Swedish Sensationsfilms

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Swedish
Sensationsfilms
by Daniel Ekeroth
Bazillion Points Books
ISBN: 9780979616365

Daniel Ekeroth’s book Swedish Sensationsfilms is a cool but somewhat puzzling tome, it seems to me. I bought it because Swedish cinema is a large gap in my personal film knowledge, asides from the usual stuff by the likes of Bergman and, of course, Thriller (aka They Call Her One Eye), which obviously features prominently in this book. But along the way there were certainly some surprising things in terms of the questions the book gives rise to, once it’s dealt a small overview of the subject, beginning with the formation, in 1911, of Sweden’s National Board Of Film Classification, which was apparently the world’s first state sponsored film censors.

Okay, so for one, I’ve never heard of any Swedish exploitation films (including all the usual suspects) as being termed Sensationsfilms. It seems to me almost something that Ekeroth has made up as a new attempt to catalogue and lump the varying films into one collective genre (indeed, the back cover blurb cites other country’s genres such as Giallo and Ozploitation as an example of the usefulness of such a category. I may be wrong on that count, of course... it may just be a Swedish term for these kinds of movies?

Another thing of slighty head scratching magnitude is the subtitle of the book... “A Clandestine History of Sex, Thrillers And Kicker Cinema”... I mean what the heck is ‘Kicker’ cinema, right? Well that one certainly, if I’m to believe the author (and I’ve no reason not to... he writes extremely well), is some kind of Swedish term for... if I’m getting this right... a generation of youths who used to like to gather on the streets of Sweden and kick the heck out of phone boxes, stray people and each other. Which, frankly, seems to me a tenuous term or idea on which to base a sub genre of a specific genre I already wasn’t sure about in terms of it’s title but, hey, I don’t really care about that much because, as I said, the book is extremely well written.

It starts off with a short history of the rise of what the writer calles the Swedish Sensationsfilms and then we get another introduction chapter called Christina Lindberg, Exposed, where Lindberg tells of her early days starting out as a photospread model while still in school and then ‘playing hooky’ (or bunking off lessons, as we might say over here... although I sadly never did that myself) so she could shoot her first sexy movie, Maid In Sweden (as it’s best known in the West).

These two sections are then followed by the lengthy section which takes up 95% of the book, which is a page dedicated to all of the ‘Swedish Sensationsfilms’ which this writer has collected together (and I can only assume that this is the total of the films able to be labelled up as such under this generic banner... which is way less than I thought but still a sizeable chunk). It’s in this section that you’ll learn things like the film Kärlekend Spräk (Language of Love) from 1969, by Torgny Wickman, is the movie that Travis Bickle takes Betsy to see as his ‘date movie’ in Scorcese’s Taxi Driver.

Following this, there is a Glossary Of Curious Swedish Culture where certain terms, countries and areas are explained... I especially liked the section on Danmark (or Denmark as it is known over here) where the author informs us that “Danish is basically Swedish, spoken by an extremely drunk person with a hot potato in his mouth.” Yeah, I must admit I did admire the author of this one and some of the eloquent conclusions and turns of phrase he utilised as he mustered judgement on a load of, if I’m judging this right, mostly garbage movies with not much in the way of redeeming features.

After this there’s a Rogue’s Gallery section where various filmmakers of these titles, from both behind and in front of the camera, are given a few paragraphs of information, followed by a brief Acknowledgments section and then a final section called Twenty Sensationsfilms To See Before You Die... which is kinda self explanatory and I’m glad the writer did all the work for us here.

That being said, I was expecting to come away with absolutely shed loads of films I’d not previously heard of to hunt out in some form or another but, sadly, because the writer is fairly negative about a lot of them (not deliberately so, I suspect, in some cases), I only came away with a list of two... Mannekäng I Rött (aka Mannequin In Red, which is supposed to be a Swedish forerunner to the giallo) and Space Invasion In Lapland... neither of which were good enough for the writer to single out in his final section, it has to be said.

However, I have to say that although I haven’t found myself armed with the usual long list of future cinematic conquests, I did find the author’s style of writing hugely entertaining and he obviously knows a lot about his subject (as he happily frittered away his life watching dreck like this). So, yeah, I found Swedish Sensationsfilms to be an invaluable addition, in some ways, to the cinematic bookshelf and if you’ve a hankering to know more about Swedish exploitation cinema then this is maybe a good place to start. Have a look sometime.