How I learned to Swede (and you can, too!): in praise of amateur aesthetics

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe terms sweding and sweded were first used in the film Be Kind Rewind (2008), but the impulse to adapt texts in similar ways has a much longer history in the performing arts. In this article, I combine autoethnography, film theory, and theories of parody to celebrate the amateur aesthetics of “sweded” movies – short, often parodic remakes of Hollywood movies created with little time, no money, and few resources. I explain the general rules of sweding, how to adapt them for one’s own creative purposes, and offer pedagogical applications and examples of courses for which the form has already been adapted.