Apparently, my Contact page was labeled “Piss Off” in the site menu. Must’ve been some fookin’ Tralfamadorian trolls hacked my site! Ahem. Anyway, the menu is now friendlier, inviting you to “Get in touch.” I glanced in at my “Link Heap” page as well, and a foetid stench of dead links engulfed and / or suffocated me, and I had no choice but to retreat shamefacedly, a failure in every dimension of Internet Presence. Which is to say, I’m aware of the issue, and maybe someday I’ll do something about it, but I make no promises!

T’other night, I plunged head first into Bergman’s Summer Interlude (1951), included on the same disc as To Joy (1950). It’s tempting to call the films twins, they share so much in structure, theme, and imagery. All the same, Summer Interlude might be the prettier twin, you know, the talented one.

First of all, it’s just a beautiful film. We’ve lost so much these days by shooting everything in color. Color tricks you into thinking you’re seeing something “real.” So it’s a lie. Whereas, black and white captures reality and explicitly transforms it into a dream. It’s honest. You can’t look at a black and white movie and understand it as anything other than an artistic creation. Not so with color; one is lulled into passive acceptance of the “reality” of what is seen. Can we all agree it isn’t healthy to look at images on a screen and think of them as “real”? (Apparently, this is how we ended up with Donald Trump and Kim Kardashian; I rest my case, y’r Hon’r.)

You can literally SEE THE LIGHT in a black and white scene (it’s the “white” part). In a color scene, there is no light, per se, only an assortment of frequencies sliced out of the spectrum and artfully composed. You can see shadows, somewhat, but even those are usually muddied by a dense enmeshment of color. Black and white removes the distractions that color preserves, forces you you actually look at a composition and interpret what you see. We must also remember the brain’s propensity to fill in the gaps whenever information is missing: this processing power engages the attention and the imagination more intimately and powerfully. I’m making all this shit up as I go, of course, but it’s probably true.

Summer seems to be a predilection for Bergman. Indeed, the first movie in the collection is Smiles of a Summer Night (1955)! Wild Strawberries and To Joy both transpire in summer, and now… Summer Interlude. A season that lasts, I would guess, about 2 or 3 months in Sweden. Ha ha! Given Bergman’s proclivity, so far, for nostalgia, it makes sense he’d focus on Summer, it being, after all, the time of year most likely to beckon to the longing reflectivity of latter years. Also, an easier time to make a movie! Honestly, that’s probably it; and now I seem to recall that Bergman’s main gig was as the director of a theater, and he made his films in the off-season, so there’s your answer, Sherlock.

I’m quite taken with Maj-Britt Nilsson, who plays Marta in To Joy and Marie in Summer Interlude. Her eyes are a touch too close together, which causes her eyebeams to intersect at an unusual angle, sharpening her smiles, but also her insults. Her body buzzes with easy, nimble energy… appropriate since her character is a ballerina! You feel no regrets at all watching her for 90 minutes in a row. There are moments when I don’t quite believe her, but I think that’s more Bergman’s fault than hers…. He’s still a little clumsy in his craft, isn’t he? By Wild Strawberries, he seems to have found his rhythm, but in this movie, he’s still a tiny bit unsure of himself, and I wouldn’t even say that if I hadn’t already seen Wild Strawberries (or, come to think of it, The Seventh Seal).

Off the top of my head, some of the major ways Summer Interlude recapitulates To Joy:

1. Structure: begin in the present, flashback to show us the doomed relationship, then return to the present for emotional mop-up.
2. Theme: grief.
3. We learn of the lover’s death before even meeting him or her: it’s just inevitable. To Joy dooms the girl, whereas Summer Interlude dooms the boy.
4. Why did the lovers die? Randomly. No fault of their own, nor of anybody else. God said, Fuck you, today’s the day.
5. Classical music! In To Joy, it’s the orchestra, which gets plenty of screen time, and in this one it’s the ballet: lovely, dramatically side-lit dancers with long shadows. Both of these movies celebrate the “Working Class” of the performing arts, the people in the trenches doing the hard work—whether sawing on the strings or pumping out the pliés! Grit and determination, we are given to understand, fuel the Arts just as much as they do the Trades.

I’m sure there’re more points, but I don’t feel like summoning them up…. If anything occurs to me, I’ll add it to the list!

Marie shuts her emotions down for 13 years after Henrik’s death. In her grief, she learns to “build a wall around herself” to prevent further harm. It’s represented visually by the theater makeup so thickly applied to her face. You can barely recognize her face behind it, it’s almost literally a wall. How is she able to tear it down? She acquires Henrik’s diary, after all these years, and it’s not the act of reading it that frees her from her self-made prison, but of giving it to someone else to read—her current lover who’s on the verge of leaving her due to her emotional freeze-out—so that he can understand why she has been so cagey with her affections. She’s literally given herself away, and now she’s free.

Nilsson does an amazing job portraying both a bubbly teenager and an “aging” 28-year old professional ballerina. Bergman has a real knack for filming women, I’m realizing…. He’s able to see past their beauty and bring out the richness of an inner life… which is a real trick when you’re filming such beautiful women!

In fact, on reflection, these early films tend to feature kind of flat, one-note male characters up against vitally portrayed females who crackle with a certain, shall we say, complexity. It isn’t until Wild Strawberries, really, that you get a male with significant depth and pathos. Maybe that was his breakthrough film? I haven’t seen enough to judge yet, I suppose!

That’s probably enough about that. I thought I had things to say about the “Uncle” character, and was going to talk about all the mirrors (Bergman loves him some mirrors, let me tell you!), but I don’t feel like it. Kinda wrote too much already, frankly, what the fuck am I doing? These were just going to be little summaries or reader responses…. If I change my mind later, I’ll come back and edit this post. So there.