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RISE OF THE SWEDISH CINEMA
FILMS appeared in Sweden some six months after the first show given by the Lumiere Brothers in Paris. One of the Lumieres' salesmen and photographers, A. Promio, was in Stockholm in 1897 and photographed the arrival of King Oscar II to open the Industrial Exhibition. Developed by the Numa Peterson Company, the film was shown to the king the same evening. For the first few years this company distributed the short pieces of film which, in Sweden as elsewhere, comprised the early programmes.
The first Swedish film-makers to emerge were Charles Magnusson and Julius Jaenzon, who made newsreels for showing both in Sweden and overseas. In 1905 Magnusson was in Christiana to record the entrance of King Haakon, and two years later Jaenzon was in America making a film of Teddy Roosevelt. In 1909 both cameramen began to make films for Svenska Biografteatern, which had been founded two years earlier at Kristianstad, a small provincial town in the south of Sweden. In 191 1 the company was transferred to Stockholm and the first studio was built.
In form, the early Swedish films differed very little from the early Danish, French or American films. Their makers were looking for action and they found it most readily at, for example, the circus. The camera remained static and the action was artificially concentrated into a small area in front of it. Even the first group of films, however, included one with a national theme which could not be duplicated elsewhere. V armldnningarna {Men of Varmland), adapted from an opera which was to be filmed on several occasions, gave an early hint of what was to become a characteristic Swedish concern with national folk-lore and the national landscape. Among other early Swedish films with distinctively national themes were Brollopet pa Ulfdsa {The Wedding at Ulfdsa), Emigranternas oden i Amerika {The Emigrants' Fate in America) and Froken Karlsson.
In 191 2 Magnusson engaged the two men who were to transform a small struggling unit into a mature and vigorous school of cinema. Victor Sjostrom
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