The hidden history of Swedish queer cinema
A new documentary uncovers an early tradition of LGBT storytelling in silent Swedish cinema, with wide-reaching influence. ”It must have been completely sensational to sit in a cinema as queer,” says director Eva Beling.
With Prejudice & Pride: Swedish Film Queer, writer, director and producer Eva Beling continues her examination of Swedish cinema – her previous credits include two television films about Ingmar Bergman, The Women and Bergman (2007) and The Men and Bergman (2008), and another about the film critic Nils-Petter Sundgren, A Life with Cinema (2011). Now, for her first theatrical feature, she’s crafted a stunning tapestry of queer Swedish cinema, ranging from the world’s earliest gay romance to the new wave of transgender films.
The seeds for Prejudice & Pride were sown during a conversation with Jan Göransson, head of press at the Swedish Film Institute: “We started to talk about Ingmar Bergman and a few of his characters; in every other film there is a queer character. Then Jan spoke about a queer entourage in the 1910s and 1920s. I had never heard about it.”
Keen to know more, Beling ploughed through a memoir by Swedish actor Nils Asther, in which he speaks openly about his relationship with the pioneering director Mauritz Stiller: “It just blew my mind. I’d never heard such a thing, that we have a queer cinema in Sweden.” Soon, Beling found herself embedded at the National Library: “I had to order up every film, so I started to order 10 at a time.” The titles quickly piled up: “I went back all the way to the 1910s, 1920s, 30s and 40s. I was up to 100 films; there were a lot of them. And when I sat there, I was like, this is amazing.”
Through this research, Beling discovered an exciting, alternative history of queer cinema. Often, discussions of early queer cinema tend to focus on German films such as Ernst Lubitsch’s cross-dressing comedy I Don’t Want to Be a Man (1918) and Richard Oswald’s Different from the Others (1919), which featured a sympathetic portrayal of a blackmailed homosexual. In telling the Swedish story, Prejudice & Pride raises interesting connections between the two nations. “Everything came out of Berlin,” Beling comments. “Mauritz Stiller and Greta Garbo, when they came to Berlin, could be themselves, and also get inspired by Berlin. German and Swedish cinema were collaborating a lot.”
Stiller helped Garbo secure a role in G.W. Pabst’s Joyless Street (1925), a key film in German cinema’s New Objectivity movement, which sought to move away from Expressionism towards a new kind of realism – itself a characteristic of much silent Swedish cinema. It’s also important to note that Herman Bang’s 1902 novel Mikaël, which served as the source for one of Germany’s canonical queer films, Carl Th. Dreyer’s Michael (1924), was previously filmed in Sweden by Stiller in 1916 as Vingarne (The Wings) – perhaps the world’s first gay romance on screen.
“When I sat at the library, they talked about this film from 1919, Different from the Others, as the first queer movie. And I said ‘What about Stiller?’ I mean, he did it in 1916! He made a two-theme movie: one theme for the straight audience and one for the queer audience. He should be credited for that. To make The Wings in that era, when homosexuality was forbidden… It must have been completely sensational to sit in a cinema as queer.”
The idea that queer audiences decode narratives in a different way from straight audiences is explored in detail in Prejudice & Pride. In one scene, the nuances of Garbo’s performance in Rouben Mamoulian’s 1933 Hollywood film Queen Christina are explored through the lens of the queer gaze. Given that Garbo’s career was launched by Stiller’s The Saga of Gösta Berling (1924), it’s a gaze through which she was viewed right from the start – and perhaps one that helped lay the foundation of her success.
“I think we have a lot to thank Stiller for,” says Beling. “He cast Garbo, Nils Asther, Einar Hanson, Gösta Ekman, those actors that had this androgynous way of being, and that’s what he put in the film. I think that Greta Garbo and all her charisma, her voice, everything, her way of being, was because of that success. Also, the fact that Selma Lagerlöf wrote the script [to Gösta Berling], and she was queer, and Maurice Stiller was queer. Greta Garbo was queer.”
Lagerlöf’s work, especially her novel Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness! and its subsequent film adaptation, The Phantom Carriage (directed by Victor Sjöström in 1921), was also a notable influence on Ingmar Bergman, as were the writings of Hjalmar Bergman (no relation). Hjalmar is featured in Prejudice & Pride as a pioneering queer creative, and it’s striking how similar the cross-dressing protagonist of The Girl in Tails (directed by Karin Swanström, written by Hjalmar in 1926) looks to Ingrid Thulin’s similarly attired character in Ingmar’s The Magician (1958). Is it perhaps the influence of these writers that are the root of the queerness in Ingmar’s own cinema?
“Yes, I am 100% sure. And also, as Nils Warnecke [curator of the Museum of Film & Television Berlin] says in my documentary, [Ingmar] was curious. So even though some of the characters and events are very tragic and very heartbreaking, it was there and he was exploring it. He was a curious man, and very, very interested in all of our human sides. And inspired, of course, but even if you’re inspired, you don’t have to put queer characters in a film. You have to be curious yourself.”
This re-examination of Bergman’s work is just one of the fascinating elements found in Prejudice & Pride, and the documentary is proving a revelatory experience for queer audiences: “I had a screening in Uppsala, where there were young people. They were quite upset after the screening because they felt like ‘Why hasn’t anyone told me about this? Why haven’t I studied this in school? Why do I see this now, when I’m 18 years old?’”
