Summer Interlude
A film by Ingmar Bergman
Sweden/1951/ 96 minutes
Perks Mini Theater; 2nd September 2012; 5.45pm
Touching on many of the themes that would define the rest of his legendary career—isolation, performance, the inescapability of the past—Ingmar Bergman’s tenth film was a gentle drift toward true mastery. In one of the director’s great early female roles, Maj-Britt Nilsson beguiles as an accomplished ballet dancer haunted by her tragic youthful affair with a shy, handsome student.
The film opens up with Marie receiving a package containing a diary. She is so moved by its emergence that shortly after decides to take a trip to the archipelago near Stockholm where she first met Henrik.As Marie remembers Henrik the film moves back and forth and shows how her life has changed.
As a ballerina, Marie has accomplished everything she ever wanted. But the truth is different. After Henrik, Marie could not love again. Her career would keep her mind busy and for a while she would forget about the pain.
The tenderness of their tentative lovemaking serves as a contrast with the older Marie's experience of disappointment. The film, Bergman's first with a female protagonist, marked a new maturity in the young Bergman’s filmmaking. The famous French director and critic Jean-Luc Godard once described Summer Interlude as "the most beautiful of films."A film that the director considered a creative turning point, Summer Interlude (Sommarlek) is a reverie about life and death that unites Bergman’s love of theater and cinema. (Source: Internet)
Ingmar Bergman
Universally regarded as one of the great masters of modern cinema, Bergman has often concerned himself with spiritual and psychological conflicts. His work has evolved in distinct stages over four decades, while his visual style-intense, intimate, complex-has explored the vicissitudes of passion with a mesmerizing cinematic rhetoric. His prolific output tends to return to and elaborate on recurrent images, subjects and techniques.
Ingmar Bergman was born on July 14, 1918, in Uppsala, Sweden. In 1937 Bergman entered the University of Stockholm, where he became an active member of the student theatrical group. In 1942, after a brilliant production of William Shakespeare's Macbeth, the aspiring director was appointed to the Swedish Royal Opera. In the years following he divided his talents equally between stage and film efforts.
In 1945 Bergman directed his first film, Crisis, the story of an unhappy love affair which ends in suicide. Several films followed closely, but in 1956 Bergman reached the peak of critical and popular praise with The Seventh Seal. It was followed by masterpieces like Wild Strawberries, Persona, Cries and Whispers etc. In addition to film, he directed over 70 plays.
Although apparently not influenced by other filmmakers, with the possible exception of Carl Dreyer, Bergman himself has had a wide-ranging influence on a generation of filmmakers. A unique and powerful presence, his genius has made an extraordinary contribution to the art of the cinema. He died peacefully in his sleep, at his home on Fårö island, on 30 July 2007, at the age of eighty-nine.
(Source: Internet)
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