The Persistence of Society-Driven Engagement in Swedish Cinema: A Locational Analysis, 1936-2016

This article underlines the importance of grass-roots civic society involvement in cinema exhibition in villages and towns in Sweden throughout the twentieth century. We investigate geographic patterns of cinema exhibition and ownership over time in a mixed rural cum (post)industrial region in the central part of Sweden known as Bergslagen. In a systematic comparison across temporal and geographic entities our analysis details the extent of civic society engagement in cinema. Our analysis suggests that civic societies contributed to the high number of cinemas in rural and small town Sweden as well as to the persistence of a surprisingly evenly distributed and decentralized pattern of cinema exhibition up until this day.