Screenwriting, authorship and gender in Swedish cinema of the 1940s: Dagmar Edqvist’s ‘The Ingegerd Bremssen case’

Abstract

Through a case study analysis, this article suggests that women’s screenwriting in Sweden in the 1940s elucidates important aspects of cinematic authorship in relation to cultural hierarchies and gender. The analysis consists of a contextualized reading of the 1942 film Fallet Ingegerd Bremssen (‘The Ingegerd Bremssen case’), based on Dagmar Edqvist’s psychological novel about a rape and its after-effects, with a screenplay written by the author herself. A textual adaptation analysis – focusing on the screenwriting style and how the woman’s perspective and experience in the novel is transformed in the adaptation – is contextualized against the historical backdrop of the changes in screenwriting practices during this period as well as of the critical reception of the film.