“Toothache in the Soul”: Summer Interlude (1951, dir. Ingmar Bergman)

Described by Godard in the late 1950s as one of the most beautiful of all films and by Bergman himself as his first mature film, ‘Summer Interlude’ tends to be overshadowed by Bergman’s other summer film, ‘Summer with Monika’, and by the heavier meditations on love relationships, existential torment, loss and despair that are now firm entries in the canon of world cinema. Ballet dancer Marie, coming to her late twenties, at once at the peak of her career and anticipating its end, receives a worn-out notebook in the mail—the journal of her former lover Henrik, documenting the summer they spent together thirteen years before, a summer ended by his death in a tragic accident while swimming on the coast. When her rehearsal is delayed by a powercut, she takes the ferry out to the archipelagic island on which the romance took place, and Marie’s remembrances of that summer form the bulk of the film. In the final third, she returns to the dance studio, resolves to confront and move on from the past, to attempt to allow the emotional openness she associates with an ‘interlude’ of lost happiness back in, past the self-protective walls she’s constructed around herself as strategic melancholia against the experience of grief. 

For much of its running time, ‘Summer Interlude’ depicts a teenage idyll which latter-day critics, in the wake of Bergman’s reputation for existential gloom, have interpreted as ‘surprisingly sweet’. This is a situational reading that, ironically enough, given the film’s own concern with memory and the re-reading of the past, depends on retrospection. Such critical response tends to receive the flashback ‘interlude’ as characterising the mood of the film itself—sweetly observed romance with occasional premonitions of dread—and it takes up much of the running time, but it’s important to note that the film is structured as a critical reflection on, as well as an echo of, that romance. If the filmic flashback tends to suggest that we can simply replay the past in the present, Bergman’s framing of these flashbacks also suggests the vicissitudes of memory, the palimpsestic alterations that are both re-readings and re-writings, not so much to decry them as fictions or to lament memory’s instability, but to explore ways in which past and present might be integrated in a way that neither melancholically disavows the past in a false ‘moving on’, nor remains immured in it, unable to face the present except with a diffident and distanced mask.

As the central structuring element of the film, then, flashback is self-consciously deployed. There are in effect two framings to the ‘interlude’ of teenage love which makes up the film’s emotional heart and takes up the majority of the running time: following the musical designation, one might call them ‘preludes’ (with a ‘coda’ to conclude). First, we have Marie in the dressing room, where she waits as the ballet rehearsal is suspended due to a power-cut—what happens when art’s sublimatory power is put on hold, the make-up is removed, and inner depths must be confronted direct? Triggered by the receipt of Henrik’s diary, and brushed off by her current lover David, a handsome but superficial tabloid hack (self-described), she takes the ferry out to the island where she spent her summer holidays and where she and Henrik conducted their affair, and it’s the further memories triggered by presence on the island itself that take us into the world of flashback per se. On Henrik’s death, the return by ferry and an encounter in the dressing room provide the final resolution. The film’s structure is insistently retrospective, a chain of remembrances, whether contained in physical objects (Henrik’s journal, the abandoned summerhouse or the bucolic coastline where the young lovers spent their time) or in a more amorphous tendency of the mind to wander. Even the remembered moment—the ‘interlude’—is itself framed by the unhealthy dwelling on the past and on youth exhibited by Marie’s alcoholic and predatory ‘uncle’ Erland, obsessed with the memory of a moment Marie’s mother danced ‘for him’ (in reality a forbidden, unreciprocated longing played out in the presence of her husband and his wife) and seeking to recreate it in his attraction to Marie: after Henrik’s death, he promises he will teach her how to wall herself off from the world.

The film at once revels in and critiques the dead-end of nostalgia—and, as Marie reckons with balancing personal memory and artistic present, so Bergman bases on his own experience of youthful love, with a lover who also died tragically young, in a gender-reversed version of that scenario that takes as (one of its) explicit theme/s the relation between artistic sublimation and personal memory and desire. As such, the integration of the interlude—the past, first love, carefree teenage years, metropolitan pastoral, Stockholm archipelago, ‘tempered countryside and wilderness’, as Bergman put it, playground of the comfortable –with the present—the city, the newspaper, the urban—is more complicated than it might appear, given that much of what we see of that present, urban world is in fact the backstage and rehearsal space of the ballet—a mode of artifice, of fantasy and of alternative world-building if ever there was one. All the ore so when we consider that, in Bergman’s notebook draft of the story the decade previous, based on his own experience of teenage love, the original ballet to be performed was Stravinsky’s Petrushka—the ironic jibes of the puppet master and the puppet performing for the callous crowd. As it stands, the ballet is the more kitschy-grandiloquent tragedy—and crowd favourite—Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake: comparisons might be drawn, somewhat unexpectedy perhaps, to Gena Rowlands getting the children to enact the dance of the dying swan in her ‘Woman Under the Influence’ breakdown, or to the more surreal ballet sequences of Cassavetes’ underrated late career ‘Love Streams’, where ballet indices nostalgia, the passing of youth, the responsibilities and demands of love and family as a form that becomes inherently uncanny, associated as it with the time-bound physicality of gendered youth and a dream-world that’s a bizarre fusion of the ‘child-like’ and the cruelly adult, the physically punishing, fate, doom, imbricated sex and death.

But whereas Cassavetes’ use of ballet here is framed through class—ballet stands as a mode of escape from the world of family, the constructions of gender roles, the inability to express care, tenderness or an aspiration beyond the worlds of gender-segregated social formations (the boy’s gang, the girl’s get-together) or the gendered labour of the family—Bergman’s world is one where the solidity of class comfort—albeit one not untouched by grief, loss, orphanhood, and the gendered performance of beauty—is, in contrast to the class conflicts of ‘Summer with Monika’, a given. The young lovers here don’t so much define sexual or classed prohibition as inhabit a blissful space of permission, while ballet is stressed as quotidian performance—the dance studio filmed with attention to lights, technicians, consumers (the worker who disparages the performance because the dancers don’t show their legs enough), the gatekeeper at reception, perpetually keeping out the press in a bit of comic relief. To that extent undercut, presented as simply another mode of labour—note the prominent shots of chain-smoking dancers, the scenes of applying and removing make-up, of people entering and leaving the space, the stairs perpetually crowded with comings and goings, the unpredictable rhythms of the working day—ballet also serves as a useful index for the film’s consideration of the relation of art to desire, passion to sublimation, aesthetic temporality to that of personal memory. In ‘Swan Lake’, the figure of the lover turned into a swan serves as ready metaphor for the ballet dancer training their body in the service of aesthetic beauty: a metamorphosis—whether as sublimation or transmutation, or both—into the not-quite human that is ballet’s own uncanny fascination, from Swan Lake itself to Coppelia to Petrushka. Bergman’s film is more concerned with the back-stage movement that surrounds ballet as with ballet as self-contained artistic world: the world of theatre wings as much as the choreographed wings of Tchiakovsky’s swan-maidens. The film was a self-interrogation, a cathartic working-through of an experience of personal loss: if more realist than a 19th century ballet, still an artistic translation—metamorphosis? sublimation? transmutation?—of personal experience. But then, what in daily life’s the border of experience, feeling, performance, self/representation?

Dying swans, the contortion of the body to a position of gravity-defying airiness in fact predicated on the disciplined torture of the gendered body: there are multiple mirrors, feints and screens here. These are all the more emphasized in the climactic dressing room dialogue with the ballet master is made up as a sinister clown, complete with hat and prosthetic nose—Delibe’s Doctor Coppelia, another variant on the obsession with craft, the mechanical, the imitative that likewise characterises Petroushka, a doll maker expert at art’s mimetic processes but unable to participate in life itself. Much of the scene is shot in a complicated arrangement of mirror reflections, the doublings and pairings of mirrors, cameras, windows.

Here we anticipate the world of ‘Persona’, of doublings and projections and withdrawal from the world. But the film’s emotional tenor is predominantly that of lyrically-invoked bliss—clouds, sun, water, teenage love—presented without judgment, consequence or moral prohibition (what a breath of fresh air in 1953), framed by the ambiguous melancholy of the dressing room, and the turn to tragedy upon Henrik’s death seems as abrupt as the turn to ‘comedic’ resolution at the end—Marie making faces at herself in the mirror on the realisation that she is, in fact, ‘happy’. If these shifts feel jarring—however much they’re elegantly smoothed over with the technical accomplishments of cross-fades, carefully composed rooms, attentiveness to the dynamics of people’s relations to interior space—so too our perceptual experience of time, and the sudden eruptions and disappearances of memory itself, at once willed and unwilled, can be jerky as much as smooth, close-ups as much as long shots, non-sequiturs as much as rehearsed and integrated narration.

But how much does this itself fall prey to the idealised stasis the film attempts to work through? In his Bergman book, Robin Wood argues for the ‘immaturity’ of the film’s ‘romantic fatalism’. It is, after all, at precisely the moment when practical difficulties are mentioned (Henrik is to go back to university, Marie to ballet school in the next three days) that the fatal accident occurs: the shift to the easier and grander mode of mortal tragedy, which gives a ‘hook’ to the narrative of memory, regret and loss that doesn’t have to entangle itself with the practical business of living, of the integration of passion with routine, career, labour, of the extension beyond the arcadian ‘interlude’ into the next act. (‘Summer with Monika’, would address these more closely.) That’s mapped onto the too-easy pathetic fallacy—picking wild strawberries in summer! walking past leafless trees in autumn!—the reading into and onto ‘nature’ in a film that’s otherwise highly conscious of artifice, performance and the uneasy balance between social construction and constriction and ‘natural’ feeling. Such moments are characterised by openings to, or onto landscape—raising the blinds in the summerhouse, cranes up towards sun and clouds or across to se and coast—in a spacious and languorously mobile visual field. After Henrik’s death, however, the framing becomes increasingly crowded and interior in the final act, with faces and bodies in rooms and interior spaces, cut off and contained by the sharp angles of walls, tables and mirrors, rather than the gentler shapes and spacious mobility of the outdoors. In particular, the extreme close-ups of the older Marie’s face—an eye, a face—present us with the unnerving experience of direct confrontation, interpellating audience as both voyeur and as suddenly themselves watched. 

 

Such moments chop up the face, dividing parts from whole, contrasting sharply with the integration of person and landscape, lover with lover that characterises the medium- and long-shot framings that dominate the interlude itself. In a parallel move, after Henrik’s death, Bergman uses crossfades of Marie walking down the hospital corridor, leaving the building, and so on, which don’t so much divide and separate part from whole but entangle different spatio-temporal wholes, different levels, so that a picture of a single whole becomes virtually impossible to determine.

These crossfades serve to index time at once passing and freezing in a kind of arrested development. While the structure of the filmic flashback tends to move from the ‘objective’—the narratalogical field which presents the narrator in context—to the subjective—signalled by the presence of the narrator’s voiceover on the soundtrack, these cross-fades seem caught between the two modes, at once suggesting the collapse of time in the immediate wake of loss and the longer process of acknowledgment, disavowal, sublimation and the like that is loss’s long afterlife. In the following scenes, Marie’s narration of memory seeks to reckon with her experience of time as a void to be filled, as something whose unavoidable passing—personal loss, awareness of mortality—is as full of anguish as the anticipation of its continuance. Thus, her conscious creation of self-protective walls, spaces that become prisons, whether in her brief romance with ‘uncle Erland’ (alluded to but not seen) or in her devotion to the ballet: art as sublimation, face as mask, total investment in skill and performance at the expense of the loss of identity, of sense of self. That this is frequently mapped out in pathetic fallacy—the ‘summer interlude’ of first love followed by the ‘autumn’ of its passing (crashingly emblematised, not only in the end of the affair, but in the tragic death of the beloved) that veers close to truism or cliché, notably in the sudden ‘happy ending’. In ‘Swan Lake’, Siegfried stays faithful to his original, true love by throwing himself in the lake, thence ascending to heaven with Odette. The lover must sacrifice themselves for the memory of a past love in order to enter into the metaphysical eternity that at once symbolises futurity and abolishes time.

In ‘Summer Interlude’, the integration of past, present and future doesn’t have to rely on the magical transformations of a ballet scenario. As the film ends, Marie, it seems, has succeeded in getting the burden of the past off her chest by giving her current lover Henrik’s notebook and resolving to—what? ‘move on?’ inhabit a new emotional openness? Just like that?—as a flash of the free-spirited teenager returns and she pulls faces at herself in the mirror. This ending as resolution is too quick to feel achieved—the present-day boyfriend’s feet planted solely on the ground, Marie, dashing backstage in a quick changeover, going up on point to kiss him, the body parts reflecting gender division, severed from the bodies they support (the feet are the proletarians of the body, Etienne Decroux once said), the balance of groundedness and aesthetic flight again subject to the ravages of time—as Marie is reminded several times, she does not have many years left in her career, and one might presume that David—who resents the erratic schedule and her pursuit of art, whilst also being admiringly attracted to it—would hardly be the most liberated of partners.

But that would be another story.