”Filmreformens förste avantgardist” : Experimentfilmaren Peter Kylberg

Sammanfattning: This dissertation is about the Swedish filmmaker, painter and composer Peter Kylberg (1938). Kylberg’s nine films produced between 1959 and 1996 serves as a historical delimitation. A purpose of the study is to critically review the existing historical writing surrounding Swedish film culture and film politics, during the timespan in focus. The approach of the dissertation is chronological and presents Kylberg’s artistry as an emerging creative process. The bulk of the source material comprises unprocessed primary sources from public and private archives as well as articles and reviews from the daily press and trade press.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. They were thus included into a film culture which encompassed feature narrative films. A classic romanticized definition of the avant-gardist 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. The study wishes to demonstrate that the conditions for Kylberg’s position, can be derived from a number of political reforms which took shape during the early 1960s – reforms that were crucial in allowing Kylberg to place minority expressions within the framework of the studio-produced nationally and internationally, marketed and theatrically screened film. The study also argues that Kylberg’s prerequisites were related to a Social Democratic overall cultural policy goal to promote the production of what representatives of the policy called “cultural benefits”. The dissertation studies the film artist’s role in the Swedish welfare state and problematizes the avant-garde concept in this specific context.Kylberg’s artistic activity is discussed as an extension of various modernistic approaches and perspectives which linked several of the pioneers of synthesized art and avant-garde film in the 1910s and 1920s. Furthermore, Kylberg’s films have striking similarities to a number of the approaches that several experimental film researchers have identified as characteristic of experimental films in the 1900s – such as city symphonies, trance 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.