The main aim of this dissertation is to examine the different childhood discourses permeating Swedish children’s cinema. This is done through close readings of three films that, each in their own way, play an important role in the history of this tradition: THE CHILDREN OF FROSTED MOUNTAIN (Rolf Husberg, 1945), THE CHILDREN OF BULLERBY VILLAGE (Olle Hellbom, 1960) and ELVIS! ELVIS! (Kay Pollak, 1977). Other subjects analysed are media debates about children’s film from the periods in which the films were produced, as well as official reports on the same subject. Taken as a whole, these elements form a significant body of material, describing the notions of children and childhood, as well as ideas around children’s film as medium, that predominated in Swedish society at three given moments in the 20th century. The study shows, that the most striking characteristic is that ever since 1945, when the first film specifically made for children was produced in Sweden, such films have been created with the intention of ‘benefiting’ the young audience. This ‘cinema of best intentions’, in turn, contains a number of attributes that are not always as unequivocally positive as they might initially seem. One of the main starting points for this exploration comes from modern childhood studies, according to which every given time and culture has its own complex of ideas, understandings and representations of children and childhood. Another central theoretical source is Michel Foucault. His ideas of power and knowledge, discipline and oppression, as well as his methodology, permeate this study. From this point of view, there is an aspect of ‘best intentions’ children’s cinema that can be seen as imposing ‘the oppression of benevolence.’ The closing discussion shows how the Swedish children’s film, today as always, is inhibited by factors such as faithfulness to the written original, fear of upsetting the young audience and commercial demands.

During World War I, war films became an important part of Swedish cinema programs. Newsreels as well as war related fiction films from the different battling nations were distributed to film theaters around the country. With these new films, the recently established censorship bureau also got new duties to consider. Aside from protecting public moral and the youth, the censors were now expected to uphold the Swedish neutrality policy in the domain of cinema. Material sensitive for diplomatic relations or potentially politically arousing for the audience was removed or edited. There were several reasons as to why cinema was singled out as the most important medium to control during these sensitive times. The authentic aura of moving images together with a fear of the reactions of mass audiences made the risk of biased propaganda seem greater. This thesis analyzes the complex web of relations between Swedish neutrality, media specificity discourse and censorship of World War I films. Examples of censorship of both newsreels and fiction films are discussed in relation to media specificity discourse in trade journals and daily newspapers of the time.

The subject of non-theatrical films is an understudied topic in archival science. This paper shows how the different approaches to censorship measures that were in play during the 1920s have affected the archiving of non-theatrical films. In the advent of technical and artistic advancement of the film medium, non-theatrical film production had become a prolific business in both the USA and Sweden during the 1920s. At this point in time, filmmaking had become sophisticated enough to tackle more ambitious narratives, while non-fiction filmmaking was still in its gestational period before the 1930s when documentary filmmaking started to be regarded as an art form. As two major film nations of the 1920s, American and Swedish lobbying groups had different views on censorship legislation. In 1911, Sweden founded the first federal censorship bureau in the world, Statens biografbyrå. In America on the other hand, the National Board of Review vehemently opposed any federal attempts to legislate the contents of film. Instead, the National Board of Review implemented a different tactic to sanitize film by incentivizing high quality filmmaking through different strategies that were based on film producers’ voluntary cooperation. Through comparative critical discourse analysis of two case studies, this study found that the archival findings from Tullbergs film and Baumer films were symptomatic of being created during the evidence paradigm, as defined by Terry Cook, where the most useful documentation could be found in state institutions exerting control over film.