldekranz, it is not only the periodicity or the general approaches to film history that they may consequently feel need revision, but also the meta-aspects of film history, which tend to privilege new approaches and perhaps overestimate their importance in relation to so-called ‘old’ or ‘classical’ history. The example of Waldekranz demonstrates not only that the linguistic barrier needs to be surmounted in the field of film history, but also that ‘old history’ may be just as vital as the very newest.
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1 Jean Mitry, Histoire du cinéma, Art et industrie I, 1895–1914 (Paris: Editions universitaires, 1967); Georges Sadoul, Histoire générale du cinéma – Le cinéma devient un art 1909–1920 (Paris: Denoël, 1952).
2 Rune Waldekranz, Filmens historia, De första hundra åren, Från zoopraxiscope till video, vols 1–3 (Stockholm: Norstedts, 1985, 1986, 1995).
3 Rune Waldekranz,’Kriser och kransar i 1950-talets svenska film’, Svensk Filmografi, vol. 5 (1950–9), pp. 9–29.
5 Rune Waldekranz,’Levande fotografier, Film och biograf i Sverige 1896–1906’, unpublished thesis (1969), The Library of the Swedish Film Institute.
6 Rune Waldekranz, Så föddes filmen (Stockholm: Norstedts, 1976).
7 Rune Waldekranz,’Filmens spegling av teknikens tidsålder’, Filmen 100 år, Tekniska museets årsbok (Stockholm: Daedalus, 1996), pp. 1–30.
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