Wild strawberries: time-images of an apprenticeship

Abstract

Through a study of Ingmar Bergman’s film Wild Strawberries (1957), this text seeks to analyze its time-images. These bring the cinema of the real closer to thought and also have the purpose of exercising the eye’s function as seer since the elements of the image relate in such a way that they must be “read” as much as seen. Legible as much as visible, the world presents itself to be seen and read as if it were “literalness”. This is a cinema which draws closer to reading than to perception, a cinema which takes us down the path of signs, which transforms us into decipherers, and which makes us repudiate automatic and habitual recognitions. It is a cinema where the montage proposes encumbrances to the spectator’s perceptions and its extensions into action by introducing a new element which impedes perception from spreading into the form of action.