Subjective Others/Foreign Selves: Queer American Spectatorship and Swedish 'Art Cinema'

This dissertation examines the phenomenon of European art cinema from the end of World War II through the late 1960s from the perspective of queer American spectatorship. It asserts that as foreign films, a number of texts released in the United States in the Cold War period spoke in a unique and illuminating way to a generation of American queer filmgoers. The preface explains my personal investment in and understanding of this process and is followed by an introduction that contextualizes the more specific focus of this project: filmmaker Ingmar Bergman and the nation of Sweden that his cinema represented to U.S. filmgoers throughout the post World War II era. The first chapter looks at two early films associated with Bergman to illustrate an interpretive strategy of film spectatorship that involves a close connotative reading of foreign art cinema in order to appropriate it to the realm of a queer cinema. As such it represents a widespread practice of minority audiences, which would often read texts "between the lines" in order to find a particular meaning within the films for themselves. The second chapter offers an examination of an equally close, if more straightforward, reading of a text that I posit to be queer in its direct impact. The film in question, Hasthandlarens Flickor, offers a strong example of a text that, while marketed to a mainstream foreign film audience in the United States, could be thought of specifically as queer film to a queer audience, something all too rare during the period addressed in this study. Chapters three and four address queer affects, as opposed to queer interpretations, as they are engendered by a number of Ingmar Bergman mid-period films. With them, this study argues for an understanding of "foreignness" as a functional metonym both for the psychic category of "otherness" and for Sigmund Freud's concept of the unconscious. A conclusion brings the issues threaded through this dissertation as a whole to the end of a history of films bearing Bergman's name.