This movie, part of the Passport to Cinema season at BFI Southbank, also screens on 22 November. Full details here.
You can read Dave Kehr's full New York Times review of the film here. This is an extract:
The film “Summer With Monika,” released in 1953, isn’t among the best known or most representative works of Ingmar Bergman,
but it may be his most influential.No doubt, its international success was due in large part to the film’s
bold eroticism. The young lovers escape the city, and the looming
prospect of adult responsibilities, by borrowing a motorboat and heading
off to the archipelago that lies east, off the Baltic coast, where they
spend an idyllic summer drifting among the islands, living off the land
and making love in the open air. In France, where casual nudity in films was no particular novelty,
“Monika” passed almost unnoticed on its first release, but when Henri
Langlois included it in a 1958 Bergman retrospective at the Cinémathèque
Française, several of the young filmmakers who would soon make up the
New Wave found in it a model for the kind of intimate, personal,
present-tense cinema they were aspiring to create. “The most original
film by the most original of filmmakers,” wrote Jean-Luc Godard, “it is
to the cinema of today what ‘Birth of a Nation’ was to the classical
cinema.”
Here (and above) is an extract from the film.
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