Ingmar Bergman
"Sometimes, when I dream, I want to remember this dream and make it into a movie, which is also an occupational disease." 」
Ingmar Bergman's words in a 1968 interview not only revealed his tendency to reinvent the unconscious mind into art, but also meant that the director could control his thoughts in his dreams.
Ingmar Bergman with mother
Is Ingmar Bergman a lucid dreamer? He takes inspiration from dreams and manipulates them. While focusing on future projects, he is immersed in his own melancholy.
This half-dream, half-awake behavior, lies between the cliffs of dreams and reality, and affects Bergman's films.
Night of the Clowns (1953)
Whether in the character's dreams or in reality, Ingmar Bergman's films are full of fantastical images.
He said that in the flashback clip of "Night of the Clown", the clown was humiliated by his wife's behavior, almost completely reproducing the director's own dream.
There is a deep fear in Ingmar Bergman's film world, including sexual anxiety, demonic visits, and so on, and what we see is like the director's unconsciousness.
Auguste Strindberg
Bergman sees August Strindberg's 1991 Play of a Dream as a major source of inspiration for the playwright's mental breakdown and a landmark work because it follows the vagaries of dreams, combining the idea of the unconscious in modern Freudian psychology.
Ghost Carriage
Another script that was crucial to Bergman was Victor Sjøstrom's 1921 silent film Ghost Carriage.
In this fable that had a huge impact on Bergman, a prodigal son foresaw the miserable life of his family after his death, was it a dream caused by guilt, or a simple supernatural journey?
Ingmar Bergman's films were so passionate about these ambiguous expressions that later generations called his films dreamlike because they not only reflected his artistic temperament, but also touched on the truth of the film itself.
Ingemann Bergman's debut filming Crisis (1946)
Ingmar Bergman said: "No other artistic medium, including painting, poetry, can convey the characteristics of dreams like film. ”
In the dream, time and space no longer exist, and the characteristics of the film are enough to change the audience's perception of it, such as unconventional camera angles, sudden editing, and unexpected sounds. From the basic elements of the film, we can see that what we see is not real, and the truth in the film is as untrustworthy as the dream.
Ingmar Bergman's work shows that the natural state of cinema is to be in a dream, and the most vivid dream in his work is wild strawberries created in 1957.
Wild Strawberries
Wild Strawberries is one of the most memorable applications of the unconscious in film history, often mentioned alongside Hitchcock's work and Dalic's whimsical film scenes.
Bergman said that the images are mostly based on the directors' sleep and nightmares, and the perspective of the film comes from the consciousness of the individual. The elderly professor of bacteriology, Isaac, is about to receive an honorary degree from his alma mater, and Isaac is caught in introspection and has a nightmare.
The protagonist Isaac
Wild Strawberries is a spiritual journey, but also physical.
The protagonist is lost in empty streets and abandoned houses, and the clock without hands seems to laugh at it, reminding him that his life is coming. Later, the dream world gradually seeped into reality, such as the watch that his mother gave his late father, which also had no hands.
Fragment of Wild Strawberries
One of the nightmares in the film is the fear of the future, and the second is the frustration of the past, dreaming of professional humiliation.
When the protagonist Isaac examines a bacterial specimen under a microscope, he sees only his own glasses; the blackboard says the doctor's primary duty, but in a strange language that he cannot understand; and when Isara diagnoses that the patient is dead, the corpse laughs at him.
Another laughing "corpse" was in Ingmar Bergman's 1968 film The Jackal Moment, his most frequent nightmare, the horrible idea of an artist trapped in his head.
Like in the decades after Wild Strawberries, his work was plunged into a world on the verge of the supernatural.
Jackal Moments
The nightmares of the second half of Ingmar Bergman's career faded away, and films such as Anna's Lust, Shouts and Whispers, and Autumn Sonata all seemed to take place in the fragile twilight hours, as if a strong ray of sunlight would evaporate them all.
Autumn Sonata
Bergman abandons the specific meaning of time and place, instead shifting the focus to the inner world. So far, few filmmakers have been able to reach such depth.
Bergman's 1982 "Fanny and Alexander" was originally intended to be his last work.
Fanny and Alexander
The film ends with the grandmother quoting the preface to Strindberg's "A Dream Drama": everything is possible, it can happen, time and space no longer exist, and under the fragile framework of reality, let the imagination wind and weave new patterns.
It's clear that Ingmar Bergman wants viewers to know that his films are rooted in dreams, in a world without boundaries, which is his life's work.