Elsa Brita Marcussen and Gerd Osten - Two leading film critics in post-war Sweden

Per Vesterlund, University of Gävle. Sweden

In the years following World War II, the national Swedish cinema experienced an intense debate on the role that the medium of film should play in the society. Two distinct discursive practices among Swedish film critics can be identified in the period from 1945 to the early 1950s. An intriguing fact is that the two of the most explicit advocates of each camp in this public conversation were women. Gerd Osten (1914-1974, mother of hailed director Suzanne Osten) was an aesthetic and artistic ideal, concentrating her writing on style and thematic features in the work of important auteurs of the time. Elsa Brita Marcussen (1919-2006, daughter of social democratic prime minister Per Albin Hansson) was on the other hand more concerned about the function of film from a sociological point of view, pleading foremost for a national production of documentary film in the tradition of John Grierson, and of fiction films with an overt political tendency. This paper will deal with the writings of Marcusen and Osten respectively, and discuss their position in relation to the otherwise patriarchal sphere of film criticism in the 1940s.