By Monica Delgado

In Summer with Monika (Sommaren med Monika, 1952), Ingmar Bergman proposes a series of resources to describe a pessimistic story of confrontation between the city and the countryside, youth and the heaviness of adult life; working life and bourgeois enjoyment without guilt. Beyond the modernity of this story which showed ethical planes respect in respect to determined principles and the freedom outside of them, this film shows how Bergman approaches the materialization of these dichotomies through the figure of the threshold. Passages, transits or simple “doors” that serve as entry and exit to new surroundings, routes to an arcade for daydreaming and a life in paradise.

The passages through these thresholds are not only being revealed as paths to change, but they are also building or allowing to accentuate the effusiveness or ease of Monika (played by Harriet Andersson), as openings to a natural and wild feminine world.

In this video essay, I explore the way in which Bergman constructs this story, using fade ins and lap dissolve, as a minimum unit that gives matter, also, to these interior stages.