Summer Interlude - Themes and Commentary

Themes and Commentary

Many of Bergman's stylistic and conceptual themes were established in this early work, including the elegiac setting of summer (Smiles of a Summer Night); idyllic, youthful romance and the eventual loss of innocence (Summer with Monika), a loss of faith in God (Winter Light) as well as specific details fully expanded later; Henrik and Marie pick wild strawberries together, and Henrik's dying Aunt plays chess with a priest who states he visits her to better know death, which prefiguring the famous chess match between a knight and Death himself in The Seventh Seal. Visually there is also Bergman's frequently seen use of beautiful fluid black and white cinematography with slow cross fades.

Bergman said of his film in 1971, "I had always felt technically crippled—insecure with the crew, the cameras, the sound equipment—everything. Sometimes a film succeeded, but I never got what I wanted to get. But in Summer Interlude, I suddenly felt that I knew my profession." He wrote in the critical study Bergman on Bergman, "For me Summer Interlude is one of my most important films. Even though to an outsider it may seem terribly passé, for me it isn't. This was my first film in which I felt I was functioning independently, with a style of my own, making a film all my own, with a particular appearance of its own, which no one could ape. It was like no other film. It was all my own work. Suddenly I knew I was putting the camera on the right spot, getting the right results; that everything added up. For sentimental reasons, too, it was also fun making it."