Ingmar Bergman

Summer Interlude

Summer Interlude

Touching on many of the themes that would define the rest of his career—isolation, performance, the inescapability of the past— Ingmar Bergman’s tenth film was a gentle drift toward true mastery. Maj-Britt Nilsson beguiles as an accomplished ballet dancer haunted by her tragic youthful affair with a shy, handsome student (Birger Malmsten). Her memories of the sunny, rocky shores of Stockholm’s outer archipelago mingle with scenes from her gloomy present at the theater where she performs. A film that the director considered a creative turning point, Summer Interlude is a reverie about life and death that unites Bergman’s love of theater and cinema.

Film Info

  • Sweden
  • 1951
  • 96 minutes
  • Black & White
  • 1.37:1
  • Swedish
  • Spine #613

Special Features

  • New digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
  • New English subtitle translation
  • PLUS: A new essay by film scholar Peter Cowie

    New cover by Sarah Habibi

Purchase Options

Collector's Sets

Collector's Set

Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema

Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema

Blu-ray Box Set

30 Discs

$239.96

Special Features

  • New digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
  • New English subtitle translation
  • PLUS: A new essay by film scholar Peter Cowie

    New cover by Sarah Habibi
Summer Interlude
Cast
Maj-Britt Nilsson
Marie
Birger Malmsten
Henrik
Alf Kjellin
David Nyström
Annalisa Ericson
Kaj
Georg Funkquist
Uncle Erland
Stig Olin
Ballet master
Mimi Pollak
Henrik’s aunt
Renée Björling
Aunt Elisabeth
Gunnar Olsson
Pastor
Credits
Director
Ingmar Bergman
Produced by
Allan Ekelund
Screenplay
Ingmar Bergman
Screenplay
Herbert Grevenius
Original story
Ingmar Bergman
Cinematography
Gunnar Fischer
Production design
Nils Svenwall
Editor
Oscar Rosander
Music
Erik Nordgren

Current

Summer Interlude: Love and Death in the Swedish Summer
Summer Interlude: Love and Death in the Swedish Summer

A watershed film in Bergman’s career, this tale of a woman caught between the past and present is a masterful study in darkness and light.

By Peter Cowie

Mirrors of Bergman
Mirrors of Bergman

Filmmaker Kogonada, with a little help from Sylvia Plath, reflects on women and mirrors in the films of Ingmar Bergman.

By Kogonada

Explore

Ingmar Bergman

Writer, Director

Ingmar Bergman
Ingmar Bergman

The Swedish auteur began his artistic career in the theater but eventually navigated toward film—"the great adventure," as he called it—initially as a screenwriter and then as a director. Simply put, in the fifties and sixties, the name Ingmar Bergman was synonymous with European art cinema. Yet his incredible run of successes in that era—including The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, and The Virgin Spring, haunting black-and-white elegies on the nature of God and death—merely paved the way for a long and continuously dazzling career that would take him from the daring “Silence of God” trilogy (Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, The Silence) to the existential terrors of Cries and Whispers to the family epic Fanny and Alexander, with which he “retired” from the cinema. Bergman died in July 2007, leaving behind one of the richest bodies of work in the history of cinema.