Bris Reklamfilmer

In 1951 Swedish film producers closed down the studios for ten months in protest against the high entertainment tax on box office receipts. Since Ingmar Bergman couldn’t make any films, he signed a contract with the AB Sunlight company and directed a number of clever commercials for them to advertise Bris deodorant soap, in which he used a number of his favourite themes. For example, there is a magic show with miniature figures, the dream – in the form of a slapstick comedy – of discovering an anti-bacterial soap, a little history film with a foul-smelling Gustav III, a princess – adapted from H. C. Andersen – who exchanges a bar of soap with a swineherd for a hundred kisses, an animated cartoon with the close-up of a female tennis player’s sweaty skin, an old man (veteran comedian John Botwid) who can’t remember the name of the soap, a commercial as a picture puzzle, a look behind the sets of a film as well as the “first 3-D commercial”, in which the woman in the ad falls out of the clip into the arms of the old man in the audience.