This essay explores a selection of Swedish feature films that were made with the explicit intention of emulating elements and conventions associated with American action, thriller, disaster, sci-fi, and horror films. Via case studies of Angry (Yohanna Idha and Christopher Schönning, 2010), Operation Ragnarök (Fredrik Hiller, 2018) and The Unthinkable (Den blomstertid nu kommer, Crazy Pictures, 2018), the article address how the intention to draw on American cinema informed production processes and marketing, how these films combined ostensibly American genre elements with local features, and how the resulting Swedish-American hybrids were received by critics. The analysis emphasizes the heterogeneity of films, filmmaking practices, and conditions of production—genre filmmaking in Sweden is often hampered by financial constraints and institutional obstacles, but there are also opportunities to break through, and the general trend is toward a mainstreaming of genre films in a national cinema that has historically been strongly associated with art films and social realism. A shift along such lines is also evident in the critical discourse, which displays an increasingly generous attitude toward genre filmmaking, nourished by hopes that such films will revitalize Swedish cinema. This implies a recalibration of the relationship between the national cinema and Hollywood’s commercial mass culture, which no longer necessarily functions as an a priori bad Other to oppose, repress, or resist.

This article aims to make sense of My Son Hunter (The Unreported Story Society and Breitbart News, 2022; dir. Robert Davi). The first part of the analysis discusses My Son Hunter as an example of right-wing counter-cinema that tries to simultaneously tap into the cultural prestige associated with feature filmmaking and provide niche audiences with “paracinematic” pleasures. The second part of the analysis explores cinematic form and filmmaking techniques in My Son Hunter, demonstrating how the movie extends a promise of “truth” via an affective bombardment that draws on melodrama and paranoid fiction, as well as the flexible modes of docudramatic approximation. The overall effect is to make logic and argumentation superfluous, which is indicative of how the film can be regarded as both symptomatic and productive of a “post-truth” condition.

This article is a reflection on its author’s experiences in teaching American media at the Swedish Institute for American studies from 2015 to 2021. By way of concrete descriptions of classes taught and topics raised, Frykholm makes a case for an approach to popular media that looks beyond both an all-too-limited focus on “mass media” and the text-centric, hermeneutically based discussions about media representations that have otherwise been the most common way of engaging with media in American studies. The article also dis-cusses challenges of interdisciplinarity that are a key concern not only when teaching media, but for the field of American studies more broadly. © 2024, University Press of Southern Denmark. All rights reserved.

Focusing on the introduction of a new government film policy in 2017, this article explores how the audience for Swedish cinema – little-watched art films in particular – is conceptualized in the context of film policy and as a topic of debate within the Swedish film industry. The analysis shows that the new film policy contributes – against its own explicit aims – to reproducing a deep-seated distinction between ‘wide’ and ‘narrow’ films. In addition, Swedish film policy has yet to adapt to the conditions of today’s digital screen culture. As a result, ‘narrow films’ are subject to low audience expectations and a de facto lack of performance accountability. This, the article argues, could be more a blessing than a curse, suggesting a need to rethink the notion of ‘failure’ and to further explore the prospects of ‘failure studies’ in the context of Swedish cinema.

The editorial outlines our main reasons for bringing scholarly attention to the theme of Scandinavian art cinema and screen cultures in transition at this moment. It provides brief summaries of the issue’s five feature articles and presents some suggestions for further research on the topic. We stress the importance of taking gender into account in future studies and call for a closer dialogue and more mutual engagement between scholars of art cinema and scholars of digital media.