"Filmreformens förste avantgardist" : Experimentfilmaren Peter Kylberg

Sammanfattning: This dissertation is about the Swedish filmmaker, painter and composer Peter Kylberg (1938–). The study examines how Swedish film-cultural and film-political actors interacted with Kylberg in his ambition to create a particular type of expression in the film medium. Thus, not only Kylberg stands in focus, but also the surrounding film-cultural and film-political climate that Kylberg related to. Kylberg’s nine productions produced between the years 1959 and 1996 serves as a historical delimitation. The approach of the dissertation is essentially chronological, as it enables a presentation of Kylberg’s artistry as an emerging development process. The bulk of the source material which constitutes the basis of the study comprises unprocessed primary sources from public and private archives as well as articles and reviews from the daily press and trade press.A purpose of the study, with Kylberg as a point of departure, is to critically review the existing historical writing surrounding Swedish film culture and film politics, during the years Kylberg was active. The dissertation is also a study of the type of expression that Kylberg tried to convey, as well as a discussion of what can be said to construe Kylberg’s concept of art. The study revolves around two problem areas which can be summarized in the words position and expression. These areas deal with Kylberg’s prerequisites as an artist and his aesthetics respectively. Kylberg’s experimental films were generally state funded and produced by major film companies for commercial exhibition. They were thus included into a film culture which essentially encompassed narrative films in feature-length format. An argument that carries through the study is that positioning Kylberg as a filmmaker is problematic. A classic romanticized definition of the avant-gardist experimental filmmaker, arguing for a clear polarization between autonomous avant-garde film and commercial industry, does not fit Kylberg. In the study, he is therefore categorized as a within-industry experimental filmmaker sandwiched between the two seemingly separated spheres “minor” and “major cinemas” – a conceptual apparatus mainly developed by film scholar David E. James.Kylberg was seen by several contemporary critics as a “traditional” modernist. The dissertation fixes on this track and argues for a reading of Kylberg as a belated modernist. Kylberg’s artistic activity is discussed as an extension – or reflection – of various modernistic approaches and perspectives, which linked several of the experimental films and synthesized art’s pioneers in the 1910s and 1920s. Furthermore, Kylberg’s films have striking similarities to a number of the trends, genres and approaches that several experimental film researchers have identified as characteristic of experimental films, mainly European and American, in the 1900s – such as city symphonies, trance films, exile films, diary films, structural films and expanded cinema. The comparison between Kylberg’s work and expressions in earlier and contemporary experimental films make it possible to see his artistry in the light of an international experimental film context.Furthermore, the study wishes to demonstrate that the basic conditions for Kylberg’s position, can be derived from a number of cultural-political reforms which took shape during the beginning of the 1960s. Emphasized in the dissertation is the dependency relationship between Kylberg and a number of cultural-political actors, which were crucial in allowing Kylberg to place minority expressions within the framework of such a resource-dependent art form as the studio-produced nationally and internationally, marketed and theatrically screened film. The dissertation studies the film artist’s role in the Swedish welfare state and problematizes the avant-garde concept in this specific context. The study argues that Kylberg’s production conditions were directly related to a Social Democratic overall culture policy goal to promote the production of what the representatives of the implemented policy called “cultural benefits”. In 1966 a film critic identified Kylberg as “The first avant-gardist of the film reform” – a categorization that tells us something decisive about Kylberg’s social role as a film artist. If he were an avant-gardist he was neither his own, nor his artistic medium’s avant-gardist, but the cultural policy reform’s. Throughout the study, Kylberg functions as an indicator of which of the institutions of the Swedish welfare state were at the time able to finance, or not finance, the kind of experimental expression he wished to create. It can be said that the acceptance of these institutions gave Kylberg an artistically legitimate, as well as economically possible, front-runner position as one of the welfare state’s sanctioned avant-gardists.