The Swedish Erotica Collection: Alienation, Education and Morality

Although the title of this new DVD box set was a given considering the nature of the films included, all six films collected are – whatever their reputation, levels of nudity and explicitness – sober-minded, hardly measuring up to any standard of what normally constitutes erotica. Three are dry sex education films, presented by real-life psychologists, while the other three are bizarre examinations of an alienated young women in relationships that involve power play, subjugation and abuse. Like nightmare, no-budget counterparts of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage.

Swedish cinema attracted a new sort of attention beyond the arthouses when 1967’s realist social drama I am Curious Yellow was banned in America in 1969 for its sexual content. The same year saw the release of the earliest film included in this box set, the sex education film Language of Love (original title Ur kärlekens språk). It’s joined here by two other sex education films More from the Language of Love (1970 - Mera ur kärlekens språk) and Love Play: That's How we do it (1972 - Kär-lek, så gör vi: Brev till inge och sten). The other three films are dramas featuring Christina Lindberg: Exposed (1971- Exponerad), Anita – Swedish Nymphet (1973 Anita - ur en tonårsflickas dagbok) and Wide Open (1974 - Sängkamrater).

While America was getting bothered with I am Curious Yellow, the arrival of Language of Love was greeted with similar frothing. A demonstration against a London screening attracted 30,000, including Cliff Richard. A print was seized on entry to America. That sealed the film’s fate and the follow ups, including More from the Language of Love and Love Play: That's How we do it went straight to porno cinemas. All three include nudity and explicitly show real sex but actually were educational films, based on the works of Danish psychologists Sten and Inge Hegeler, who had been publishing books on sexual relations since the 1950s. The Hegelers appear in all three films, discussing the cases which inspired the ensuing sequences. Overall, the effect is dry and sober. They’re so dull it’s hard to watch them. But that didn’t matter for British cinemas and audiences expecting and getting an explicitness they’d never seen before.