 |
| Summer with Monika (Directed by Ingmar Bergman) |
Summer with Monika, directed by Ingmar Bergman, has always inspired devoted admirers. In The 400 Blows, François Truffaut thought a press shot of Monika (Harriet Andersson) deserving of theft by his alter ego, Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) (1959). Near the end of the 1950s, Jean-Luc Godard wrote numerous laudatory pieces about it. Recently, experts such as Alain Bergala and Antoine de Baecque have hailed it as a seminal achievement in the evolution of modern cinema.
Bergman recalled it fondly throughout his life. He had a personal stake: when he fell in love with the film's lead, abandoning his wife and children for her.
Summer with Monika continues to be a film of extraordinary vibrancy and vigour – tempered with a sad, even painful perspective. We can see more clearly now how the dream of youthful passion carried out by Monika and Harry (Lars Ekborg) in their temporary rejection of a dreary Swedish society is constantly contradicted by the practical realities of money, ageing, inevitable disillusionment, and everyday mundanity.
One of the film's continuing appeals is its portrayal of protracted island idyll in which the social world never completely disappears – but where the young lovers manage to escape far and deep enough into nature to live out their shared dream for a valuable time.
This is what Godard responded to in 1958 when he claimed that Bergman's camera "seeks just one thing: to grasp the present moment at its most fugitive and delve deeply into it in order to endow it with the quality of eternity." Naturally, once Monika becomes pregnant, the reality-principle kicks in: marriage, work, and the event of childbirth.
For commentators both past and present, Andersson as Monika embodied the New Woman in 1950s and early 1960s European cinema.
Laura Hubner's perceptive essay in the Criterion booklet draws a connection between the Italian neo-realism that the film recalls (in its often squalid detail) and the French Nouvelle Vague that the film anticipated in so many ways – most notably, in the withering look into camera that Monika/Andersson performs, which Doinel/Léaud recreates in the final shot of The 400 Blows.
When Godard lauded the film, he made another set of connections: Bergman retained, rather anachronistically, "devices dear to avant-gardists of the 1930s" (such as Louis Delluc, Dimitri Kirsanoff, and Jean Epstein), ranging from double exposures and water reflections to backlighting and montages devoted to the surrounding environment (city or island). And it is in these depopulated montages that Summer with Monika stakes a claim to a legacy much more recent than the Nouvelle Vague: here is the germ of contemporary contemplative cinema.
This self-interview by Ingmar Bergman first appeared in Filmnyheter, a publicity magazine issued by the Swedish production company Svensk Filmindustri, to coincide with the opening of Summer with Monika. It was translated by Birgitta Steene, author of several books on Ingmar Bergman.
What was it like making Monika?
I didn’t make Monika. [Source novel author and coscreenwriter Per Anders] Fogelström bred her in me and then, like an elephant, I was pregnant for three years, and last summer she was born with a big ballyhoo. Today, she is a beautiful and naughty child. I hope she will cause an emotional uproar and all sorts of reactions. I shall challenge any indifferent person to a duel!
A wild paternal love, indeed!
For most people, a film is a short-lived product, like soap, matches, or polished false teeth. But not for the film director. He lives with his opus (like the devil, he does) until opening night, when he unwillingly surrenders it to the public.
Does it have to be like that?
For me it does. A film causes me so many worries and such a lot of reactions that I have to love it in order to get over it and past it.
There are also sensible directors.
Of course, sir. I have heard of several such individuals who are both wise and reasonable and who also behave almost like decent people, even when making a film.
And you despise them?
I don’t envy them. They have a tougher time than those of us who have lost or have never owned a pair of decency’s long underwear or the gold-rimmed glasses of critical reason or the rustling starched shirt of wise afterthought.
Poor film, poor actors, poor etc.!
Not at all. If you look carefully, you’ll see a little thing sticking out of my head.
Do you mean, sir, the tip on your beret?
Beret! What you, sir, call the tip on my beret is not a tip on a beret but a radar. With this radar, I make my movies, and it has never been inferior to the aforementioned underwear, glasses, or starched shirt.
A few strandings . . . in foggy waters . . . treacherous hidden rocks. Hmm!
Remember that technique improves over the years. Also, radar has its childhood diseases. But let’s talk about Monika!
From what I’ve heard, it includes the obligatory Swedish nude swimming.
I haven’t heard that nude swimming has become obligatory in Swedish filmmaking. But I think it should be.
Aha!
In a country where the climate seldom gives you an opportunity for anything but a tub bath, ice bath, or Finnish sauna—except possibly once or twice a year—we ought to be given, through the cinema, the illusion of some idyllic region where well-shaped young girls splash about as God created them, without getting goose bumps all the way down to their toes.
And so, Mr. Bergman, the nude swimming in your film has not provoked the production management?
Dr. Dymling [Carl Anders Dymling, Bergman’s producer at Svensk Filmindustri] has not raised any objections to those scenes. Per Anders Fogelström has found them to be in the spirit of his book. We actually thought it was fun to make them (except perhaps Harriet Andersson, who was freezing cold the whole time and had to be sawed or thawed loose, but who sacrificed herself for art).
So do you want to say anything with this film?
If we have to bore the readers with the so-called message of a film, then let’s make it brief. In four words and in Fogelströmian . . .
?
Get out! But return!
Mr. Bergman, you seem to believe that film and literature shouldn’t have anything to do with each other. But Monika is a novel! Isn’t it?
Now, if I feel like being inconsistent, that’s my own business and not meant to annoy people. In this case, the novel was actually a film synopsis long before it became a novel. Besides, Fogelström has been an understanding, loyal, and in all respects great colleague. He may not write with an ambition to achieve immortality, but whoever says anything depreciative about Fogelström [a popular writer] I’ll challenge to a du—
Any beautiful moment from the shooting of the film?
As always, one forgets the hard work and remembers the fun. In this case, the skerries. We—
Make it short!
One morning at six o’clock, we were on our way to location, the engine of our little boat, the Viola of Ornö, thumping across the still waters. The horizon at sea fused with the sky, the islets stood like floating octopuses in all that soft white. Up above, the fiery button of the sun was burning. It was warm and unusually still; there wasn’t even a swell, not a ripple. It was like eternity itself. It was like being in eternity. The smell of the sea, the quivering in the hull, the murmur around the stem, and the high silence—the summer of eternity.
And then what happened?
Nothing. That was it.
What was it like making Monika?
I didn’t make Monika. [Source novel author and coscreenwriter Per Anders] Fogelström bred her in me and then, like an elephant, I was pregnant for three years, and last summer she was born with a big ballyhoo. Today, she is a beautiful and naughty child. I hope she will cause an emotional uproar and all sorts of reactions. I shall challenge any indifferent person to a duel!
A wild paternal love, indeed!
For most people, a film is a short-lived product, like soap, matches, or polished false teeth. But not for the film director. He lives with his opus (like the devil, he does) until opening night, when he unwillingly surrenders it to the public.
Does it have to be like that?
For me it does. A film causes me so many worries and such a lot of reactions that I have to love it in order to get over it and past it.
There are also sensible directors.
Of course, sir. I have heard of several such individuals who are both wise and reasonable and who also behave almost like decent people, even when making a film.
And you despise them?
I don’t envy them. They have a tougher time than those of us who have lost or have never owned a pair of decency’s long underwear or the gold-rimmed glasses of critical reason or the rustling starched shirt of wise afterthought.
Poor film, poor actors, poor etc.!
Not at all. If you look carefully, you’ll see a little thing sticking out of my head.
Beret! What you, sir, call the tip on my beret is not a tip on a beret but a radar. With this radar, I make my movies, and it has never been inferior to the aforementioned underwear, glasses, or starched shirt.
A few strandings . . . in foggy waters . . . treacherous hidden rocks. Hmm!
Remember that technique improves over the years. Also, radar has its childhood diseases. But let’s talk about Monika!
From what I’ve heard, it includes the obligatory Swedish nude swimming.
I haven’t heard that nude swimming has become obligatory in Swedish filmmaking. But I think it should be.
Aha!
In a country where the climate seldom gives you an opportunity for anything but a tub bath, ice bath, or Finnish sauna—except possibly once or twice a year—we ought to be given, through the cinema, the illusion of some idyllic region where well-shaped young girls splash about as God created them, without getting goose bumps all the way down to their toes.
Dr. Dymling [Carl Anders Dymling, Bergman’s producer at Svensk Filmindustri] has not raised any objections to those scenes. Per Anders Fogelström has found them to be in the spirit of his book. We actually thought it was fun to make them (except perhaps Harriet Andersson, who was freezing cold the whole time and had to be sawed or thawed loose, but who sacrificed herself for art).
So do you want to say anything with this film?
If we have to bore the readers with the so-called message of a film, then let’s make it brief. In four words and in Fogelströmian . . .
?
Get out! But return!
Mr. Bergman, you seem to believe that film and literature shouldn’t have anything to do with each other. But Monika is a novel! Isn’t it?
Now, if I feel like being inconsistent, that’s my own business and not meant to annoy people. In this case, the novel was actually a film synopsis long before it became a novel. Besides, Fogelström has been an understanding, loyal, and in all respects great colleague. He may not write with an ambition to achieve immortality, but whoever says anything depreciative about Fogelström [a popular writer] I’ll challenge to a du—
Any beautiful moment from the shooting of the film?
As always, one forgets the hard work and remembers the fun. In this case, the skerries. We—
Make it short!
One morning at six o’clock, we were on our way to location, the engine of our little boat, the Viola of Ornö, thumping across the still waters. The horizon at sea fused with the sky, the islets stood like floating octopuses in all that soft white. Up above, the fiery button of the sun was burning. It was warm and unusually still; there wasn’t even a swell, not a ripple. It was like eternity itself. It was like being in eternity. The smell of the sea, the quivering in the hull, the murmur around the stem, and the high silence—the summer of eternity.
And then what happened?
Nothing. That was it.
No comments:
Post a Comment