Featuring Monica Zetterlund: Jazz in early Swedish television
2021 ◽
Vol 11
(3)
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pp. 307-316
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Keyword(s):
Following Miriam Hansen’s writings about the popular cinema, this study presents a hypothesis that the new medium of television in 1960s Sweden may be a form of ‘cultural horizon’ that enables multiple understandings and thus contributes to the popularity of the medium. The study focuses on a number of programmes where one of the most popular Swedish artists of the period, the jazz singer Monica Zetterlund, appears in performance. When these programmes are juxtaposed, contradictory features emerge that I suggest are pieces of a cultural horizon described by Hansen – high/low, modern/traditional and international/vernacular – that contributed to the evolution of Swedish television.