Bergman’s summer

In a scene from A summer with Monika (Sommaren med Monika, 1953), a young woman looks directly at the camera, seeming to gaze at us just as she is about to be unfaithful to her partner: in a few seconds, her face expresses a variety of emotions that include desire and guilt, a sense of challenge and also a certain melancholy. It was the first time that, breaking a cinematic convention, someone looked so explicitly at the audience.

The cinema is always present, so Monika continues to gaze at us. In fact in his memoir, the Magic Lantern, Ingmar Bergman explains that he did not direct the gesture, but this was an idea (an intuition or improvisation, the result of the moment) of actress Harriet Andersson. It has also been said that in fact, her look was directed at Bergman, who then lived with Andersson, one of his many relationships with his actresses who, as he admits, left their mark in his films.

A summer with Monika was the first international success in Bergman’s filmmaking, and caused an impact on young French critics (especially in the case of Godard and Truffaut) who would become the directors of the Nouvelle Vague.

At that time, Bergman was 34 years old and it was then that, under the enduring influence of playwright August Strindberg and filmmaker Victor Sjöström, he combined theatre and cinema, which continueduntil the end of his career.

In fact, summer has been a protagonist in many of his films: Saraband (2003), Through a Glass Darkly, (1961) and Person (1966), combined island settings and summer with internal conflict edging on madness, part of his endeavour that his films should act as a reflection in which he invited the audience to view themselves. Wild Strawberries (1957), and others were about the meaning of existence, anguish before death, the social function of artists and intellectuals and what he called the Silence of God.

Bergman died in 2007 at the age of 89 on the Greek island of Faro, on the same day as the Italian master, Michelangelo Antonioni.