WILD STRAWBERRIES
Sweden, 1957, 95 minutes, Black and white.
Victor Sjostrom, Ingrid Thulin, Bibi Andersson, Gunner Bjornstrand, Max Van Sydow.
Directed by Ingmar Bergman.
Wild Strawberries now appears on many lists of films that are considered to be the masterpieces of the cinema. It dates from Bergman's middle period, which includes The Seventh Seal, The Virgin Spring and The Magician.
The film shows an old man making a day's journey to receive worldly honours, but the physical journey causes him to make a spiritual journey into the past as well as into his soul, and he tries to understand himself and link the causes and effects of influences on his life. The journey is framed in symbolic dreams about death and paradise which makes the whole journey a purgatorial experience.
Veteran Swedish director Victor Sjostrom plays the old professor remarkably. The other principal actors are regularly featured in Bergman films. A deep and moving experience of the meaning of life.
1. To what did the title refer? What did it symbolise?
2. How did the structure of the film - a journey to receive honours, in one day, with revisiting the sites and memories of life past - parallel the theme of the film: a journey through life, a purgatorial journey?
3. Was the Professor a worthwhile character to explore - did his age and status enhance him in the eyes of the audience, give him the dignity of an old human being, near enough to death to value the meaning of life? How repellent was his selfishness, his self-centeredness, his inability to like people, his taking his servant and family for arante
4. How well did Bergman communicate the basic message of his film as well as its mysterious nature and its fascination by the initial dream: age, the strange city, timelessness, facelessness, death, injury to the faceless corpse, burial, a buried, clutching hand?
5. Bergman framed his film by dream. How did the agitation of the initial nightmare contrast with the paradise peace of the final dream? (But it was only through a purgatory that the Professor could move from a hell to a heaven,)
6. What did you make of the personality of the Professor - as a man, as a scientist, as someone deserving a degree 'honoris causa', as a man able to assess the value of his life?
7. What did his relationship with hie housekeeper reveal about him: his contrariness, his unwillingness to please or understand her, thinking that the mere use of Christian names solved closeness of relationships, his fussiness, stubbornness, his decision to go by car?
8. What was his relationship to Marianne? She told the truth to him about her life, her feelings. Was she the equivalent of the guide through Purgatory, able to lead him to the truth, and, therefore, sharing the journey with him?
9. Comment on techniques used by Bergman to illuminate the Professor e.g., Marianne's telling the Professor he was like his son, Ewald, and the flashback to a car with Ewald sitting in the same position and attitude as his father.
10. How was Marianne changed by the journey? Her ability to pour out the truth to the Professor about her husband and her desire for a child (and he being ready to listen to her)?
11. How did Ewald parallel (and illuminate for the audience) his father his loneliness, isolation, unwillingness to compete with others, especially children? A basic inadequacy? (Note the Professor's relationship with Ewald - the money loan, formal, little feeling.)
12. How did the people picked up on the way serve as symbols of people encountered in life?
13. What did the bickering couple signify - what were the subjects of their quarrel - they self-absorbedly crash into others? Why did they dislike each other? Why did they show something of what the Professor's life must have been? Why did Marianne ask them to get out of the car? Was she unfeeling for them? Was she right in condemning their bad example for the young?
14. How did the Professor relate to the young people - their freshness, idealism, arguments, Science versus religion, the girl centred on herself (and her name being Sara), their appreciation of him, their encouragement and joy in sharing his honour?
15. How important was the visit of the Professor to his mother – she so old, her understanding of him, her rebukes of him, her complaints about not being visited, her awareness that her not dying had held up the inheritance, her relationship to Marianne?
16. What was the significance of the visit to the garage-owner and his great esteem and gratitude to the Professor? He said the Professor should have stayed and worked there.
17. How effective was the style of the flashbacks, their romantic, sunny aura of the past, but especially the Professor's entering into them and re-living them? What effect did they have on him? What did they reveal about his past?
18. What role did Sara play in his life - offering him a vision, yet rejecting him and marrying Siegfried?
19. How happy were his past, his relationship to his family and Siegfried?
20. What was the significance of his relationship with Sara at the end, being on the island, the search for his parents, but a type of paradise bliss, the fact that he was home?
21. How important was the sequence of the Conferring of the Degree: its formality, yet at that moment the Professor had forgotten his honours and was trying to piece himself together, to find the causality links in his life and its interpretation?
22. What was the cause of his final peace and serenity? How had his reliving his past and talking it out liberated him?
23. How religious was the film - themes of purgatory, guilt, forgiveness, reparation, expiation, cleansing, Paradise? The discussions of science and religion? The Professor said that God present was a reality for him?
24. What is the meaning of life according to the film? Note the number of generations represented in the film - the old mother, the Professor, Ewald, the youngsters, Ewald’s unborn child.
25. Why is this film considered such a masterpiece - Bergman, the acting, the exploration of life and values?
