silver nitrate notes

Wild Strawberries and Victor Sjöström's Last Face

18 aug 2025

Ingmar Bergman cast Victor Sjöström (1879-1960) as Isak Borg, the elderly professor at the centre of Wild Strawberries (1957), in part because Sjöström was already seventy-seven and in declining health, in part because Sjöström was one of the founding figures of Swedish silent cinema. Bergman had grown up watching Sjöström's films. The Phantom Carriage (1921), which Sjöström had directed and starred in, was a film Bergman would later say he had watched once a year for most of his life. Casting Sjöström was an act of homage that was also a practical casting decision: the face on screen was a face the Swedish audience of 1957 already knew.

The cinematographer was Gunnar Fischer again, shooting his tenth Bergman film. What Fischer does in Wild Strawberries that he had not done in The Seventh Seal is soften the contrast. The Seventh Seal was a hard, engraved image. Wild Strawberries is a flattered image: more midtones, less absolute black, light that appears to be coming from directions the scene does not quite specify. The film is a drive across Sweden punctuated by dreams and memories, and Fischer lights the dream sequences so that they are visually indistinguishable from the present-day scenes. The film refuses to mark the boundary between memory and the present. The photography refuses with it.

The opening nightmare, where Isak walks through a silent Stockholm street and finds a clock without hands and a funeral hearse that overturns, is shot on a closed studio street at night with a diffusion filter on the lens. The image is not sharp. The light is directionless. Sjöström's face, photographed in close-up as he watches a coffin fall into the street and discovers that the corpse inside is himself, is lit by a single soft source that comes from below the lens. The face has lived for seventy-seven years on screen by 1957; it has lived for seventy-seven years in life; it is, in that shot, one of the most inhabited faces in cinema history.

The daytime road-trip sequences are photographed at the opposite extreme. Bright available light, clean skies, high-key exposures. Fischer uses the brightness to make the present tense feel thin, which is exactly the effect Bergman is aiming for: Isak is in the present, but the present is less alive for him than his memories.

Sjöström died in 1960, three years after the film's release. Wild Strawberries was his last major performance. Bergman would write, in The Magic Lantern (1987), that he had never been as frightened of a collaborator as he had been of Sjöström, and that he had never learned more from one. The two sentences carry approximately equal weight.

[ « prev: Nights of Cabiria · next: Touch of Evil » ]

» leave a comment in the guestbook

sources
[1] Bergman, Ingmar. The Magic Lantern. Viking, 1988.
[2] Bergman, Ingmar. Images: My Life in Film. Arcade, 1990.
[3] Cowie, Peter. Ingmar Bergman: A Critical Biography. Scribner, 1982.
[4] Gado, Frank. The Passion of Ingmar Bergman. Duke UP, 1986.