Wild Strawberries (Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

In the iconic intro to Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries an elderly man awakens from a terrifying nightmare which seemed to prophesied his upcoming death. The man is 78 years old and has been withdrawn and isolated from family members and friends over the past several decades making his last few years very lonely. His whole life has been hard work which ended him in the field of science where he became a greatly respected professor. He has a married son who is a doctor with no kids and a mother who is still alive and active. His wife has been dead for many years and the only company Isak has is his housekeeper. Tomorrow he will be receiving an honorary degree in Lund Cathedral and he has to drive down there to receive it. This elderly man is someone who has accomplished everything in his life when it came to education, his occupation and financial stability; but when it comes to the people who love him, he has coldly shut them out and selfishly ignored them. He now realizes time has gone by and he understands he must make amends for past sins, before his death arrives and it is too late. 

Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries came out the same year as The Seventh Seal and both are considered not only masterpieces of art cinema but two of Bergman's greatest achievements. There were many themes that Bergman kept revisiting throughout his work, but the one that he is most known for is his fear of death. Death was a force so unstoppable and yet unenviable, that it has always frightened the great director. Both of those films focused on Death and inThe Seventh Seal Death took the form of a boogieman, which was the Grim Reaper. In Wild Strawberries Death doesn't have a name or a face; but the theme is more subtle. Death is brewing beneath the elderly man's conscious; with the elderly man knowing his time will soon be near.