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Ingrid Ryberg
To cite this article: Ingrid Ryberg (2014) Bergman's Queer Male Spectator, NORA - Nordic Journal
of Feminist and Gender Research, 22:2, 155-158, DOI: 10.1080/08038740.2014.900110
Article views: 87
BOOK REVIEW
Ingmar Bergman’s daring feature, Summer with Monika (1953), about young lust and
infatuation one summer season in the Stockholm archipelago, formed part of the
shaping of a national self-image of a country at the forefront of sexual liberation—
not least for women—and of Swedish sexuality as natural, free, and educated.
Internationally, however, this notion of a modern and enlightened sexuality came to
be understood as “the Swedish sin” and was tied to an image of a spiritually hollow,
amoral, suicide- and divorce-burdened, socialist nation. When Bergman’s film first
reached American audiences in 1955 it was not as an art film, but as the re-edited
“skin flick” Monika—The Story of a Bad Girl!, shown in drive-ins and grind-house
theatres. The case of Summer with Monika is a telling example of how the meaning of
any single film changes with and is shaped by different promotional strategies,
exhibition practices, and national, historical and cultural contexts.
In his book, Queer Bergman: Sexuality, Gender and the European Art Cinema
(2013), Daniel Humphrey studies the exhibition and reception of Bergman’s early
films in the USA and argues that they resonated with and invited a particular kind of
queer spectatorship, pre-existing the era of the gay liberation movement and the
emergence of a film culture more explicitly dealing with homosexuality, such as the
work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder or John Waters. By a detailed analysis of the ways
in which Bergman’s work reached the American audience—through film posters and
ads, movie theatres and reviews—Humphrey demonstrates how notions of
foreignness and strangeness, commonly used to describe the films, were associated
with non-normative sexualities and spoke directly to gay and lesbian audiences.
For instance, after its early grind-house existence and after Bergman’s American
breakthrough as an art film director, Summer with Monika reappeared in 1960 as
Monika with the tagline “The Story of a Strange Girl”, adding to the discursive
construction of the European auteur’s work as emanating from a curious, sexual grey
zone, which also related to a Cold War-era image of Sweden as a suspicious socialist
nation of demasculinized men. After the US release of The Magician (1958),
Bergman’s first film featuring androgynous characters, the notion of the uncanny
also became increasingly tied to his work. By relating Freud’s notion of the uncanny
to his theories on polymorphous perversity, Humphrey argues that this further
evoked a queer spectator position.
q 2014 Ingrid Ryberg
156 Book Review
but his interpretation also becomes just one of many possible readings that the
auteur’s multi-faceted work invites—which is finally exactly what characterizes the
European art film.
Ingrid Ryberg
Department of Media Studies, Stockholm University
Stockholm, Sweden