#42 We just watched this on Netflix streaming: Wild Strawberries

Not much of a title screen. Artistic or budgetary?

The Film: Wild Strawberries

Countless filmmakers point to Ingmar Bergman as an inspiration. I have no idea why this is, but I have a theory: Bergman was one of the first, if not the most popular and prolific, to use film as a true medium of introspetive self-expression. Meaning, he made movies that were deeply personal, often to the point of transcending the art form.

What other director would have a man playing chess with Death?

An image that you, dear reader, are likely familiar with even if you don’t know the movie I’m talking about.

Wild Strawberries is a more existential version of Ikiru. It finds a man at the end of his life trying to find peace and makes amends. If not make amends, than at least recognize his wrong-doings.

I have my complaints with the movie. The main and most obvious (to me) is that a great deal of the movie is made up of a flashbacks and voice overs and if he was indeed making a Swedish Christmas Charol than he should have the decency to build in a some type of literary device that made the whole thing less “weird” , if that is a satisfactory word. (It isn’t)

I think the movie works and might fall into the realm of a “spiritual exploration”, but it often annoyed me and didn’t flow well with the story. When similar surrealist visions occur in movies like 2001: Space Odyssey, they flow from human madness and the incomprehensible reality of space, time, and its effect on consciousness. Bergman just plays them off as dreams…

The Scrooge shot.

Why to watch it: It is a decent place to jump into the waters of Ingmar Bergman.

Ingmar Bergman is a great filmmaker – no one can really deny that. His films exist in a different reality than the movies we’re familiar with today. There is something to be said about Bergman being a bit boring - Wild Strawberries does feel long at only an hour and a thirty minutes, but that is because I’m used the to the conventions of modern filmmaking.

The movie is a road story, but asks all questions that Bergman was obsessed with such as death, existentialism, and the existence of a creator. These questions often come off feeling contrived, for example there is a moment where two characters are an obvious (maybe too obvious) dichotomy of religious belief in the existence of God and they physically fight over whether God exists. Bergman = stark storytelling.

Such moments are not unusual with Bergman. His films always scream out questions and ideas instead of  subtlety eluding to them. Woody Allen is often the same way – likely inspired by Bergman

One of the last images of the film.

Pay attention to this: “Environments more than entertainments”

Roger Ebert referred to Andrei Tarkovsky’s movies this way. Whether the definition applies to Bergman is not for me to decide, but I think it is a cute way to describe Bergman’s great talent: Creating an atmosphere - not just of aesthetics, sound, and framing, but one of an atmosphere of moral and spiritual questioning. That being a long-winded and clumsy way of saying Bergman’s works aren’t just to entertain, but to create self-contained worlds where a Knight (in the Seventh Seal) really would turn to the camera and express his fears about death and the absence of God.

I must concede that while I liked Wild Strawberries quite a bit, I would not list it with my favorites of the “old greats” (Ozu, Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, Kubrick, Welles, Hitchcock, Fellini – to name a few of them).

Another note: For those people who would want to cut my balls off for hinting that this isn’t the masterpiece you believe it to be, I want to note that the versions available (especially the one I watched on Netflix) of Bergman’s older films are nearly unwatchable. Someday I hope to hit up a Bergman festival where they have beautiful restored prints available. If you’ve ever seen a completely restored, computer-cleaned Blu-ray, you know what I mean.

-Collin