silver nitrate notes
a personal log of classic black and white cinema
navigation
currently watching
The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928, Dreyer). second viewing this month, on the Norwegian-print restoration.
recent updates
14 apr · published Toland piece
09 apr · archive tidied
02 apr · april watch log added
27 mar · fixed broken Murnau link
14 mar · new guestbook entries
visitors
072,681
mailing list
new posts by email. two to four a year.
Smiles of a Summer Night and Bergman's Other Register
14 apr 2021
Smiles of a Summer Night (Sommarnattens leende, 1955) is the Bergman film most people have not seen. It is also, by some distance, the funniest thing he made. The film won the Cannes Special Prize in 1956 and turned Bergman from a Swedish director known locally into an international filmmaker whose next two films (The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries) would define him for the English-speaking audience. The cinematographer was Gunnar Fischer.
The film is, structurally, a Mozart opera written as a bedroom farce. Four couples (or almost-couples), at a country house party in the summer of 1901, spend one increasingly rearranged night working out who is actually in love with whom. The characters include a middle-aged lawyer and his young virgin wife, the lawyer's old mistress (an actress), her current lover (a military officer), the officer's wife, the lawyer's grown son (who is in love with his stepmother), the house maid, and the old dowager who arranges the whole disaster. By dawn, almost every pairing has been rearranged at least once.
Fischer's photography is deliberately unlike his work on the darker Bergman films. Smiles is lit high-key, in soft summer light. The country house is photographed as an open set of airy rooms. The garden sequences use available daylight with light fill. Fischer uses softer-focus lenses on the close-ups of the young wife than on the older characters, a conventional 1950s technique for visually distinguishing the innocent from the experienced. The film looks like a stage production photographed without ironic distance.
Bergman later said the film was the turning point of his career. Svensk Filmindustri had been ready to drop him after several commercial failures. Smiles made money. Bergman made The Seventh Seal on the strength of it. Without Smiles, the rest of his career might not have happened.
| film | Sommarnattens leende / Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) |
|---|---|
| director | Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007) |
| cinematography | Gunnar Fischer |
| stars | Ulla Jacobsson, Eva Dahlbeck, Gunnar Björnstrand |
| studio | Svensk Filmindustri |
| runtime | 108 min |
| format | 35mm, 1.37:1 |
[ « prev: Throne of Blood · next: Rashomon » ]
» leave a comment in the guestbook
sources
[1] Bergman, Ingmar. The Magic Lantern. Viking, 1988.
[2] Cowie, Peter. Ingmar Bergman: A Critical Biography. Scribner, 1982.
[3] Gado, Frank. The Passion of Ingmar Bergman. Duke UP, 1986.
[4] Sondheim, Stephen. Notes to A Little Night Music (musical based on this film), 1973.