silver nitrate notes

Summer with Monika and the Stockholm Archipelago

19 dec 2024

Ingmar Bergman made Summer with Monika (Sommaren med Monika, 1953) four years before The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries. It is the film of his that first made his name internationally, partly for its content (Harriet Andersson's Monika appears nude on screen, briefly) and partly for the audacity of its photography. The cinematographer was Gunnar Fischer, whom we have met on the two later Bergman films.

The plot is a kind of inverted summer-romance story. Monika, a working-class teenage girl in Stockholm, runs away with her boyfriend Harry to spend a summer on a small motorboat in the Stockholm archipelago. They live freely on islands, swim, fight, fall in and out of love. The summer ends. They return to the city. Monika, who hates the city and the life it requires, soon abandons Harry and their newborn daughter to do something else with her life.

What Fischer does in the archipelago sequences is photograph available daylight on water as if the medium itself were the subject. The sequences were shot on actual islands in the Stockholm archipelago over the summer of 1952. Fischer worked with a small crew, often handheld, often shooting without artificial light. The film's image is brighter and sharper than what the rest of European cinema was doing in 1952. The cumulative effect of the long summer sequences is that we come to feel the freedom of the place, which makes Monika's eventual disengagement from Harry and the city more comprehensible than the dialogue makes it.

The most famous shot in the film is the one in the city in the third act. Monika, alone in a café with another man, looks directly into the camera for several long seconds. Bergman cuts to the lighting setup behind the café (we see the studio lights for an instant) and back to her face. The shot is a deliberate breach of the fourth wall. Bergman would later say that he wanted Monika, in that moment, to acknowledge the audience that had been judging her throughout the film.

Andersson was nineteen. She would become one of Bergman's regular collaborators (Through a Glass Darkly, Cries and Whispers). Summer with Monika is the film in which Bergman first finds his voice.

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sources
[1] Bergman, Ingmar. The Magic Lantern. Viking, 1988.
[2] Cowie, Peter. Ingmar Bergman: A Critical Biography. Scribner, 1982.
[3] Steene, Birgitta. Ingmar Bergman: A Reference Guide. Amsterdam UP, 2005.
[4] Björkman, Stig, et al. Bergman on Bergman. Simon & Schuster, 1973.