Italian Neorealism and “Wild Strawberries”

 

     This week, we began to talk about Italian Neorealism, which is also known as “The Golden Age”,  and which came about around 1943 and continued on until about 1952. Some major influences of Italian Neorealism were poetic realism, marxism, and christian humanism. This was a film movement characterized by stories set amongst the poor and the working class, filmed on location, mostly in rundown cities as well as some rural areas. These films are known for often using non-professional actors, even some of the actors being pulled right from the street, although in a number of cases, well-known actors were cast in leading roles, in front of a background populated by local people, rather than extras brought in for the film. This continues on our topic of World War II as Italian neorealism films mostly show the difficult economic and moral conditions of post World War II Italy. The films told stories including conditions of everyday life such as poverty, oppression, injustice, and desperation after the war. A good example and one of the most notable Italian Neorealist films is “Bicycle Thieves”, an Italian drama directed by Vittorio De Sica in 1948. This film is about a poor father in post WWII Italy who is given a job which requires him to have a bicycle. He scrapes up enough money to get one, which would be a saving grace for his poor family, but has the bicycle stolen from him. The film goes on to show the father and son, searching for the stolen bicycle around the city of Rome so that the father can work to support his family. The ending of the movie is not a positive one, and leaves the viewer on a unsettled note, which was generally the case for Italian Neorealism films.

A still from “Bicycle Thieves”

     This week in class we also had a screening of the film “Wild Strawberries”  a 1957 Swedish drama film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. Bergman is a director well known for his dark themed films, touching on existentialism, religion, and dealing with the most inward personal doubt and internal conflict. In this film, a doctor, now an old man, is traveling with his pregnant daughter in law to receive an award. Along the way, the old man ( named Isak Borg) is brought back into different parts of his life, where he gets to watch and reflect on things that he did, and how he acted. He is shown that he was not necessarily the best man. He has this internal conflict concerning his old age, which is the cause of these nightmarish images and his flashbacks.

A still from “Wild Strawberries”

A still from “wild Strawberries”

They meet a group of fun, loud outgoing, seemingly manic young people along the way, two men and a woman. The woman, Sara, is a parallel of Isak’s lost love from when he was young. Each of these hitchhikers set off isak into a new memory of his past, forcing him to reevaluate his life. Isak and his daughter in law also pick up a middle aged couple along the way, who displayed such a toxic energy that they had to be forced to leave. This couple reminded isak of his own troubled marriage when he was their age. One of the heaviest scenes of the film in my opinion was the one with the examiner, a dream of Isak’s where he is asked to explain foreign writing written on a board in front of him and he cannot complete the task, which the examiner then explains that the board says the first duty of being a doctor is to ask for forgiveness, and then tells Isak that he is “guilty of guilt”. Scenes like this are so intriguing as they are a view into the mind of someone struggling with deep internal unresolved conflicts. He reminisces about his childhood and his sweetheart Sara, with who he had fond memories of gathering strawberries with, but who instead went on to marry his brother. He is confronted by his loneliness and indifference, recognizing these traits in both his old mother and in his middle-aged son, and he gradually begins to accept himself, his past, his present and his approaching death. This film surprisingly was also very funny, with the manic hitchhikers, the scenes with the twins from his past, and the scenes with his maid. Comedic tones are not very common in Bergman films, as they give an unexpected lift in mood to these heavy topics that Bergman displays. But in this film, the funnier scenes kept an engaged audience to the seemingly slow yet actually important and in depth scenes that make up the rest of the film.