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The introduction addresses the ‘modernity’ of Antonioni’s 1960s films in the context of the proliferation of the mass image in postwar culture on the one hand, and aesthetic and art-historical debates about medium specificity, and ‘purity’, on the other.

Et lille land’ - a little land - is a trope of Danish identity which recurs in many of the short informational films about Denmark made from the 1930s to the 1960s. This chapter outlines why the notion of Denmark as a small country has historically been fundamental to the nation’s self-understanding as an imagined community, and how and why it has been employed in informational films made for domestic and foreign consumption. The chapter discusses the role of film in the national imagination, and the importance of medium-specific qualities in that process of imagining: for the purposes of this book, such qualities include the films’ shortness, which impacts on narrative as well as distribution and exhibition. The chapter then discusses recent scholarship on ‘small-nation’ cinema, especially in the Nordic region, and the place of informational filmmaking within the small-nation context. A final chapter section outlines a further body of scholarship on cultural diplomacy, soft power, and nation-branding in the Nordic region as a framework for understanding how images (including informational films) move across borders and re-negotiate auto- and xenostereotypes.

Chapter one examines the workshop’s early years (1919-23), when its tapestries and carpets were understood as “pictures made of wool,” and weaving lacked a theoretical armature. Expressionist artists like Wassily Kandinsky and Johannes Itten saw painting as a conduit to the artist’s soul, while weaving was too domestic and laborious to hold significant depth. Setting these objects and texts against contemporaneous, Marxist debates about labor, this chapter considers the vexed status of abstraction in the Weimar Republic.

The second chapter examines the initial theories of weaving, written by Anni Albers, Helene Schmidt-Nonné, and Gunta Stölzl between 1924 and 1926. As the school abandoned its experimental beginnings and catapulted itself toward a technological future, a modernist theory of weaving was born. Harnessing the functionalist (Sachlichkeit) discourse of the Neues Bauen movement (Adolf Behne and Walter Gropius), they specified the use of textiles in architectural space.

Drawing on László Moholy-Nagy’s arguments regarding the “optical” nature of photography, weaving student Otti Berger developed a complimentary theory of tactility as it pertained to weaving and fabric. While close-up photographs of Bauhaus textiles in magazines and brochures worked to sell the workshop’s products, Berger reflected on the simultaneous visuality and “hold-ability” (Haltbarkeit) of the woven medium.

In 1932, Otti Berger began to seek intellectual property protection for her textile fabrication techniques. Identifying herself as a patent “author”—an “inventor” in a design world mostly marked by anonymity—she would also define her craft anew. What she developed through patent applications (in dialogue with her patent attorney) was a theory of textiles for the modern age—a language that combined legal rhetoric with that of functionality and media “properties.”

After Anni Albers immigrated to America with her husband, Josef, in 1933, her writing practice quickly expanded. Through texts published in magazines or catalogues and ultimately in two books—On Designing (1959) and On Weaving (1965)—she considered terms like “medium” and “design” as they integrated and, in postwar America, increasingly eclipsed the work of “craft.” In this chapter, Albers is set into dialogue with several significant and incongruent voices on media from this moment.