With the first flush of sustained sun, I spent a few days scattered about, feeling my way toward what I am now doing — watching a lot of Bergman films. I feel like he’s a filmmaker for summer, for the wax/waning of spring. I often think about buying that huge box-set, but then I might miss the heat, emerging — on the other side — blinking, but happy. It’s also very expensive.
— It is easy to fall into the trap of seeing parallels between similar but different things, and to find it impossible to think about one without regard to the other. What are we saying, actually, when we observe that a particular filmmaker seems to reference another filmmaker in a scene, the composition of a shot? This is the formulation of a legacy, but it’s equally possible that the referencing scene is unintentional, that the filmmaker would recoil in screaming horror at the possibility of this interpretive interleaving. Coincidences happen.
— I haven’t watched Wild Strawberries (1957) for years, perhaps even as many as ten or fifteen years. Dumbly, I’d forgotten how its most effusive and intoxicating effect is the weird palpability of its dreaming. Isak Borg’s dreams. These dreams, pouring out from the professor’s docile, sleeping body, vibrate between the agonising (surreality, nightmare) and the cathartic. His life is also a dream. I also forgot about the familiarity of its characters, most of whom - in the tight, tumbling space of a car (his car, Isak’s, it is “old fashioned”), loitering at a roadside, seated at a long lunch table (exposed to the air) - burst with a kind of insane, unfiltered candour. Marianne, his daughter-in-law, asserts - immediately - that she finds Isak to be unpleasant, bitter. She smiles throughout. Sara, her face almost cracking apart from bonhomie, expresses her more-than-playful love for the professor. Berit and Sten (the couple whose car gets wrecked in a near head-on collision, flipping over) pour forth their marital bitterness within the discomforting space of the car, all hurtling toward Lund (and, beyond it, Italy). This too is a dream, really. Bergman’s film begins in a sentimental, avuncular and deeply mannered mode, before cracking apart under a barrage of outbursts and confidences. Berit slapping Sten’s face until he cries. How they are ejected from the car. Wilderness.
— But, dreams. When I said, “it is quite easy to fall into the trap of seeing parallels”, I was thinking about Maya Deren and, specifically, I was thinking about Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). This is because the first dream of Wild Strawberries seems to drink (hungrily) from the same bowl of soup. Overexposed, a white light defacing Isak’s unspeaking face and eyes and lips; the handless clock face; his doppelganger (corpse) that falls from a coffin; the insistent bashing of the hearse’s horse-drawn wheels against the lamppost. All of it hinges upon an acutely Expressionistic poetics. When P. Adams Sitney wrote of Deren’s Meshes in his Visionary Film in 1974 (it began with Deren), he could have been writing about Bergman, some fourteen years removes: “[the film] explicitly simulates the dream experience” - its concern with transitions (from waking to dreaming) and with ambiguity (of waking). Bergman’s Wild Strawberries does indeed feature a seemingly clear-cut enjambment between this imagistic nightmare and waking (he jolts awake on his sweated-upon sheats). But like I said above, the succeeding rhythm of extremities and outbursts further dismantle any easy barrier between the waking and the dream. A flipped car, a volley of slaps, a trio of young hitchhikers singing beneath his window (he blinks, happy). But even when he arrives at the old family retreat by the lake, Sara arrives as if plucked straight from the Midsummer night - and the second dream (the first dream of the dacha) comes (it seems) without sleep, without an accented moment of sleeping. He rests by a patch of wild strawberries, resting his body (on its side, slightly propped up), the camera looking through him as he looks through it, and the dream fade-slips over the surface of the waking ‘real’. Now, dreaming comes easily to him - entirely unbidden, and without always relying on the mechanism of actually falling asleep.
— The subconscious is irrational, discontinuous, even terrifying. Later (but not much later), Bergman would accelerate through the ambivalence of personal psychological experience - the crushed/aporetic boundary between reality and dream. Not least because of Persona (1966). Here, Wild Strawberries feels like a transitional moment - a transition between the (still weird) sentimental mannerism of Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) and that quixotic 1966 explosion of the self.
— Clearly, Isak’s nightmare is an intimation of death - his. He witnesses his own body, his body looks at him (rising from the coffin just as he leans down into the patch of wild strawberries). The bodies, imagistically, pass through each other - not in time, not even in space, but associatively, in some montage-at-a-distance. He is lowering toward the grave, and all the ecstatic fragments of the life-world (here and gone) are rising up to meet him, reverberating around in the smashed logic of the waking film. Anders and Viktor, his two male hitchhikers, tussle (physically, mentally) over the existence of god. They are him, not only as a young man competing with a suitor (his brother) for the love of Sarah, his cousin (memories; both played by Bibi Andersson). They reflect (lumpenly) his internal contradiction between science and the inchoate God.
— Deren’s imagistic “trance film” (as Sitney called it) embodies not the mad voyeurism of the subsconcious per se, but the “erotic mystery of the self”. It is a “quest inwards”. Wild Strawberries partakes of both, probing a trembled finger into the eerie soup of a body-toward-death (the mind fragmenting, shatteringly) and a very personal, intimate kind of reverie that helps him toward this frontier. Make no mistake, this is Isak’s journey! But it is, necessarily (still), a confrontation with the psychological abstract of death itself. Despite the little pieces of programmatic harp music, the slightly exposed film stock, the wobbling fades that let the past and the present slip over-inside each other, the entire experience is much more ambivalent than I first remembered. Isak presses his hand against a mirror (dark reflection, reflected back); he gazes down at the shade of his looming silhouette in a summer puddle. It is within the burned cage of a fire-gutted building that he watches his former wife’s infidelity (the past) in a forest clearing. He has tried to live a good life, a kind life, but his heart has been shattered. He confronts, now, its pieces. Regret, regret, but smiling, good-naturedly. Why has this building been harrowed by flames? The world itself (wrapped between dream and waking) has begun to come apart at its seams.
— Dream, again. The first. The camera dolly tracks as he moves against the flank of an empty row of buildings. A figure (back turned to him) collapses to the floor as he reaches out his hand (the same hand that reaches toward the mirror). Transitions become localised to gestures, moments of contact.
— I was saying something about coincidences and parallels. Both Deren and Bergman - across an expanse of raging ocean - were dipping through the cobalt surface of wartime/post-war manners and mannerism. Bergman was a modernist, as Deren, broadly, was a modernist. The comparison probably ends there, but - I implore you! - watch the first dream of Wild Strawberries and then watch Meshes of the Afternoon. Theirs is a shared and uneasy complication of the subconscious. Mirrors, doubles, jarring angles, faceless (and distorted) faces. What they share is a kind of aesthetic stratagem, as Ur-Jungian as it is a fragmented confrontation with their own idiosyncratic subconscious.
— But it’s interesting that Deren was described by Jonas Mekas (writing in the Village Voice on 21 October, 1959) as an “anti-Bergmanite”, as paraphrased by Henry K. Miller: “she doesn’t see why all the [world] craze about him”. This is with explicit reference to Wild Strawberries. But there is a convergence, I think, between these pulsations of the American avant-garde and the dream logics of (some) European cinema, like Bergman’s, but again this could all be a sort of unintended radiation from their shared objection to narrative norms and their concern (much more pronounced in the American avant garde) of interrogating perception and its psychologies. The Seventh Seal (also 1957!), which I re-watched last night (just checking), feels different again. Neither ‘Derenetic’ nor “trace-like”. Bergman changes gears.
— Funny how, in The Seventh Seal, Bibi Andersson’s acrobat-actor passes Andreas Blok, the anguished crusader, a bowl of wild strawberries. He eats them as if they’re a votive offering, eyes closed to the rushing obliteration of the world.
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