Rune Waldekranz: Swedish pioneering film historian

Abstract

By the turn of the millennium, as cinema had celebrated its hundredth birthday and New Historicism had been established as a central methodological approach to film studies, the legacy left behind by the classical film historians of the first generation – Jean Mitry, Georges Sadoul – had also been critically revisited. The globalizing general surveys of the historians of the old school, with their underlying teleological assumption that the new film medium had gone from strength to strength, suddenly appeared naive and simplistic with the emergence of new perspectives in film history – of micro-histories as well as of technological approaches to the medium. Moreover, with the establishment of new technologies like the VCR, which provided easy access to older film material, the many lapses of memory in the historical textbooks and the obvious misinterpretations that followed, the history of cinema obviously needed to be rewritten, and the early historians were often reduced to the role of springboards in academic texts, in order to demonstrate that much needed to be revised. However, in the writing of film history, not only have there been significant shifts between historical paradigms, but there are also obvious language barriers, which means that several global histories of cinema have actually remained local, in the sense that they have only been accessible to the few who are in command of a minority language. Such is the case of the Swedish film historian Rune Waldekranz (1911–2003). Born only fifteen years after cinema came to Sweden, he shared with both Mitry and Sadoul the condition of being almost of the same age as the new medium. With a monumental film history in three volumes, from the beginnings to 1990 (2601 pages in all), Waldekranz is one of the most 1 Jean Mitry, Histoire du cinema, Art et industrie I, 1895–1914 (Paris: Editions universitaires, 1967); Georges Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema – Le cinema devient un art 1909–1920 (Paris: Denoel, 1952).