The debate between historians and film scholars regarding the pros and cons of moving images as historical sources, has been going on for decades. Truth, and other non- compromising categories, defines an ideal to approach, irrespective of sources, whether printed, oral or visual. Today we tend to see history as part of a broader cultural framework. The construction of the past, and the past's many discourses are now more in focus than an imagined one to one relationship between facts and historical explanations. Given a critical awareness of faked newsreels, biased camera perspectives, ideological voice-overs et cetera, we should be able to scholarly benefit from one of the most neglected sources of our time, in spite of its predominance in the recent history of our culture.
Documentaries always display a rhetoric.
Reality cannot speak unmediated or uncoded. A Wealth of Material A group of scholars at Stockholm University approached the Sveriges Television Archives a year ago. It all started with a course on early cinema for doctoral students , and a search for pertinent material to screen in that context. Over the years Svensk Filmindustri had acquired minor collections from many Swedish film companies. Most of that material ended up in the SVT archive.