With a title referring to the old city center of Stockholm, Gamla Stan is an avant-garde sound city symphony about the Swedish capital entering into the modern era. Made by a group of young intellectuals in the summer of 1931, it starts with a poem by Artur Lundkvist and Erik Asklund, the latter reciting the verses in front of the camera. The poem, which was also published in a Stockholm newspaper at the time, addresses the Old Town of Stockholm as a woman in different guises, and it expresses the young intellectuals’affirmation of modernity and the coming of a new era for Gamla Stan. The film follows a dawn-to-dusk structure and shows the small and narrow alleys of the medieval city center together with modern streets with traffic policemen, motorized traffic, and busy pedestrians. There are high-angle shots and numerous atmospheric images of water, including puddles and wet pavements during a rain shower in the afternoon. Clearly, the film was inspired by Ruttmann’s Berlin and Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera. Moreover, in its rudimentary story of a young couple and the depiction of narrow and deserted streets, Gamla Stan also recalls Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures: A girl comes home in the wee hours to sleep through the day while a sailor wanders the streets of Stockholm until they meet by chance at night at the end of the film.
Erik Asklund (1908–80), Artur Lundkvist (1906–91), and Josef Kjellgren (1907–48), who apparently appears in the film as an urban wanderer, belonged to the literary group “Fem unga” (Five Young Men), which was founded in 1929 and played a key role in introducing modernist literature into Sweden. In 1931, together with film critic Stig Almqvist (1904–67) and author Eyvind Johnson (1900–76), they approached Svensk Filmindustri with their idea of making a short film. The original idea of the film included a more elaborate love story between the girl and the sailor, which was almost completely cut out because of the nervousness of the amateur actors. In the final version, only a few indications of their story remain.
Gamla Stan received mixed reviews at the time of its release. It was considered an interesting failure and criticized for its oblique camera angles and its Soviet-style of montage.
Eva Hielscher
further reading
Andersson, Lars Gustaf, “Interwar Film Culture in Sweden: Avant-Garde Transactions in the Emergent Welfare State,” in Malte Hagener (ed.), The Emergence of Film Culture: Knowledge Production, Institution Building and the Fate of the Avant-Garde in Europe, 1919–1945 (New York, NY and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2014), 227–48.
Askander, Mikael, “Gamla stan. Reflektioner kring ett modernistiskt filmförsök,” HumaNetten 8 (2001), retrieved from www.vxu.se/hum/publ/humanetten/nummer8/art0103.html, 4 September 2017.
Askander, Mikael, Modernitet och intermedialitet i Erik Asklunds tidiga romankonst (Växjö: Växjö University Press, 2003).
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