Two by Ingmar Bergman: Sawdust and Tinsel (1953) and A Lesson in Love (1954)

These films by Bergman have a liveliness and humor not found in many of Bergman's later works.  Sawdust and Tinsel is an energetic film about circus performers, a circus often being used as a metaphor for the world (my favorite examples are Frank Capra's Rain or Shine, 1930 and Chaplin's The Circus, 1928).  It starts with an image that immediately identifies it as a Bergman film:  a line of horse-drawn wagons against the early-morning sky (the period of the film is unclear, though there is a reference to the recent invention of the motorcar).  There is even a shot of a windmill to empathize a fatalistic theme of the film:  we are tilting at windmills if we think we can escape our fate.  The owner of the going-broke circus takes it to the town where his wife --whom he hasn't seen in three years -- lives with their two children.  The circus owner wants his wife to take him back, but she is happy with her life, running a small shop, and refuses.  He returns to his circus girlfriend who has been visiting her old lover at the theatre, where the head of the theatrical troupe says he produces art, while the circus only produces artifice.  The circus owner and his girlfriend return to each other -- they are just too used to sleeping with one another -- and the circus leaves for another town.  There are scenes of putting up the circus tent in the pouring rain that emphasize the pain and struggle of trying to maintain a traveling circus but the performers bask in the applause of the audience, applause that makes up for all their sacrifices.  There are plenty of symbols, such as a sick bear who the owner shoots (instead of shooting himself) but they do not overwhelm the characters and narrative as they sometimes do in later Bergman films.

A Lesson in Love is labeled in the opening credits as "a comedy for grown-ups," though like most good comedies it is ultimately serious.  A gynecologist has given up his mistress and wants his wife back, following her to Copenhagen where she plans to meet her lover.  The film is full of flashbacks about how the doctor met his wife (he was best man at her planned wedding to another) and how he met his met his mistress (a patient) and separate lives with each, including a flashback to a birthday party for his father where the extended family goes on a picnic.  In this film we are beginning to see the influence of Mozart on Bergman's work, influence that culminated in his lovely film of The Magic Flute (1975).  A Lesson in Love is a film where adults eventually come to terms with marriage --after fifteen years -- as being "for life" and find that that can be more liberating than confining.  Both these films are, of course, in beautiful black-and-white.  Bergman's films, like those of Antonioni and Bresson, did not benefit when he switched to color (presumably for commercial rather than artistic reasons),