ABSTRACT
By 1945, industrial films had been produced in Sweden for more than 20 years. Following rapid growth during the mid-1920s, the practice of commissioning industrial films had become common among many larger companies in what were later regarded as the core industries of Sweden: mining, steel, wood, and paper. Industrial films, taking their lead from the dominant industrial-film production company of the 1920s, were primarily seen as suitable for public relations and documentation. 1 Those interwar period films were made along the lines of the typical documentary films of the time, with a straight narrative structure, authoritative narrator (or intertitles), and, in the films of the 1930s and 1940s, dramatic music. Even though they could also be screened at the companies themselves, which they were, they were obviously made as “stand-alone aesthetic objects,” though with an informational or sometimes even didactic purpose.
