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A really fantastic historian is helping me trace the development of the Stockholm press and the way the structure of information
on the page
settled into a pattern by the 1860s, and had become completely commercialized by the 1880s. I'm indirectly laying that against a social tracing of the increasing rigidity of the social pattern of Stockholm, which was never a free city. It was a city ruled by the king. Kings have played an extremely autonomous role in the Swedish society, and the Swedes have rarely looked at that. They always go goo goo over the king, like we do in England. Well, in the film the king is going to emerge as something of a tyrant. Swedish kings interfered strongly in politics, and several were really reactionary.
Stockholm was an agricultural city dominated by the court; there was a large underprivileged class. Very rapidly it was hauled into the industrial eraprobably more rapidly than any other city in the Western world. Within fifteen years, heavy production came in, and so on. And the Swedish soul began to developunfortunately, the modern soul. The city became more and more rigid. The police force developed. By 1879, the city was broken up into zones of control, which interestingly is just about when the press had become spatially systematized. Each zone contained ten thousand people, and there was a guy in charge of registering the population. This was seen as a more sophisticated censor processoops, sorry, another slip
census
process; they registered the birth, death, and occupation of every person within each district. They also listed prison sentences, and other reported irregularities in moral behavior. From this time on, you can look at the way juvenile delinquents are treated, the increasing stress on more penal sentences. I won't bore you, but there are so many things that you can see are part of the development of "modern civilization." The town is architecturally destroyed. Stockholm is a fantastic model for how our society's completely fucked itself up with more and more structures and blocks. And, of course, there's also what the words of the news stories are
saying,
which will add other complexities.
I'm even going to try and talk about cutting rhythms at a certain point in the film. I may try and cut a sequence one way, and then cut it another waynot just for the didactic hell of that, but to try and flow a bit with Strindberg's own decentralization as a person. Do we need a center inside ourselves or don't we? Strindberg was so all over the place that one could theorize that he never really had an internal center to his psyche, which was both a strength and, unfortunately, a weakness for him. He suffered all his life, and he could never really flow with his relationship with Siri von Essen. At the same time, he was always trying to break out of conventional structures, particularly in his plays. He made highly condensed, highly charged pieces, where a lot is done just