Malleable Memories

"Recently I've had the weirdest dreams" (1:11:55).
Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries (1957)

Points for Reflection

Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries (1957)

1. during Marianne’s and Isak’s car trip conversation, Bergman cuts away to shots of the countryside, trees, and road every now and then.  Why?  At what moments does he choose to interrupt the conversation’s flow with these outdoor views?
2. which transitions does Bergman use to indicate a  shift in time or perception, and what role does the musical score play in such shifts?
3. what commentary does Bergman provide on religion in this film?  Consider characterization, dialogue, quiet reflections, and the poem recited in the film’s second half.
4. why do you imagine Bergmann hired Bibi Andersson to play both the Sara of Isak’s reverie and the hitchhiker named “Sara”?  What of his decision to cast Gunnar Sjöberg as both Sten Alman (husband to Berit  Alman) and the academic examiner who shows up in Isak’s dream?
5. what justification does the Professor Isak Borg give himself for his self-isolation?
6. the film opens with the aged Isak musing that he is grateful for his life, particularly his love of science.  Are this gratefulness and particular love visible to the viewer during the film?
7. Isak admits (to himself) his pedantic tendencies—his overconcern with minor details, rules, and so on.  Does this bit of self-awareness make him more humble around others?
8. play the psychoanalyst and interpret Isak’s surrealistic dream that morning; what do you imagine each of its odd elements symbolize?
9. Isak wants to relate his morning’s surrealistic dream to Marianne, but Marianne expresses disinterest in dreams, so he doesn’t. Why do you imagine she’s less than interested?
10. why doesn’t Marianne take the train back home to Lund, instead asking her father-in-law if she can ride along?
11. Isak tells Marianne that he and Evald resemble one another, that they both have principles.  Do these principles overlap?
12. is Marianne’s early  assessment of Isak accurate?   Does the film reveal him to be, in her words, an “utterly ruthless” and “selfish old man” who never listens to anyone but himself, hiding “it all  behind [his] old-world manners and charm”?
13. Isak apparently told Marianne a couple weeks earlier that he has“no respect for mental suffering.” What does he himself seem to be suffering from, mentally, on this particular day?
14. despite her critiques of Isak, Marianne says she doesn’t actively dislike him, but instead feels sorry for him.  She doesn’t elaborate.  Can we?  Do we find him pitiable too?
15. Isak feels the need to explain the variables (i.e. sentimental feeling, fatigue, sadness) that may have triggered his recollections of his family’s time at the summer house.  Why?
16. what transitions does Bergman use to switch from present to past?
17. Isak, sitting outside the old summer house in a patch of wild strawberries, notes that “the day’s clear reality dissolved into the even clearer images of memory with the strength of a true stream of events.”  How are we to take this?  Do his words imply that what he envisions actually happened?
18. does Isak’s waking day dream about the past reveal the same things about him that his more surrealistic dream—experienced during sleep that morning—suggests?
19. what do we make of the fact that, according to Isak himself, his memories of the past appear to him clearer than surrounding reality?
20. are we to understand that the encounter between Sara and her flirtatious cousin, Sigfrid, actually happened and was witnessed by Isak, or that Isak’s mind has conjured this scenario?
21. why might Bergman have insured that Bibi Andersson (Sara) place an artificial mole on the right side of her face?
22. during Isak’s reverie, Sara tells Sigrid that Isak is the least conceited of the four brothers, and later confides to her sister that he is “so moral and sensitive.”.  If this is an accurate estimation, and Marianna’s claim about Isak’s current self-absorption is also true, what might have caused the alteration in his temperament in the intervening years?
23. we also learn from Sara’s confiding in Charlotta that Isak likes talk about the afterlife and sin.  Does Isak appear religious in the present?
24. what do Sara’s revelations about Isak’s character tell us about his desires and motivations?  If we were to psychoanalyze him, what conclusions might we reach?
25. what feelings overwhelm Isak as he concludes his daydream about the summer house decades earlier?
26. Isak tells Sara he was once in love with a woman named “Sara,” and notes that she and the present, hitchhiking, Sara were similar.  Is this accurate?  Are they mirror images of one another in any important ways?
27. why might Bergman insert the unhappily married couple, Sten & Berit Alman?
28. what attributes does Sara, the hitchhiker, like about each of the brothers traveling with her?
29. during their luncheon, Isak does not respond to Victor’s question of whether he’s religious, but continues to recite the poem he has begun. What does this poem suggest about Isak’s own worldview?
30. during his final dream, Isak imagines a conversation with cousin Sara; could this conversation have actually occurred?
31. during the university examination Isak dreams of, the professor testing him tells him that a doctor’s first duty is what, exactly?
32. in the third stage of his final, haunting dream, Isak dreams of his wife.  What accusation delivered at him in the second, earlier stage of this long dream catalyzes this particular memory?  What accusations did Isak’s wife, dead now for 30 years, cast at him?
33. is there any way out of Isak’s current emotional and mental situation?
34. what caused the current rupture between Marianne and Evald?
35. why does Marianne tell Isak about the conversation w/ her husband?
36. are the three hitchhikers’ words that Isak must know “everything about life” ironic by the time they deliver them, and a bouquet of wild flowers,, or has Isak learned something significant about life on this particular day?
37. what is the “extraordinary logic” Isak discerns while receiving a reward and thinking back on the day’s events?
38. Isak notes, in closing, that if he has been “worried or sad during the day, it often calms me to recall childhood memories.”  Do his various reveries on this particular day calm more than unsettle him??
39. color film stock had been used in musicals since the late 1930s--and had become quite common in the early 1950s--yet Bergman chooses to film, once again, in black and white. How does this decision effect the film's tone and atmosphere?
40. why might Bergman choose to depict this particular day in the life of Isak?
    
    

Rearview Mirror (1972)
Poul Anker Bech

Dr. Paul Marchbanks
pmarchba@calpoly.edu