Wild Strawberries Analysis

Wild Strawberries (1957)

Written and Directed by: Ingmar Bergman

Golden Bear at 8th Berlin International Film Festival

Nominated for Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay

This film has a simple premise but it lies on the top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. The premise doesn't even has a conflict in the first place, a 76 year old retired doctor Isak Borg travels in a car to receive a honorary degree from his Almamater. There is no physical conflict here, the conflict is internal and it's abstract. He keeps getting weird dreams and the incidents which he shows in the dreams are recognizable in a way that you can recall getting such weird dreams. A dream sequence is shot with overexposed lighting and it is interesting that Bergman used this technique of the actor physically being there in the childhood scenes which symbolically indicate that he's reminiscing those moments. This technique was later used by Woody Allen in Annie Hall who cites Ingmar Bergman to be his major influence in films and that shows in his work as well, the themes they explore are existential and intellectual in nature.

The editing in this film majorly comprises of dissolves, these work majorly when they have to show his mind slowly wandering from one place to another. The extensive usage of dissolves remind me of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining and Jim Jarmusch's Paterson, there is a meditative feeling when you see two beautiful landscapes dissolve from one to another. A major theme explored in this film is acceptance, it's about accepting how life happens to you and about how you cherish and not regret the way you lived your life. The scenes in the film kept wandering here and there with different people he meets and until I read some essays on the film, I couldn't clearly decipher what he's trying to say with it. It's because the entire film is so sub textual and layered and especially when it's a foreign language film where you're not familiar with the socio-cultural milieu. I'm yet to watch Ingmar Bergman's other films, I'll probably get a better understanding of his films after I watch his other work.