The Magic Lantern of Ingmar Bergman: Summer With Monika
February 25, 2025
Presented by The Swedish Club and Greg Olson Productions
The Magic Lantern of Ingmar Bergman
Young Monika (Harriet Andersson) and her boyfriend feel a breeze of freedom. They throw off their city responsibilities of work and family for a summer of idyllic island love, but can they cope with the inevitable grownup complications? Bergman’s gorgeous images and rebellious, free-wheeling spirit inspired French New Wave pioneers Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut. And the film introduces Harriet Andersson, one of the key players in Bergman’s stable of extraordinary actors.
SIFF year-round passes and vouchers are not valid for this screening.
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Tuesday, February 25, 2025
Looking back on decades of his film work, Bergman said, “My movies have been conceived in the depths of my soul, in my heart, my brain, my nerves, my sex, and not the least, in my guts. A nameless desire gave them birth.” Given artistic freedom by the Svensk Filmindustri, Bergman followed his intuitions, the promptings of his subconscious. Young Ingmar’s home movie projector came with a film strip, and when he cranked the handle, a woman moved on the screen, “the Goddess of Love.” In his life and work, women have been central to his being. A nourishing mother, wives, lovers, friends, engendering artistic inspiration and a sometimes tumultuous contentment. The first of Bergman’s strong female characters is teenage Monika (Harriet Andersson). She and her boyfriend Lars (Lars Ekborg), fed up with their oppressive home and work lives in the city, flee to the idyllic Stockholm archipelago after watching a Hollywood movie. Sunny warm days of love and music yield to harsh realities: Monika’s intruding former boyfriend (John Harrison), dwindling food, the chance that Monika is pregnant. Could she and Lars adopt a bourgeoise life back in the city? The film was a knockout for French New Wave founders Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut. Godard called it “the most beautiful film of this most original of filmmakers,” and in Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) his young hero ogles a sexy film poster of Summer with Monika.
—Greg Olson
- Director: Ingmar Bergman
- Principal Cast: Harriet Andersson, Lars Ekborg, John Harryson, Georg Skarstedt, Gosta Eriksson, Ake Fridell, Ake Gronberg
- Year: 1952
- Running Time: 62 min.
- Screenplay: Ingmar Bergman, P.A. Fogelstrom, from his novel
- Cinematographers: Gunnar Fischer
- Editors: Tage Holmberg, Gosta Lewin
- Music: Erik Nordgren
- International Sales: Svensk Filmindustri