Wild Strawberries (1957), dir. Ingmar Bergman

Ingmar Bergman owes a debt to The Phantom Carriage (1921), most notably in The Seventh Seal (1957). As Bergman reflects in Images: My Life in Film, he first saw The Phantom Carriage aged fifteen, still watching it “at least once every summer” (1990:24). The casting of director Victor Sjöström as Isak Borg came at the suggestion of producer Carl Anders Dymling, something Bergman “thought long and hard” about. In a sense, Bergman used Wild Strawberries to repay the debt of his influence. As Peter Cowie writes, Sjöström was 78, a widower and in poor health, often forgetting his lines and needing a strong supply of whiskey; Sjöström passed away three years after the film’s release.

Old age has many representations in film. Up (2009) beautifully confronts the life of a widower and the icons of his childhood; Beginners (2010) reminds us it is never too early to come out; in Nebraska (2013), Woody hangs onto false hopes and dreams. But rarely are we allowed to look at protagonists complexly from their perspective, filtered through their interactions with sons, daughters and grandkids. Isak Borg represents another generation, a remnant of the Victorian era – the end of the 1870s – as a new era comes of age; his elderly mother hangs onto life in her mid-90s. With fifteen great grandkids, she swims in cards, without inheritance, but holds a tangible connection to the past in her collection of toys and dolls. As a professor, Borg lives within his own mind: at his desk, he writes words on paper, reflects with his cigar, reminded of the past by images surrounding him. Cinematographer Gunnar Fischer places great attention to framing Borg’s head in side and silhouette. In one incredible shot, Borg watches the sun: for as much time as Borg has left, as long as the sun still rises, there is still life.

Isak Borg works at his desk, surrounded by memories

Borg’s mother still clings onto life

Salvador Dalí might be best known to cinema for his work with Luis Buñuel on Un Chien Andalou (1929), though Dalí’s name is littered throughout cinema from his work with Walt Disney on Destino (2003) and with Hitchcock on Spellbound (1945). But in an incredible surrealist scene, Bergman and Fischer draw up visions evoking Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory (1931). We delve within Borg’s mind as he imagines a town square with a clockface with no hands, the silhouette of a man and a passing coffin in a phantom carriage, carrying his twisted face and body. But as Mark Le Fanu writes, Bergman wasn’t Freudian, but “too much of an artist to subscribe to any single ideology of the unconscious”. Borg must confront his own legacy: Wild Strawberries acts as a road movie, travelling to Lund to collect a prestigious award, but with stops along the way. The pageantry of the award ceremony is enough to become disillusioned, as though the meaning of our lives can be placed within awards themselves.

Bergman uses a sense of Dalí-esque surrealism

Bergman drew from his own relationship with his family. As he reflects in Images: My Life in Film, “I had created a figure who, on the outside, looked like my father but was me, through and through”, in all his failings (1990:20). Sjöström invested the film with “his pain, his misanthropy, his brutality, sorrow, fear, loneliness, coldness, warmth, harshness, and ennui”, occupying Bergman’s soul and making it “all his own” (1990:24). Bergman confronted his family throughout his films: in his short Karin’s Face (1984), Bergman draws a montage of photographs of his own mother, allowing us to reflect on who she was as a person and the influence she had on Bergman.

Through Borg, Bergman draws a connection between present and past. Wild Strawberries approaches flashbacks similarly to Manchester by the Sea (2016): separation between time becoming blurred, flowing in and out of each other, as fully realised and immersive as the present moment. Within memory, there are no boundaries. As he reflects in Ingmar Bergman on Life and Work (1998), all creativity is rooted in childhood, achieving a “dialogue”. Writing in Images: My Life and Film, Bergman was “forever living in my childhood, wandering through quiet Uppsala streets, standing in front of the summer cottage and listening to the enormous double-trunk birch tree” (1990:22).

Bergman utilised memory equally well in Summer Interlude (1951), as a ballet dancer recalls an encounter in her younger years. Like in The Go-Between (1971), we search our own pasts and memories to reconcile our youth and childhood. Embodied spaces provide a window into the past; Borg becomes reminded by locations, from grand staircases to fields of grass and flowers. Bergman focuses upon nature, from clouds to trees. As Fischer frames scenes through windows, he creates a literal window into the past to look through. Visiting his grandmother’s house in Uppsala in 1956, Bergman was inspired to create a sense of a man “opening a door and walking into his childhood”, before “walking round the corner of the street and coming into some other period of his life”. Borg’s youth is idyllic, kissing in the garden. Bergman uses the motif of wild strawberries throughout his films, appearing in both Summer with Monika (1953) and The Seventh Seal, symbolising a sense of life. At the assembled group at the table for name day, including Uncle Aron and the twin girls in pigtails, there’s something quaint: they bless the Lord, with fancy tableware, rituals, moustaches and a cone-shaped hearing aid.

Borg’s past is an idyllic realm of romance

Cinematographer Gunnar Fischer makes use of frames, creating a literal window into the past

Accompanied by daughter-in-law Marianne (Ingrid Thulin), Borg encounters Sara (Bibi Andersson) on the road, travelling to Italy with her male lovers, Viktor (Björn Bjelfvenstam) and Anders (Folke Sundquist). With a pipe and her open sexuality, Sara embodies a late 1950s coolness. One of the party comments “I can’t imagine a worse thing than getting old!”; Borg accepts it. He can’t either: his inescapable, present position, but over the course of the film Borg begins to find himself comfortable in his age. Spending time at the table together, playing the guitar and remembering good times over a glass of wine, a sense of youth emerges. As he writes in Images: My Life in Film, Bergman was struggling to deal with the “negative chaos of human relationships”, not only in his separation from his third wife, his crumbling relationship with Bibi Andersson and feud with his parents (1990:17).

The party that join Borg in the car embody youthful sexuality

At the table, Borg reflects on old times

Like all Bergman films, Wild Strawberries touches upon theological themes. In his age, Borg might seem like a fountain of wisdom, but Borg is just as lost as the next generation. Wild Strawberries’ contemporary setting makes it more accessible than the medieval theological debates of The Seventh Seal, grounded with a comedic edge. Bergman interjects the film with comedy: in his relationship with his housekeeper Agda, serving him coffee and an egg for breakfast, Borg bounces off her with retorts like and old married couple. Viktor, Anders and Sara squabble over the existence of God, with the same childish edge as the territorial fights for the woman Harry loves in Summer with Monika. Viktor merely wants Sara to show some interest in him. Borg watches these debates, but can give no answer. Faith has no time; the resonance it has (or lacks) with each generation is individual and personal. Marianne’s argument with her husband Evald over her unborn son in a car hit by rain encapsulates a sense of existential nihilism. Evald cannot see any value in life in a meaningless world; giving birth to life is an act of savagery and a loss of control, with intensity beyond Borg’s own youth. The birth of a child offers the film circularity between generations, but Evald cannot accept this unending cycle.

In the car, Evald debates Marianne’s right to motherhood

Summer with Monika (1953), dir. Ingmar Bergman

Adapted from the 1951 novel by Per Anders Fogelström, who collaborated with Bergman on the adaptation, Summer with Monika acts as a portrait of working class life in Stockholm, as young Harry (Lars Ekborg) works days away in Forsbergs stacking glasses; Monika (Harriet Andersson) works as a shop girl in a grocers. Harry is constantly denigrated, considered a “sack of potatoes”. Harry seeks a small act of revenge in defiance, hesitant to push a glass until it finally falls to the ground. In the pub, we see the men around him are twice his age, without anyone to relate to. Cinematographer Gunnar Fischer, a frequent collaborator of Bergman’s, perfectly encapsulates Stockholm during this period, presenting the intersection of the city with modernity as trams pass by; Fischer pays close attention to frames and silhouettes.

Cinematographer Gunnar Fischer focuses closely upon frames and silhouettes

Harry and Monika never want to slave away in the world of work, seeking to escape norms set upon them by society. Oversleeping one morning upon his father’s boat, Monika convinces Harry to quit work and find time to themselves. But roles quickly become domestic: Harry must put bread on the table as they search the archipelago for something to eat. The concepts of the teenager and separation between childhood and the working world of adulthood are constructs: as the documentary Teenage (2013) explores, the notion of the teenager was formed through the changes within society and status of the post-war period; each generation has their own unique relationship with youth.

Their dream of travelling the world has a source: in the Garbio cinema, they watch a Hepburn film, Song of Love (1947). Monika is led to tears; Harry is disinterested. Song of Love fosters values of love and escapism and a good life that Monika attempts to emulate, dooming it to fail. Films directing our gaze back at the screen itself offers a unique approach to our own relationship with cinema: the cinematic screens within Donnie Darko (2001), Maniac (2012) and La La Land (2016) offer self-reflexivity, allowing us to see who are characters are and their values. Cinema extends beyond its escapist tendency into a confrontation to who we are and what we hold onto. Monika stares into high street windows, wanting to wear the clothes glamourised by women, to buy a dress and be fashionable. She performs her sexuality based on films themselves, describing Harry as “just like someone in a film”. Bergman embraces a female perspective, subverting the male perspective of the original novel. As Laura Hubner writes, Harriet Andersson represents “the arrival of a new kind of female star” with a “natural beauty that shuns Hollywood glamour”, whilst harkening back to “Bergman’s early male heroes who rebel against society”.

Monika’s dream emerges from the cinema itself

The pair’s intense sexual desire follows the rush of the early stages of a young relationship. Monika is in charge of her sexuality, having slept with other men before. As she smokes cigarettes, she connotes sheer sexuality. Perhaps the best-known example of teenage melodrama and rebellion from the same period is Rebel Without a Cause (1955), depicting a fragmented parental relationship and concerns around gang violence. Harry and Monika never feel content with home lives; family life seems to just be reading magazines. Around their parents, they have to monitor how they express physical intimacy, putting their clothes back on. Even on the boat, moored to the coastline, they cannot escape family entirely; it’s Harry’s father’s boat. The boat is never the dream imagined: space is cramped, somewhat subduing the freedom of sexuality where they have space to get undressed together. Without responsibility, there’s infinite freedom as an endless summer against a seemingly endless landscape. But all summers end one day; time seeming stretchless and endless must pass.

Around their parents, Harry and Monika must monitor how they present their relationship

Upon the archipelago, Harry and Monika embrace their sheer sexuality

Summer with Monika was shot on a small budget, filming over three weeks in July on Ornö Island, reshooting and dubbing scenes afterwards; Bergman promised producers it would be “the world’s cheapest film”; production lasted until October. As a couple left to themselves, Harry and Monika have a space to have sex in peace and go skinny-dipping on the island. As Bergman commented in a self-interview, “I haven’t heard that nude swimming has become obligatory in Swedish filmmaking. But I think it should be.” But they cannot escape creature comforts, or even other people: Monika brews coffee; Harry shaves with his razor. Unsatisfied by cooking mushrooms, Monika searches out a garden of fruit but steals meat, getting in trouble. A fellow tourist sets their boat on fire; Harry must prove his masculinity and defend against him, getting in a fight framed in close-up by Fischer. Nature has power beyond them, with Fischer emphasising the landscape and the island’s constant storms. Harry and Monika become reduced to ants as Fischer emphasises the landscape around them.

Landscapes of the archipelago stretch on beyond Harry and Monika

As much as they try to sing songs and read books, they cannot escape responsibility, talking to each other about their issues in life and feelings of loneliness as they drink away. Harry and Monika vow to be monogamous as they move into their next stage of life: remain together, raise kids, study to be an engineer. They speak from youth, whilst attempting to factor in and deal with mature responsibility. Summer with Monika bears comparison to Summer Interlude (1951), a ballet dancer’s recollection upon youth from adulthood, recalling a sense of innocence and dreams of adulthood upon a romance on the archipelago that ends in tragedy. As Hubner writes, Monika follows the “seasonal cycle” of Bergman’s 1950s films with “renewed dynamism”, through their meeting, romance, disillusionment and maturity.

Bergman was in part working from his own experience: Bergman and Andersson had had a brief relationship. But in its initial US release, Monika’s vision of teenage youth and romance was distorted and devalued, released as an exploitation film re-edited by Kroger Babb, Monika, the Story of a Bad Girl, emphasising the film’s lewd sexuality and inserting footage from a nudist resort on Long Island. In Los Angeles, the film was confiscated as pornography, its distributor fined and sentenced to three months in prison.

But Monika is continually affected by male ownership over her sexuality. At work, colleague Lelle constantly torments her as a sexual target; she’s sexually assaulted, placing his hand up her skirt, groping her breasts and pushing her around. Harry’s boss considers her a slut, not someone to get involved with. On the island, Harry and Monika find a mirror to their relationship, as older couples dance away the evening at a resort. Summer with Monika is a cyclical narrative, as Harry and Monika begin to look more and more like their parents: chaotic, loveless, abusive, even as fighting authority seemed their deepest desire. As Hubner writes, Monika “has no alternative other than to become financially dependent on a man […] or to repeat the poverty cycle like her mother”.

As Monika becomes pregnant, Harry and Monika appeal to the courts for a licence to marry despite being underage, dressing smart. Looking after a baby is immensely difficult, contending with work, the economy and the constant need for new clothes. Harry and Monika find it difficult to keep up their old sense of life, forced back into industrial jobs, accepting reality as it is. Their relationship quickly becomes abusive: Monika attempts to oscillate their relationship between arguments and intimacy, but Harry punches her. Monika abandons her child, but the strain on her isn’t difficult to see. As Monika smokes her cigarette into the camera in direct gaze with the audience, we feel her pain. In the final scene, Bergman flashes back to the beach, recalling the past with a sense of its passage and acceptance as Marie did in Summer Interlude.

Harry and Monika must attempt to deal with the adult responsibility of caring for a baby

In an incredible shot, Monika smokes her cigarette in direct gaze with the viewer

Summer with Monika may not be the first film one thinks of when approaching Bergman’s career. Bergman had been working in film for over a decade, honing his craft working in theatre, careers he kept simultaneous. Summer with Monika never had a chance to be taken seriously outside of Sweden, but the success of later works allowed for reappraisal as Bergman’s name became more prominent. Monika is an essential work, acting as a powerful portrait of the inevitability of change and the impermanence of young relationships.

The Giant (2016), dir. Johannes Nyholm

Having finished watching Clash, I sat waiting around in the Everyman for the start of The Giant, presented with a Q&A with director Johannes Nyholm.

Sweden’s cinematic legacy seems defined by Ingmar Bergman, perhaps one of the most celebrated world cinema directors to have ever lived, for his melancholy tales of humanity. Other films and directors have come after Bergman: Let the Right One In (2008) might be one of the most well known, with its teenage vampire romance, whilst directors like Lukas Moodysson have a noticeable presence.

Nyholm has previously worked on music videos and short films like Puppetboy (2008), but The Giant is his first feature. As Nyholm tells in the Q&A, the road to The Giant was a 10-year process, developing the script and other ideas in the meanwhile, filming another yet to be released feature in 2011. Nyholm found funding from Dutch financiers, but remained limited by budget. Nyholm explored The Giant’s basic concept in his music video It Will Follow the Rain (2006), but music videos and cinema are two different, though connected, realms.

When I asked Nyholm the inspiration behind the project, Nyholm related a time when he had a dream, aged 4 years old. In the dream, his body was bloated; Nyholm was unable to move, his mind turning to existential thoughts. Rikard’s love of pétanque comes from Nyholm too: Nyholm used some of his old teammates from the game in starring roles, largely relying on nonprofessional actors; Nyholm used only 4 professional actors within the film.

The Giant might be difficult to describe in terms of genre: the film combines sports, magical realism, drama and the western, finding a perfect balance between each, combining surrealism with the mundanity of everyday life, juxtaposing moods against each other. Other recent films like A Monster Calls (2016), through its giant, embodied monster, balance the dark world of mortality and the wish fulfilment of children’s fairytales. Nyholm achieves similar: the giant embodies two aspects of Rikard’s self. Rikard holds onto a dream to compete in the Nordisk pétanque championships, but Rikard feels constantly held back. Rikard imagines what it would feel like to be free. As a 30 year old with a deformed condition, Rikard feels infantilised, looked after constantly by carer Roland. In scenes shot through Rikard’s own perspective, we see how difficult it is within his body: though Nyholm injects Rikard with personality and humanity, through his distorted, circular vision, he struggles to see the world around him.

But Rikard feels joy: at his birthday party, he is enraptured by the love and care afforded to him by others, surrounded by gifts and multiple slices of birthday cake; Nyholm makes a cameo during this sequence. Speaking to Roland on the bench outside the hospital, they joke about blowjobs, showing only some maturity; he still has sexuality, despite his condition. Rikard insists his individuality and ability to look after himself: he refuses to stay down in a hospital bed; he holds onto a deep relationship with his mother, insisting he see her. As Nyholm tells, Elisabeth’s song also came from his own family.

Like the disabled characters of Freaks (1932) and The Elephant Man (1980), Rikard must prove his humanity in the face of otherising and dehumanising; the carnival sideshow of Freaks drank alcohol, had interpersonal relationships, had their own existence, despite the hate and mockery of others. Rikard’s skull is fractured in an intentional attack during a game, but Rikard becomes the one punished by management. At a train stop, bullied by a group of men, Rikard’s misery is turned into spectacle, recorded on their phones; attacked by his own pétanque balls. In the championships, Rikard is constantly underestimated within the tight, restrictive rulebooks of the game.

In Rikard’s paintings, he sees himself as master of his own universe: he paints landscapes, as a joy and passion of expression as other senses fail him. In pétanque, the formation of the game represents the motion of planets within the galaxy, drawn upon his restrictive bedroom floor where he can’t make too much noise; Rikard is at the centre. Through animation and model work, Nyholm injects the film with bright autumnal orange sunsets, as the giant walks among trees; his giant foot lands upon train tracks. The camera moves across the landscape, amid the trees and mountains and waters; a place truly beautiful. In the final scene, he rises from the ambulance. The giant rises upon the city as Godzilla or King Kong; everyday citizens run for their life. Rikard emerges as powerful, two bodies as one.