Kroonikaklipp kui kultuuriloo dokument: Hindåsi juhtum
Film clip as a document of cultural history: The case of Hindås

Summary/Abstract: At the end of the 1940s, a viable Estonian exile community was formed in Sweden; it mainly consisted of the World War II refugees. During the first two decades, an amateur film maker, Harald Perten, recorded the most important events of the Estonian Swedes (i.e. Estonians living in Sweden). He produced some longer silent films which chronicled life in exile. The films contain subtitles with the name of the event as well as some other data. Yet, a large part of his recordings stayed unexploited. The “raw material” belongs to the Estonian Archives in Sweden and presently the concrete data about those clips are missing, i.e., it is unclear when and where Perten filmed those clips. Based on a clip of such kind (working title “Hindås 19??”), the current article describes the course of identification of the filmed cultural event and people participating in it.The study was designed as a two-step analysis: 1. The analysis of the film clip Perten supposedly made at an exile Estonians’ summer fest. A group that consisted of eight Estonian-Swedish experts (they had participated in the cultural life of their diaspora group since the end of the war) watched the clip with an aim to identify from memory the people and the event. They were successful in identifying the former – the prominent Estonian-Swedish cultural and political figures. The question whether the clip had been filmed at the end of the 1940s or at the beginning of the 1950s caused disagreement among the experts. 2. The analysis of the print sources was based on the exile Estonian newspapers and summer fest booklets. It became apparent that the Hindås summer fest, which merged St. John’s Day with the national Victory Day and a small song festival, took place in 1947. Alas, at the same time, Estonian Swedes celebrated the fest in eight different regions all over Sweden. According to the newspaper articles and booklets, some people identified in the Hindås clip actually took part in different summer fests.In the course of the analysis, the year of the filmed event remained unclear. For different reasons, we cannot be sure whether this event actually took place in Hindås. While discussing the cultural-historical value of the unidentified film clips, we can say that even if we do not know the exact data, those clips nevertheless can be regarded as a unique source that demonstrates the cultural life of a well-organised exile community as well as the early cultural contacts with the representatives of the host country. The Hindås clip with subtitles is available on the Internet at http://www.folklore.ee/tagused/nr63/.

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