The Cinematheque

In 1951, Ingmar Bergman, with bills to pay (the Swedish film industry was on hiatus in a tax dispute with the government; the filmmaker, by then twice divorced, had three families to support), wrote and directed nine commercials for a new anti-bacterial soap called Bris (Breeze, in English.) He was given substantial resources (they were Sweden’s most expensive ads to that time) and considerable latitude; the spots, made with a full film crew, and shot by Gunnar Fischer, Bergman’s great cinematographer of the 1950s, were meant to be screened in cinemas. Bergman, years later, described them as ​“miniature films in the sprit of Georges Méliès,” and said, ​“I had a lot of fun challenging stereotypes of the commercial genre.”