Summer Interlude - Critical Response

Critical Response

"Ingmar Bergman's method of making film is miraculous.... He belongs to a handful here and there in the world who are now discovering the future articulation of film, and the result can be revolutionary." Stig Almqvist, Filmjournalen (1951).

"There are five or six films in the history of the cinema which one wants to review simply by saying, 'It is the most beautiful of films.' Because there can be no higher praise... I love Summer Interlude." Jean Luc Godard, Cahiers du Cinéma, (July 1958).

"Bergman found his style in this film, and it is regarded by cinema historians not only as his breakthrough but also as the beginning of 'a new, great epoch in Swedish films.' Many of the themes (whatever one thinks of them) that Bergman later expanded are here: the artists who have lost their identities, the faces that have become masks, the mirrors that reflect death at work. But this movie, with its rapturous yet ruined love affair, also has a lighter side: an elegiac grace and sweetness." Pauline Kael

"Outstanding—film making at its best." Variety

"This is the picture that established Ingmar Bergman's international reputation. Although it still deals with the theme of young love that dominated his earliest films, it contains the first inklings of the dramatic intensity and structural complexity that would characterise his more mature work ****." Radio Times