Book Reviews

The film sequence from 1911 is short: Two boys are looking at the operator cranking his camera while a man turns the fountain faucet, and suddenly, water jets into the air at Vängåvan, the city park of Sundsvall. The sound of splashing water can be heard, high-resolution green trees rustle in the wind, and fashionable ladies in magnificent colourful hats stroll by. The sequence from Vängåvan stems from a film shot by Swedish Biograph in 1911 and later archived as SF2074 – naturally, a silent film without colour. But on YouTube, the same film, now retitled as Sundsvall 1911, comes to life again, algorithmically upscaled by ColorByCarl (colourisation artist Carl Hamnede). Swedish Biograph’s old footage has been remastered and upscaled to 4K and 60 frames per second using various AI and software toolkits. Colour and sound have also been artificially added. Then again, ColorByCarl explicitly states that his film “is an artistic interpretation of the original footage and is by no means intended to replace the original film and its historical value” (ColorByCarl, 2022).

Despite its title, in film historian Jan Olsson’s book, The Life and Afterlife of Swedish Biograph, not much is said about streams of upscaled silent cinema on video platforms such as YouTube. The afterlife of early cinema is, however, nowadays increasingly a digital phenomenon; ColorByCarl has almost ten thousand subscribers. More popular upscaling artists, such as Denis Shiryaev, count subscribers in the millions. His upscaled version of footage shot by Swedish Biograph in New York (also from 1911) has been viewed more than twenty million times (likely including a number of bots). Film archivists, however, detest machine-learning algorithms; after Shiryaev uploaded his AI-enhanced version of L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat, the Institut Lumière posted a takedown request, claiming copyright of a 125-year-old film. Silly archivists.

Established in 1907, Swedish Biograph was the first major film company in Sweden. A few years later, the company relocated and built a film studio in Lidingö, outside Stockholm. The CEO Charles Magnusson (a former film photographer) was an excellent businessman with an artistic eye. He eventually hired Julius Jaenzon, Victor Sjöström, and Mauritz Stiller, one cinematographer and two directors who would become world famous with films like Terje Vigen (1917) and Sir Arne’s Treasure (1919). The very same year, Swedish Biograph merged with the film company Skandia, relaunching itself as Svensk Filmindustri (SF), while also establishing an up-to-date studio space: the Filmstaden [Film City] in Råsunda, Stockholm.

Film historians have usually analysed Swedish Biograph’s productions in a romanticised way, focusing on a cinematic Golden Age that produced feature films with a Nordic aesthetic envisioned by brilliant directors. Olsson’s book, however, offers a more nuanced narrative of the short history of Swedish Biograph. The story of this canonical film studio does not only involve great films, but also commercial demands and technological restraints, volatile audience preferences, crass business opportunities, and government regulations (in 1911, the National Board of Film Censors was established in Sweden).

Olsson knows his subject well. Swedish Biograph has been a research interest of his for more than three decades (full disclosure: Twenty-five years ago, he was my supervisor). The Life and Afterlife of Swedish Biograph hence offers a rich exploration of both business and economics, film production practices, changes in film style, and commercial misgivings, to quote some of the chapter headings. The book is written with exquisite prose and is a pure pleasure to read. It also features a number of witty remarks and amusing comments – one heading is entitled, “The Government Goes to the Movies”, pas mal. As indicated by the title of the book, a recurring theme is a kind of cinematic longue durée – from commercial circulation of film prints on an international market towards archival heritage, a process during which the market value of Swedish Biograph diminished, while gradually being replaced by increased cultural value.

One especially fascinating chapter in Olsson’s book deals with reel culture. Early cinema had the technical disadvantage of being produced on different film reels; such “one-reelers” or “two-reelers” were gradually replaced by multiple-reel films. Yet, in Sweden, each cinema had only one projector. In December 1918, the Palladium theatre in Stockholm became the first cinema with two projectors for continuous projection. This particular media infrastructure affected Swedish Biograph’s usage of storytelling and dramatic narrative – or as Olsson states, “SB’s production practices were intertwined with the Swedish exhibition model, which operated with a single projector and thus necessitated breaks during reel changes” (p. 26). For film directors (and producers), it was thus necessary to place reel breaks at natural moments in the unfolding of stories. Form affected content, to say the least.

By accentuating both projection technology and reel culture, business and film style, as well as the actual output of Swedish Biograph, Olsson in many ways delivers a completely new history of early Swedish cinema. While previous film scholars usually put emphasis on major productions during the Golden Age, Olsson makes a careful examination of the company’s film production year by year, a meticulous research endeavour that nevertheless encounters some disturbances. From 1914, for example, not a single production of the sixteen feature films of Swedish Biograph has been preserved. All are lost.

Yet, for the films that have been archived, there remains the question of what an original film actually looked like. Sjöström’s first masterpiece, the social drama Ingeborg Holm from 1913, can serve as a case in point. When the film had its premiere, it was almost 2,000 meters long, but in 1915, a reedited version of some 1,500 meters was released (and submitted for inspection by the film censors). When SF screened the film in 1944 during its twenty-fifth anniversary celebration, the version was down to 1,300 meters. Olsson states that some of the missing scenes (among the lost 700 meters) are described in textual scenarios – but he also firmly declares that the “film we now call Ingeborg Holm, which has been screened and analyzed as a classic since 1916, is a severely truncated version” (p. 103).

Given my own research interest, the archival afterlife of early cinema is an especially interesting read. Olsson devotes a final chapter to what he terms archival practices, focusing on both the establishment of the so-called Swedish Film Society [Svenska Filmsamfundet] as well as the Swedish Film Archive [Filmhistoriska Samlingarna]. These actors – laying the foundation for film historical scholarship in Sweden during the late 1930s and onwards – ironically began their archival activities at the same time as an explosion and fire in Vinterviken, Stockholm (in 1941, close to the Nobel dynamite factory) wiped out most of the feature-film negatives from Swedish Biograph. From a scholarly perspective, this was a devastating catastrophe; yet, according to the minutes from the board meeting at SF afterwards, a laconic comment simply stated that during the fire, “some older negatives belonging to the company were destroyed. The negatives lacked commercial value”. Film was (and still is) often pure business.

While researching his book, Olsson has used the Swedish Film Institute (SFI) and its archival holdings a lot. The oldest part of these collections was gathered by film archivist Einar Lauritzen, who almost single-handedly created the Swedish Film Archive during the 1940s and 1950s, then located at the National Museum of Science and Technology in Stockholm. Due to a lack of monetary resources, the Swedish Film Archive was, however, foremost a paper archive devoted to film. In 1964, for example, SF sold all of its newsreels and non-fiction films (among them the 1911 footage from Sundsvall and New York) not to Lauritzen’s archive, but rather to Swedish Radio and its Film Archive [Filmarkivet], not the Television Archive as Olsson states. Olsson furthermore claims that SFI – and its new CEO Harry Schein – absorbed Lauritzen’s creation a year later in 1965. Here, however, Olsson is only scratching the film historical surface, since Lauritzen was against the merger; in short, Schein forced him. Today, SFI (2018) states on their website that the origins of its archive is the Swedish Film Society, “making our archive one of the oldest in the world” – but nothing is said about Lauritzen’s refusal.

The archive, Olsson states, is a site for practices “aimed at safekeeping and reviving films from the past” (p. 11). Such practices have naturally changed from the early analogue days of “pioneering film archivism in the 1930s to the digital culture that drives today’s restorations, preservations, and screenings at archives” (p. 11). Professional film archivists and institutions like SFI perform the important task of safeguarding film heritage. Yet today, the archive – understood in a wide sense – is also elsewhere, most prominently online. On YouTube, Sjöström’s Ingeborg Holm is available for anyone to see, and so is his Terje Vigen – including various mashups of both films – not to mention movie pirate sites such as yts.mx, where almost all of the film classics from the Swedish Golden Age are available. Some film archivists may be upset by sites like yts.mx or ColorByCarl’s algorithmically upscaled footage from Swedish Biograph. Yet, they give unprecedented access to archival material. ColorByCarl’s endeavours can also be perceived as a way to bring Swedish Biograph back to a new audience – or as one commentator (ColorByCarl, 2022: Tiffany C.) on the film Sundsvall 1911 stated: “Very interesting! Everyone seems fascinated by the camera. Some are curious, some are suspicious”.

Pelle Snickars, Professor, Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences, Division of ALM and Digital Cultures, Lund University, Sweden

Resistance to the Current: The Dialectics of Hacking is an intriguing look at the dialectic interaction between hacking (as repurposing tools and routing around constraints and regulations) and the recuperation of the capitalist economic system. The book offers a gritty look into the entangled nature of the economic systems and the hacker communities that seek to challenge the existing norms. Far from civic-technology utopianism, the authors point out that the hacker communities are mostly unable to operate outside of the system they seek to change, and they remain vulnerable to being consumed by it as it adapts to the disruption through recuperation.

The book takes a look at four empirical cases. The first of these (p. 59) is a free-space optical (FSO) device project called Ronja, developed in the Czech Republic in 2001. Rooftop-to-rooftop optic transfer of data gave Ronja users a way to bypass restriction and surveillance in conventional networks, before the driving community dissolved over internal differences. The second case study (p. 87) is the RepRap project, short for self-replicating rapid prototyper. RepRap was an open-source 3D-printing project that produced the first low-cost desktop 3D printers, before the market was overtaken by commercial rivals. The third case (p. 123) takes place in a different time horizon. Here, the authors give an historical account of Hacklabs and how they gradually became Hackerspaces, then Tech Shops, before finally evolving into start-up incubators and accelerators. Finally, the book examines the truly enduring case (p. 159) of Internet Relay Chat (IRC), which has since its origin in Oulu, Finland in 1988, served as a venue for secure communication for countless people and has truly resisted efforts to capitalise on its success.

The book builds on the idea of the historical logic of capitalism as outlined by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello in the book The New Spirit of Capitalism (2005). Boltanski and Chipello argued that a dialectic relationship exists between critique and recuperation. Once the capitalist system has had time to adapt to the disruption, the disruption can in fact act as a source of innovation and feed into the legitimacy for capitalism (p. 15). Autonomist Marxism is also used as a framework to build on the idea of technological advancement as a response to class struggle and the “social factory”, where capitalist value production is not hindered with the constraint of contractual employment.

In the book, Söderberg and Maxigas understand concepts such as “open innovation” as a failure of the hackers to retain a level of autonomy, becoming part of the capitalist system (pp. 15–16). Söderberg and Maxigas determine that this interaction between the industries and hackers bears a resemblance to the contemporary business models in other walks of life, such as media, where users and fans routinely act as uncompensated content creators. In fact, after the initial failure of the industries to resist the peer production models of the hacker communities, their work and methods were harnessed for capital, and these models have migrated to other sectors of the economy.

Söderberg and Maxigas’s analysis takes place in three time-horizons (p. 26) in the book. First is the level of a single hacker project or a single community. This is usually a short period of time, as projects tend to have a short life-cycle, even though the work itself would be continued in some form. Second, a much longer time-horizon is a development of hacker communities, movements, and cultures. Lastly, there is the temporality, where hacker cultures are seen as a by-product and a tiny contributor to the economic system. These temporalities are used to understand the dynamic interaction between hackers and the economic system. After the economic system has recuperated from a high-impact disruption, this can in fact act as a source for new commercial products and organisational reforms in other sectors of the economy. The authors also point out that the outsider position hackers often like to position themselves in is always within the larger whole of the capitalist system (p. 27). Söderberg and Maxigas go as far as to argue that the fantasy of disruptive hacker projects acts like a trap to capture value, and that the open innovation models are built in anticipation of this hubris (p. 28).

Söderberg and Maxigas shed light on an interesting and extremely important topic, and they use a seemingly mixed bag of cases to construct a solid and systematic examination. Empirical cases are analysed in depth and the analytical framework of the different time-horizons cuts through the overtly optimistic counter-arguments that the reader might have. The authors also steer away from the cynicism of a hopeless uphill struggle against the capitalist system, and they do a very good job in capturing the hard-work aspect of hacker projects, community building, and maintaining resilient systems.

Reading Resistance to the Current, I am constantly reminded of a presentation made by the celebrated Internet technology pioneer Jon Crowcroft at Aalto University in 2018. He gave a rather similar four-case account of how much of his own ground-breaking work building the Internet was almost immediately weaponised. Crowcroft’s presentation was terrifying, but I walked away optimistic: Someday, there would be a system of immaterial property rights that would give researchers some control over the ethical use of their technology. However, this system of capital control would, even at its best, do very little to tackle the issues raised in Resistance to the Current. Especially in the time-horizon expanding beyond information technology itself, in which it is reduced to a mere field of a much larger and longer history of the capitalist economy, and despite our best intentions, our inability as researchers, creators, and hackers to control the ramifications of our work can quickly and at any point turn our utilitarianist strife against itself. Even as users, we are all semi-conscious pawns in a system that routinely misappropriates our input and is, in some cases, directly built for this very purpose. Against this backdrop, our great struggle to construct a socially and ecologically sustainable world, and triumph over the existing faulty paradigm of a capitalist economic system, seems destined to fail.

I do, however, remain cautiously optimistic. To suggest a fourth temporality, the dialectic interaction that Söderberg and Maxigas depict over the course of the book, between the economic system and the struggle contesting it, is in itself part of a meta-system where the only non-variable element is change itself. There was a time before capitalism that embodied the same fault-lines that are present in our own time. The real determents of recuperation can be argued to take place beyond the economic system, in which it is a mere part of our combined human needs and aspirations and where the real counterpart is the surrounding ecosystem. Outcome of this bout is certain: equilibrium.

Resistance to the Current: The Dialectics of Hacking is a thought-provoking and well-written book, suitable for anyone hoping to better understand the fine-grained and complex interaction between hacking and the overarching economy. Case studies are fascinating and written in a way that is accessible for readers without a background in information technology. The book also offers an important viewpoint for everyone working even remotely in this field, as a more broadly shared conceptual framework helps to overcome the issues Söderberg and Maxigas point out.

Sami Kotiranta, Doctoral Researcher, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland

Media and information literacy (MIL) is central in the fight against disinformation, hate speech, and cyberbullying. The current state of “post truth” and the logics of platform capitalism also raise questions about trust and responsibility, filter bubbles, surveillance, datafication, and digital rights. One essential part of this complex concerns the role of digitalisation in relation to education, and more specifically, the function of teachers in this new media ecology. This matter has been addressed by (among others) UNESCO, in their MIL curriculum for teachers (Grizzle & Wilson, 2011), as well as in the updated version of this document (Grizzle et al., 2021). In parallel, large financial and pedagogical investments have been made in the development of the digital classroom. A process that became even more relevant to discuss due to the extensive use of online technologies for learning during the Covid-19 pandemic.

It is in the light of this that I read Jesper Tække and Michael Paulsen’s book, A New Perspective on Education in the Digital Age: Teaching, Media and Bildung. The authors’ approach to teachers in digitalised classrooms differs from the ordinary mainstream and more technocentric and instrumental perspective on this. Tække and Paulsen instead suggest a critical, historical, and explorative understanding of media technologies in relation to education. The authors also point out that digitalisation has transformed the communicative and spatial premises for teaching, and they want to discuss how schools and teachers relate to this new ecology for knowledge production and citizen-making. Both authors have long since been engaged in research, teaching, and school development projects with connections to digital technologies and MIL, and it is with reference to these ventures that the empirical part of their book is rolled out. However, their overall aspiration is rather to offer us a theory-driven configuration of teachers and their didactic considerations in the digitalised classroom.

In the first two of the six chapters, Tække and Paulsen present their key concepts and propose “The critical-constructive Bildung approach to teaching and media” (p. 4), which they separate from a more instrumentalist understanding of the relation between media and education. Instead, they establish their perspective with reference to media ecology (McLuhan, Innis) and humanistic and historical thinkers (e.g., Arendt, Gadamer, Kant, and Koselleck), educational philosophers (Biesta, Dewey), and elements of post humanistic theory (Deleuze, Latour), system theory (Luhmann), and critical communication theory (e.g., Habermas). This is how the authors describe their approach to Bildung and the qualification and socialisation of the digital citizen of the future:

Bildung, in this critical variant, suggests that, through teaching, students should be encouraged, supported and challenged to (1) think and act critically-reflectively but to be autonomous; (2) think and act rationally, i.e., from the point of view of humanity; and (3) think and act in an historically and contextually conscious manner. And, to this we will add: (4) to think and communicate through different media in critical-reflective-conscious ways. (p. 6)

I find this framework sympathetic. It also aligns with a long (partly Nordic) tradition of media literacy and media pedagogics (Carlsson, 2019; Forsman 2020) as well as more recent approaches to MIL (Mihailidis, 2018). Another important aspect of Tække and Paulsen’s conceptual and analytic framework are models and figures meant to describe how teaching in the digitalised classroom can and should be organised through production and interaction, participation and community, and self-expression and information-seeking in communication with others online.

In the book’s third chapter, the presentation becomes more empirical as it gives us examples from several “action based research projects” (p. 76) focusing on “actors response” (mainly teachers) in relation to the implementation, testing, and use of digital media in the classroom. The empirical material mainly comes from three projects conducted, together with teachers, in secondary schools and upper secondary schools in Denmark between 2006 and 2019. Where digital tools (iPad), digital platforms (Google, YouTube), and social media (Facebook, Twitter) was tried out and evaluated. Tække and Paulsen have a lot of interesting observations and reflections to give and can, through their examples, show how the role of the teacher in the classroom has changed with an increased and more self-sufficient use of digital media. Based on this, they suggest three waves, tendencies to describe a transition between three different types of classrooms. During the first wave, we had “The penetrated classroom”, when the Internet challenged traditional teaching. In the second wave came “The intensified classroom”, where the use of social media platforms reestablished and intensified the educational situation. Then with the third wave, “The contact seeking classroom”, emerged as teachers and students integrated third parties (e.g., authors, researchers, or students in other countries) in their classroom interaction. This historical interpretation is interesting, although I wonder about the explanatory value of such generalisations in association with quite detailed empirical data, from three separate projects, with character of school development projects. Still, we are offered several interesting reflections on how the (Nordic) classroom has gone from being a rather closed space to becoming part of a global network. With these structural changes, teachers’ attitude towards digital means has changed, and new forms of ambivalences have emerged. Here, I find Tække and Paulsen’s metaphors for how teachers relate differently to digitalisation and new media well worth considering: the teacher as engineer, creator, gardener, challenger.

In the fourth chapter, Tække and Paulsen suggest an analytical model for how to analyse their empirical data in relation to Bildung and media practices. We also get some concrete advice on how to approach the digitalised classroom, as well as some more philosophical features. In the final two chapters, the authors address Big Data, and filter bubbles, Covid-19, and distance learning. Although this discussion on state and market, citizens and civil society seems a bit detached from the previous parts, it is of relevance for the overall argument. The conclusions appear somewhat abruptly, and perhaps this quote from Chapter 6 would have been a more decisive note to end on:

All in all, the critical-constructive Bildung approach calls for good role models in the schools and if the politicians and opinion leaders cannot live up to the Bildung ideal presented in this book we really need the teachers to try to support and encourage their students to become true knowledge seekers and guards, experimenting in the school with correcting misinformation on the internet, improving dialogue in social media, breaking out of filter bubbles and caring about the common good. (p. 164)

Michael Forsman, Professor, Department for Media and Communication Studies, School of Culture and Education, Södertörn University, Sweden