Flick Review < Summer With Monika | Ingmar Bergman (1953)

Summer With Monika (1953) Stars: Harriet Andersson, Lars Ekborg

*Godard’s colleague François Truffaut paid a small yet well-known tribute to Summer with Monika in his own feature debut The 400 Blows , when the principal character Antoine and his friend René steal an iconic still from the film from a notice board.

Summer With Monika | Ingmar Bergman (1953) is the most original film of the most original of directors. Summer With Monika is to the cinema today what Birth of a Nation (DW Griffith, 1915) is to the classical cinema. Just as Griffith influenced Eisenstein, Gance and Lang, so Summer With Monika, five years before its time, brought to a peak that renaissance in modern cinema whose high priests were Fellini in Italy, Aldrich in Hollywood, and (so we believed, wrongly perhaps) Vadim in France.Jean-Luc Godard extolled the film more than anybody else. Commenting on the Bergman retrospective in Paris in 1958