During the late-1960a and early-1970s, when I first had access to international art films, the reigning auteurs were Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard, and Akira Kurosawa (with some films by Andrei Wadja firmly established in the repertory I could read about but not reach in Minneapolis art houses. Alienation was the universal theme--with those is Kurosawa and Wadja films trying to make differences in society, those in Antonioni, Bergman, and early Godard films trying and failing to connect.

Living in the anomic 21st century with a rapidly encroaching surveillance society, I'm puzzled by how alienated the characters in Antonioni and Bergman and (pre-Maoist) Godard films (along with those in many Fellini and Visconti films and the beginning of the new German cinema) were. Similated sex and lots of explosions seems to keep the mass audience content today, but that is a topic for another day.

The death in Sweden yesterday of Ingmar Bergman a few weeks after his 89th birthday drew my attention from the start of an Antonioni retrospective to the work of the first cinema-creating idol of my youth. (To which Antonioni reacted by dying himself? The project is still on...)

Including "Fanny and Alexander," the 1985 film with which Bergman officially retired from film-making in 1985, I'd seen 19 of his films, some of them more than once. I've been aware that Criterion has recently released some early Bergman films (earlier than the 1955 "Smiles on a Summer Night," the great sex comedy which is the oldest Bergman film I've seen, and one of only two that I've watched again in recent years ("The Magician" is the other).

I spent four hours yesterday watching documentaries about Bergman that are mosly him talking--with apparent candor, with fluency, and with charm. "Ingmar Bergman Makes a Movie" (Winter Light) also includes scenes of his researching (many times) a scene and editing another one. Bergman spoke of the tedium of writing and of directing motion pictures, but neither he nor cast and crew seems to have been bored, however long it took him to get what he wanted on film.

Of the Bergman films I have on hand, I thought the Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries, 1957), the one about age and facing imminent death, was an appropriate choice (playing chess with Death in "The Seventh Seal" (1956)would also have done just fine, and "Shame" (1967) has the most direct contemporary relevance here in Cheneyland. The Criterion disc of "Wild Strawberries" is burdened with a commentary track by Peter Cowie, whose style and voice I can't stand (but whose book on Bergman I one).

When I first saw "Wild Strawberries," I knew that the old man driving down memory lane between his home in Stockholm and receiving an award in Lund was the seminal Swedish film director Victor Sjöström. In the decades since I first saw the film, I have seen some of the silent-film masterpieces Sjöström directed in America -- "He Who Gets Slapped" (with Lon Chaney, Norman, Shearer, and John Gilbert), "The Scarlet Letter" and The Wind (both starring Lillian Gish with Lars Hanson), though not "The Phantom Carriage" (1921), the one that is directly recalled in the first dream sequence. That is, while I now know some of Sjöström's masterpieces, I don't now that his regrets about ceasing to direct films when sound pictures began were or what personal resonances he had to the lonely old professor of medicine Isak Borg.

Bergman recurrently denied that sharing his initials meant anything, saying "Isak" appealed to him as a "cold" name. Isaac is the one willing to be sacrificed by his father (Abraham) and whether it is how Bergman wrote the character, how he directed Sjöström, or Sjöström's personality overflowing the role, Professor Bork does not seem all that cold to me. A bit cranky, yes, and rebelling at plans made for him, but eager to calm his set-in-her-ways housekeeper (Gunnel Broström), happy to have the company of his daughter-in-law Marianne (Ingrid Thulin) on the drive to Lund, where her husband (his son) Dr. Evald Borg (Gunnar Björnstrand) lives.

Plot spoiler alert

In between witnessing scenes from his past (in the first of which he loses the young woman he loves to one seducer and in the second of which he sees his adulterous wife with her seducer), and visiting his 98-yea-old mother, played by Naima Wifstrand (whom I see as desiccated, but not cold), the pick up a young woman named Sara (Bibbi Andersson) on her away to Italy with two rival beaus, Anders (Folke Sundquist). and Victkor (Björn Bjelfvenstam) vying for her in part by arguing about the existence of God and scientific materialism . They are silly, not least in their short shorts and in their combativeness. There is also an automobile accident that incorporates a bickering married couple whose VW beetle overturned into the doctor's old and spacious touring car.

After the accident, Marianne drives, and the nastiness added to the car by the latest additions soon prompts her to stop and to order the couple out "for the sake of the children." Later, while the "children" are picking flowers, Marianne tells her father-in-law about her problem at home. She is pregnant and wants to bear the child. Evald does not want to be responsible for bringing an innocent child into the heritage of coldness (and recurrent conflicts) that is his lineage. Isak attempts to offer sympathy, not something he's very good at or at which he has much practice.

Still, to me, neither Isak nor his mother seem cold. Lonely and lacking family or social support, yes, but a stop for refueling at which Max van Sydow refuses payment for all the unpaid kindness Isak had done when he was the district doctor years before further undercuts Isak being a cold and bitter old man, a survivor of a Strindbergian marriage. The youngsters respect Isak's age and social position, but also like him and treat him as something between being a referee and being a playmate. He is touched by their energy and their treating him as a human being rather than a block of ice.

They serenade him before continuing on to Hamburg--and after Isak has made gestures at defrosting the very proper relations with his housekeeper and his son... and unmistakable signaled his support to Marianne to bring new life into the imperfect world.

End spoiler-alert

In addition to providing dream sequences (catnip to cineastes), striking visual compositions, and a range of outstanding performances from multiple generations of actors, Bergman provided what most viewers would regard as catharsis--or even a "happy ending." I remember watching "Cries and Whispers" as being about as much fun as having fingernails wrenched out (a great film that I would have to be very steeled ever to watch again). "Wild Strawberries" is closer to "Smiles on a Summer Night" than I remembered. It used to be programmed so often, because it is carries its closed-in octogenarian out on the road, mixing new experiences with youthful memories, and doing what characters in many Bergman films (such as "Winter Light") try to do--connect.

I don't know if Sjöström had difficulty remembering lines. His voice-overs don't seem redundant (of what is visible). Far from bothering me, I find his voice rich and reassuring...just not cold! I guess that his being sympathetic from the time he wakes up at the start of the film might be seen as a failure, but I choose to believe that "coldness" is a failure of imagination and observation by his family members rather than the journey thawing him. If Isak is supposed to be unlikable, the film fundamentally failed, but that is not how I choose to interpret what I see--in the excellent Criterion print-transfer.

I'd speed up a few scenes, but can occupy myself more closely examining the compositions (before the Bergman partnership with Sven Nykvst; Gunnar Fischer shot "Wild Strawberries" (and "The Seventh Seal" just before it).

The hour-and-a-half interview 1999 interview by Jörn Donner is unsatisfying. Speaking carefully but with every appearance of seeking to be candid, Bergman answers some questions--some of which seem impertinent to me. He spoke about the tedium of writing and of blocking, but ranked himself good at his craft as a director (stage and screen, the latter being more exhausting, especially believing that as Antonioini once said, camera placement is a moral choice). The 81-year-old director seemed more relaxed than in the interviews from 1962 in "Ingmar Bergman Makes a Movie" (but the priceless parts of that are the scenes of doing his work blocking, directing actors, and editing "Winter Light"). I'd guess that this lengthy bonus feature would bore those with little familiarity and/or little interest in how Bergman thought about what he had done and was still doing in his early 80s (i.e., the age of Sjöström in "Wild Strawberries").


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© 2007, Stephen O. Murray

There is no shortage of other interpretations with more plot-detailing in epinions reviews of this canonical film--one that was made the same year as Kurosawa's "Throne of Blood" and "The Lower Depths," and Fellini's "Nights of Cabiria." The racist, jingoistic claptrap "Bridge on the River Kwai" received the "best picture" Oscar for the year.






Recommended:
Yes

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