And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground There are certain people of whom it is difficult to say anything which will at once throw them into relief—in other words, describe them graphically in their typical characteristics. These are they who are generally known as “commonplace people,” and this class comprises, of course, the immense majority of mankind. Authors, as a rule, attempt to select and portray types rarely met with in their entirety, but these types are nevertheless more real than real life itself. For instance, when the whole essence of an ordinary person’s nature lies in his perpetual and unchangeable commonplaceness; and when in spite of all his endeavours to do something out of the common, this person ends, eventually, by remaining in his unbroken line of routine—. I think such an individual really does become a type o...
In 1966, math teachers protested the early use of calculators in classrooms
Wild Strawberries (1957)
I was quite sure I was an unwanted child, growing out of a cold womb.—Ingmar Bergman, from Images: My Life in Films
The film I constantly go back to, however, is Wild Strawberries (1957), which, while scarcely a bag of laughs, has a compassionate view of life that best illustrates the more optimistic side of Bergman's puzzled humanity.
At its centre is 76-year-old Professor Isak Borg, a distinguished medical scientist who travels from Stockholm to Lund with his daughter-in-law to receive an honorary doctorate. On the 400-mile car journey the old man remembers his past - the girl he loved who married his brother instead, and his own bitterly unsuccessful marriage. Despite his benevolent exterior, to which everyone pays tribute, he recognises in himself something arid and distant.
The film opens with a dream sequence that has been stolen from ever since. Borg arrives at a house with boarded up windows in the old quarter of Stockholm. He sees a clock with no hands and an old hearse approaching. One of its wheels gets caught up on a lamppost and a coffin falls out. The outstretched hand of the corpse within tries to pull Borg inside.
One of the prime reasons is what can only be described as the transcendent performance of Victor Sjostrom as Professor Borg. Sjostrom was the great Swedish silent-era director, who died aged 80, not long after the film was completed and whose The Phantom Carriage had so influenced Bergman. It was he who made the final scene one of the most serene of all Bergman's endings. "Sjostrom's face shone", said the director. "It emanated light - a reflection of a different reality, hitherto absent. His whole appearance was soft and gentle, his glance joyful and tender. It was like a miracle".
Later, Bergman admitted that the character of Borg was an attempt to justify himself to his own parents, but that Sjostrom had taken his text, made it his own and invested it with Sjostrom's often painful experiences. It is still, however, chiefly concerned with forgiveness between parents and children and the lost possibilities of youth.
If the theme of Wild Strawberries is how life can become atrophied and sterile - often repeated from generation to generation - Bergman's working out of his argument is extraordinarily detailed, since almost all those in the film to whom this applies have no idea what is happening to them.
Isak's admired and respected mother, for instance, is slowly revealed as hard and mean-spirited, though not to herself. And it is only when his daughter-in-law Marianne (Ingrid Thulin) speaks honestly to him in the car that Isak begins his journey of self-recognition.
What makes the film great is its nearness to each of us. And its almost Christian insistence on the possibility of reconciliation and redemption.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/1999/jun/10/1
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