Kris Hattori
CTCS 502
Professor Kase
He Would Always Have Been Isak Borg, Ingmar Bergman
While Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries (1957) is a film that largely embraces the personal, there are clear links to religion and Swedish nationalism that resonate throughout it. I believe that these three categories can never be fully segregated from each other despite an auteur’s intention to create a film that focuses on one. Bordwell hints at why this may be true. He explains that the competent art film viewer, "...watches the film expecting not order in the narrative but stylistic signatures in the narration: technical touches and obsessive motifs (Bergman's character names) (Bordwell 59)."
When viewing an art film, one can make the concession that even the most infinitesimal details can betray authorial marks. Because of this, I believe that a film must be looked at in terms of quantitative and qualitative patterns in order to discern the differences between conscious decisions, unconscious decisions, and simple happenstance.
At one level, the film is a narrative about one man who is able to relieve some of the loneliness in his life by taking both a physical and mental journey. Examining the film at an authorial level, it is the work of Ingmar Bergman, who wrote the screenplay after taking his own road trip to a town from his youth and toying with the idea of the past and present merging. He elaborates, "The film was based on my experiences during that trip to Uppsala. It was all as simple, concrete, and tangible as that. And I had no difficulty at all in carrying it through (146)."
His choices in the film, both formal and narrative are distinctly his own. He asserts that one of the film's most iconic scenes, the dream sequence in which the protagonist, Isak Borg (Victor Sjöström), walks down a street and encounters a hearse and his own living corpse, is based on a recurring dream that he had been having at the time. The scene is brightly lit, imagery is hauntingly alien, and sound design is disorienting. Bergman has created a scene that is distinctly personal art in both content and formal execution.
From the film’s introduction, we see Borg pause to make a move on a chessboard and dismiss it with a grunt. This simple interaction places the chessboard’s importance over many of the other props in the movie. It seems to be a nod to The Seventh Seal, a Bergman film that immediately preceded Wild Strawberries, in which death himself commanded the game. In the dream sequence, Borg encounters a clock with no hands that looms overhead. While these are simply props, I believe that they indicate that there is a threshold that a particular element of a movie must meet based on importance or distinctiveness before registering it into one of the three categories. As is the case with the handless clock (clocks and time being recurring motifs in Bergman’s work), this distinctiveness can operate across an auteur's films.
The reflections of the personal resonate more heavily through Wild Strawberries than its representation of the ideological or national. Borg even shares the same initials as Bergman. The odds that this would happen by chance are one in 676. When an interviewer questioned Bergman about the decision, he responded that it was an "innocent coincidence (Björkman 146)"—a response that seems about as coy as The Beatles insisting that “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” was not about LSD, especially when one considers the sheer amount of autobiographical content within the film.
RELIGIOUS IMPLICATIONS
Many critics like to point to the ideological implications within the film, often citing Bergman's own Father, a Lutheran minister and strict disciplinarian as a reason for this. When asked about how conscious he was about including Catholic implications within Wild Strawberries, he simply replied, "Not at all (Björkman 146)." Despite this, it is hard to ignore the quantity and specificity of formal and symbolic elements in Wild Strawberries that can be read as distinctly religious.
Borg and his daughter in law, Marianne (Ingrid Thulin), meet with university students Sara (Bibi Andersson), Viktor (Björn Bjelfvenstam), and Anders (Folke Sundquist). The group takes a lunch outdoors where Viktor, a rationalist doctor to be, and Anders, a theologian and future Lutheran minister, argue the merits of religion and rationality. They exchange clichés such as “religion is the opiate of the masses.” Unable to settle their differences, they both implore the wise Borg for an opinion, which he deflects by reciting a hymn rather than answering. This lack of concern seems to mirror Bergman’s own thoughts on the issue—that he would simply like that his own message. In this case it is likely that Borg’s own thoughts stray towards reconciliation with his father (Törnqvist 127).
Eventually, Viktor and Anders' differences erupt into a shoving match that Borg and Sara watch from the car, amused. The short fight is filmed at a long range, leaving the viewer simply as a spectator. It lacks the intensity and involvement that close ups and fast cutting between the two combatants would bring to the viewer. Thus Bergman uses formal methods to transform the fight between two friends into a controlled exhibition of levity. Here Bergman uses them as a way of infantilizing an argument between religion and rationalism through allegory. Their sophomoric debate and one dimensional natures make them decidedly impersonal characters. In neither of the two encounters between Viktor and Anders does one gain a clear upper hand on the other.
The origin of obvious visual symbolism such as the stigmata Borg receives by puncturing himself on the nail is hard to deny; however, the recurring themes of mortality, confession, and redemption can easily be said to transcend religious dogma. Dissecting the ideological from the personal becomes problematic at this point due to Bergman’s own relationship to Lutheran Protestantism. Perhaps the ideology has shaped so much of him during his formative years that his decisions are unconscious. This could account for the heavy religious implications throughout the film which oscillate with the lighthearted banter between Viktor and Anders. Although Bergman admits that there is a general religiosity to the film, even this seems to be a concession that he makes only to appease his critics.
SWEDISH NATIONALISM
In the first flashback to Borg’s past, the viewer is greeted with a stylized depiction of the Swedish bourgeoisie. From the color of the walls, appliances, and clothing of Borg’s family to the sunlight pouring into the room, everything is white on white. French argues that the idyllic imagery is taken from the iconic works of Swedish designer, Carl Larsson (French 53). As Sara becomes torn between Borg and his brother, she retreats into a darkened hall. Shadows creep over her face as she confesses her turmoil. It is here that Bergman breaks the façade of this Swedish ideal and subverts the iconic Swedish imagery in order to serve his own narrative.
The structure of the Swedish educational system provides Bergman with a framework for the film's narrative. It is the catalyst for Borg’s need to travel and allows him to hold a place of reverence amongst the three students. Although Bergman engineers the simplistic dichotomy between Anders and Viktor, it does not appear as though this is his indictment of a poor educational system or of the Swedish youth. Bergman admits that while he had attempted to make the three students representative of the Swedish youth, they are a weakness of the film. Bergman recalled "Even at this time the image was utterly outdated (Björkman 147)." The simplistic nature of the trio is often attributed to Bergman’s own disconnect with the age group.
DEMARCATION
What we see occurring most often in Wild Strawberries is an overlapping between the personal and the ideological and an overlapping between the personal and the national. Bergman explains, "I'm a radar set. I pick up one thing or another and reflect it back in mirrored form, all jumbled up with memories, dreams, and ideas (Björkman 18)." He seems to hint the impossibility of absorbing and redistributing ideas of nationalism or ideology without coloring them with one's own experiences.
This becomes one of the most problematic aspects of quantifying a film, its scenes, or even its stills as providing meaning discretely in a single register or representation. It seems that while a filmmaker can intend, at least consciously, to create scenes that register as being personal, ideological, or national, there are levels of the unconscious that can speak volumes to viewers. Bergman describes wrestling with the conscious and unconscious.
Bergman explains:
All the time a film is being made, one flinches away from marginal thinking. If I relyin on my intuition I know it will lead me in the right direction…If I begin hesitating and discussing, I get so tangled up in personal complications and become so crudely aware of what it really is I’m depicting, I can’t go on…Obviously I was perfectly well aware from the outset, on the other hand, that Engineer Ahlman and his wife are a scurrilous portrait of Stig Ahlgren and his wife (Björkman 140).
Bergman himself later becomes an unreliable source to his own film as he stated that his admission that Isak Borg was portrayal of himself as “a tired, old egocentric, who’d cut himself off from everything around him—as I had done (Ruuth 22),” as being false. Bergman’s own indecision points at the reality that one cannot separate the personal, ideological, or national within a film. It is up to the viewer and the critic to set the threshold for qualifying these elements as such.
Bibliography
Björkman, S et al (1973). Bergman on Bergman. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster.
Bordwell, D (1979). The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice. Film Criticism, 4(1), 56-64.
French, K & French, P (1995). Wild Strawberries. South Bank, Waterloo: BFI Publishing.
Ruuth, M (1994). Images. Bloomsbury, London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Törnqvist, E (1995). Between Stage and Screen: Ingmar Bergman Directs. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press.
