Spaces of becoming: the Stockholm Film Workshop as a transnational site of film production

Abstract

The aim of the essay was to present the Stockholm Film Workshop (Filmverkstan, 1973–2001) and its significance as a transnational site of film production. The films and the filmmaking at the workshop are considered as part of a minor cinema film practice in David E. James’s sense. James’s theory is complemented by returning to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s original concept of minor literature in order to stress an analysis that is based on film as a means of production and cultural intervention. This point is emphasized by a presentation and analysis of how various professional and non-professional filmmakers from Colombia, Egypt, Greece and Turkey made use of film at the Stockholm Film Workshop in order to intervene in their new cultural situations. Thus, the textual model of film analysis that is prevalent in Hamid Naficy’s seminal work on accented cinema is complemented with theories of cultural production in order to enable an analysis of a transnational film practice that is on a par with the immigrant experience.

Keywords:

• accented cinema
• film workshops
• minor cinema
• transnational film practice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. All three projects have been funded by the Swedish Research Council. The current one is called ‘The Cultural Practice of Immigrant Filmmaking’ (2013–2015).

2. For an application of Zimmerman’s theories in relation to the Stockholm Film Workshop and theories of the public sphere, see Andersson and Sundholm (2010).

3. For an introduction to the workshop and its relation to Swedish film cultural policy, see Andersson and Sundholm (2012).

4. There are no statistics available regarding the proportion of immigrants among cultural workers, but in interviews that we conducted with filmmakers from different countries and periods (for example, Sergio Castilla from Chile, Muammer Özer from Turkey and Reza Bagher from Iran), they have testified that immigrants were underrepresented throughout the 1970s and 1980s. For the Latin American filmmakers, the situation was different as long as they confirmed the political struggle.

5. Maureen Paley, who later became a successful gallerist in London, finished three films at the workshop, of which two have been preserved on U-matic – Spot and Interference, both from 1977.

6. The others who collaborated on the film were as follows: the late Silvia Carlsson-Camandona and Bengt Sundkvist (both from Sweden); Benito Muños and Eloy Pérez (both from Spain); and Nikos Charalampides and Kiriakos Papadopoulos (both from Greece). Of these, only Sundkvist had previous experience of film production as an electrician.