The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Ingmar Bergman · a film · 1957 · about 91 minutes · in Swedish, as Smultronstället
Mode
Road film and dream play in one; a morality play of summons, journey and judgment, told by an old man in voice-over
Mythos
The summons to judgment; the descent to the dead; the lost garden; the double; the far shore
Phase
One day and one road, Stockholm to Lund, from a dream before the journey to a dream after it, with sixty years of a life met on the way
Presentation
Feature film in black and white, Academy ratio, mono, Swedish dialogue, about 91 minutes; Gunnar Fischer’s photography, Erik Nordgren’s music; Victor Sjöström’s last film role
Register
From the overexposed street of the first dream to the summer light of the strawberry patch and a housekeeper’s comedy at bedtime
Scale
One old man, four generations, a road the length of a country
Governing Proposition
An old physician drives from Stockholm to Lund to be made a jubilee doctor fifty years after his doctorate, and on the way everyone he meets, waking or dreaming, shows him what he has been. The wager of the film is that a life of correct conduct and withheld feeling can be a death carried inside a living man, that the past can be entered and watched but not changed, and that one day on one road is long enough to review a life.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film opens at a desk. Professor Isak Borg, a physician and a scientist, introduces himself in voice-over: an old man of correct conduct and professional honour, who has kept his feelings to himself. Victor Sjöström plays him. Born in 1879, the director of The Phantom Carriage (1921), he was about seventy-eight, and this was his last film role; he died in 1960. Isak is to travel to Lund, where he will be made a jubilee doctor fifty years after his doctorate. The whole film is the day of that journey.
First he dreams. He walks through empty streets under a hard, shadowless light. A clock hangs without hands, and a watch has none. A man with no face falls and becomes a stain on the pavement. A hearse comes by, its wheel catches on a lamp post, the coffin falls and breaks, and a hand reaches out of it and pulls him toward the corpse, which has his own face. Gunnar Fischer overexposes the street until it is nearly white. The dream says before anyone else does what the day will find: the man is dead inside his life, and his time has stopped.
He decides to drive instead of flying. Marianne, his daughter-in-law, played by Ingrid Thulin, goes with him, and in the car she tells him plainly what she thinks of him. The road south, the length of the country from Stockholm to Lund, will give him his past in the order the geography gives it. A journey forward in space becomes a journey backward in time, and every stop on the way will hold up to him some part of what he has been.
Movement II
They stop at the summer house of his childhood. Isak goes to the strawberry patch, and the past is simply there: it is a summer sixty years before, and his cousin Sara, played by Bibi Andersson, is among the wild strawberries when his brother Sigfrid comes and kisses her. Isak stands beside them at his present age, an old man in his own youth, seen by no one and unable to change what he watches. No optical device marks the passage. Staging and light take him in, and past and present share one frame. The Swedish title means a cherished hidden place, and this is the place.
In the house Sara confesses, and old Isak, unseen, listens. The family gathers at table for a deaf uncle’s birthday, the household of sixty years before still at its meal as if no time had passed. Isak watches from among them, and none of them turns. The dead are not summoned here. They are found where they were, keeping a birthday, and the living man is the one who cannot be seen.
This is the film’s first discovery and its whole method. Memory is not a flashback framed by the present; it is a place the old man can walk into and stand in, and what it shows him is that he was always outside, a spectator of his own life. Then the present comes back in the shape of a girl who wants a lift south, and Bibi Andersson plays her too. The Sara he did not have and the Sara who climbs into his car are one face, and the film never needs to say so.
Movement III
The present Sara travels with two young men, Anders and Viktor, and the car fills with youth. The young men argue about God along the way. They are the youth Isak set aside, riding beside him to his honour, and they will go with him all the way to Lund. Their quarrel is the thinnest thing in the film, a debate in outline; their company is not.
A near collision brings the Almans into the car, a married couple played by Gunnar Sjöberg and Gunnel Broström. Their marriage is a war conducted in public. They wound each other before strangers, theatrically, until they are put out on the road. They are Isak’s own marriage replayed by the living, and the film pitches their cruelty as a lesson. It will need them again: the husband returns in the second dream as the examiner.
At a petrol station the attendant, Åkerman, played by Max von Sydow, and his wife remember Isak with gratitude as the doctor who once served their district. It is a small scene, and it carries a large weight. Here is the good he did and forgot, kept by people he never thought of again. When the dreams come to judge him, this is the one thing the day has put on the other side of the scale.
Movement IV
They lunch on a terrace, and the young recite; Isak answers with a hymn. Then he visits his mother, played by Naima Wifstrand. She lives in a cold house and is cold herself, a woman who has outlived her children. She shows him a box of old toys and a watch without hands. The cold the film has been finding in Isak has a source, and it is sitting in front of him, very old, in her cold house.
He dreams again. He is examined, and Alman is the examiner, and a microscope is set before him; the examination goes against him. Then comes a forest, and his wife, Karin, laughing with her lover, and then speaking of her husband’s coldness, while he watches from the trees. The verdict is loneliness. The competent man has failed at the one task he never set himself, and the honour waiting at Lund and this examination are the same event seen twice.
Awake, Isak hears Marianne’s account of Evald, his son, played by Gunnar Björnstrand. Evald does not want the child she is carrying. The line runs on: from the mother who outlived her children, through the son who outlived his feeling, to a grandson who refuses a child of his own. What the dreams have judged in Isak the living have already inherited. Marianne is the one who has said it aloud, and she says it to the man who began it.
Movement V
At Lund the ceremony is held in the cathedral, and Isak is made jubilee doctor. The film gives the occasion its formality and little more: the reward has already been weighed in the examination, and the old man receiving it is no longer quite the man who set out in the morning.
At night Agda, his housekeeper, played by Jullan Kindahl, declines his offer of first names. It is comedy, and it is the truest measure of how far he has come, which is not far. He speaks with Evald, is reconciled with Marianne, and is gentler than he was. Below the window the young sing to him.
He sleeps, and dreams a third time. Sara leads him to a shore where his parents sit in the sun, his father fishing, his mother waving to him across the water. The film ends on Sjöström’s face at rest. It is a gentler law than the one that judged him, and the film lets the grace stand without answering the verdict. What it has shown is a life reviewed in a single day: the past entered and watched, never changed, and an old man who learns in the last hours of his honour that he was always outside it.
Act III · The Twelve
The road is built so that every station returns Isak’s image to him: the Almans are his marriage replayed by the living, Åkerman the good he did and forgot, his mother the source of the cold, the hitchhikers the youth he gave up, with Sara doubled, and Evald the cold handed on. The subtractive test bites at three points. Remove the Almans and the second dream loses its examiner; remove Åkerman and the verdict has no counterweight; remove the mother and the line to Evald and the unborn child is cut. It gives in more places than a film so short can afford. The students’ quarrel about God is a debate in outline that the lunch illustrates rather than needs; the Almans’ cruelty is pitched as a lesson; the evening at Lund carries less than its length. The design is compelled; several of its stations only illustrate it.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and holds: a life of correct conduct, professional honour and withheld feeling can be a death carried inside a living man, and the cold is inherited, from a mother who has outlived her children to a son who has outlived his feeling and on to a grandson who refuses to have a child. Self-knowledge comes late and by indirection, in dreams and in what others tell him, and it changes little: he can be kinder to Agda and to Marianne and still not undo a marriage. Image carries much of it: the coffin with his own face, the handless watch, the old man unseen in his own past. Two costs hold it below the bar. The film often says what it has already shown, through Marianne in the car and the examiner’s verdict, and the close softens what the middle found.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The first dream is one of the medium’s high passages: the overexposed empty street, the clock and the watch without hands, the man with no face who falls into a stain, the hearse wheel caught on a lamp post, the coffin breaking, the hand that pulls him toward the corpse with his own face. Beside it stand the strawberry patch in summer light; Sara’s confession in the house while old Isak listens; Karin in the forest, laughing with her lover and then speaking of her husband’s coldness, watched from the trees; and the last image, Sjöström’s face at rest after the parents on the far shore. These recur across the film rather than standing alone. Frequency holds the axis down: the road between stations, the Almans in the car, the students’ squabble and the ceremony at Lund are level, and the evening reconciliations are gentle rather than high.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The myth is built and carries load. It is the oldest frame of the morality play: a man summoned, a journey to judgment, companions who show him what he was, a tribunal, a sentence. The honour at Lund and the examination are one event seen twice, reward and judgment. Inside that frame stand the descent to the dead, in the summer house where the family of sixty years before is still at table; the lost garden, in the strawberry patch and a title that means a cherished hidden place; the double, in the corpse with his face and the two Saras; and the far shore where the parents wait. The particular stays particular: a deaf uncle’s birthday, a petrol station, a housekeeper who will not use first names. It stands at the bar and no higher, because the archetypes are often signalled as emblems, the handless watch above all, rather than lived.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The real turn is formal. Past, dream and present are entered without a change of physics, and the old man walks into his own memories at his present age, seen by no one, unable to alter what he watches. That made memory a place in the frame rather than a flashback, a departure from the framed flashback of the studio film. The inheritance is heavy, and the film declares it: Sjöström’s own The Phantom Carriage (1921), with its death cart and its night of reckoning; Strindberg’s dream plays; the expressionist street; and the dream of one’s own coffin, filmed by Dreyer in Vampyr (1932). The stake was bounded: Bergman came to it after the Cannes success of Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), and the road picture and an old man’s reckoning were proven forms. The departure is of a device more than of the whole, and that holds the axis among the lowest.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows. A day’s journey forward in space is a journey backward in time, so a life is reviewed in the time it takes to drive the length of a country, and the road enforces order: the past is met in the sequence the geography gives it. The device of the old man present in his memories is the knowledge itself, that the past can be watched and not entered, and that he was always a spectator of his own life. The dreams, which judge him, and the road, which shows him the living, converge at Lund. Tell it as a biography and the simultaneity of the old man and his youth is lost; tell it as pure dream and the living witnesses are lost. The cost recurs: the voice-over and the spoken verdicts state what the form already holds, and the instrument is made to explain itself.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Sixty-nine years of return are evidence. The film has drawn readings from film criticism, from psychoanalysis, where it is a set text of dream interpretation, and from developmental psychology, where Erik Erikson wrote on Isak as a case of the last stage of the life cycle. Return yields: the Almans as Isak’s marriage, Evald as repetition, Marianne as the one who breaks the chain, the two Saras as the life not lived, Agda’s comedy as the film’s truest measure of change. What holds it among the lowest is legibility. The watch, the coffin and the examination are read the same way by almost every viewer, much of the meaning was decoded early, and its centre is less disputed than that of its director’s later and stranger films. Return confirms the reading more often than it opens a new one.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Released in 1957; the field is the cinema of the 1950s, and force and reach are scored together. With The Seventh Seal (8.7), released the same year, it established the interior art film as a central form, and its own reorganisation was of memory, dream and present in one continuous space, with consciousness as the structure of a feature film. Part of that force is Bergman’s breakthrough as a whole, shared with the other film, and is discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Golden Bear at Berlin (1958) and international release carried it; Woody Allen built Another Woman (1988) and Deconstructing Harry (1997), the second an old writer’s journey to receive an honour, directly on it; and the life-review film, with the old self present in the past, descends from it. The reach stayed largely within art cinema.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The film as released survives whole; restorations are repair, and no loss of the original version is known. The form is fully legible. Presence is continuous over sixty-nine years: exhibition and circulation, home video in every format, a standing place in film teaching and in the literature on age and memory. It is wide in art cinema, not the widest. Its own director’s later work now draws more of the attention, and that keeps presence from the top. The surface is touched by its decade: the bourgeois manners of 1950s Sweden, the Almans’ theatrical quarrel and the students’ debate about God belong to their moment. The condition the film treats, the reckoning of old age, has not aged. Among works that have survived fifty-five to seventy years it stands at the foot of the usual range, because presence is wide but not widest and a little of the surface is charged.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The making carries weight. Sjöström’s performance is the film’s instrument: a face that registers a lifetime of withheld feeling and its slow loosening, and the last close-up rests on it. Gunnar Fischer’s photography divides the orders: the overexposed, shadowless street of the first dream, the summer light of the strawberry patch, the forest of the second dream. The entrances into memory are made by staging and light rather than optical device, so that past and present share a frame. Thulin’s monologue in the car, Wifstrand’s mother and Andersson’s double role are exact, and the script’s design, each station a mirror, is a strong construction. The costs are several and visible, and they hold the making well below the summit of the medium: Nordgren’s score is conventional, the hitchhikers and the Almans are played broad, the car interiors are studio work, and the dialogue is often explanatory.
Score: 8.4 / 10
One law governs: every encounter, waking or dreamt, returns Isak to himself, and past, dream and present obey the same physics, entered without a change of rule. Take the two most distant elements, the nightmare of the coffin and Agda refusing first names at the end of the day; both are Isak meeting what he did to the people near him, one as terror and one as farce. The deaf uncle’s birthday, the Almans’ violence, the students’ wrangle and Åkerman’s gratitude fit the same scheme of witness, and the range runs from expressionist dream to summer comedy. The strain is at the close, and it is not slight. The serenade, the reconciliations and the far shore bring a grace the film’s law has not earned, and the examination’s verdict of loneliness is softened rather than answered: the last movement obeys a gentler law than the dream that judged him.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Held in one structure: consciousness, in the dreams and the voice-over; the family across four generations, from the mother through Isak and Evald to the unborn child; marriage three times over, Isak and Karin, the Almans, Evald and Marianne; vocation, in the country doctor Åkerman remembers and the scientist the academy honours; youth and age, in the hitchhikers beside the old man; the sacred, in the hymn, the students’ debate and the ceremony in the cathedral; death throughout. Each is reached through Isak, and none is merely listed. What is held weakly keeps the axis lowest, and one man’s day holds less of the world than its range of themes suggests. History and the state are absent, Sweden is a landscape and a professional class, labour is a profession seen from its honours, and the sacred is a question argued by students rather than an order the film enters.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.8, then The Archetypal Deep at 8.5, then The Sublime and The Made at 8.4. A film that survives whole and in continuous circulation after sixty-nine years, its condition, the reckoning of old age, unaged; a morality-play frame of summons, journey, tribunal and sentence that bears the load; a first dream among the medium’s high passages; and a performance by Sjöström on which the last image rests.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.4: consciousness, four generations, three marriages, vocation and age are held through one man, but history and the state are absent, labour is a profession seen from its honours, and the sacred is a question argued by students. Above it, The Inevitable, The Swerve and The Bottomless Well at 8.1: stations that illustrate the design rather than need it, a turn of device on an inheritance the film declares, and symbols read the same way by almost every viewer.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.1 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.3, The Made at 8.4, The Inner Law at 8.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.8 clears the bar of 8.5 and The Archetypal Deep meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Unconcealment and Pressure on Tradition at 8.3 fall two tenths short, and The Swerve at 8.1 falls four tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis it covers falls below 8.1, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.4. Four of the five summit conditions are met; the work is held below the summit by the Epochal Gate, on three axes, and by its aggregate, 8.2 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries) as released in Sweden on 26 December 1957, about 91 minutes, from the desk in the prologue to the face at rest after the last dream: written and directed by Ingmar Bergman for Svensk Filmindustri, produced by Allan Ekelund, photographed by Gunnar Fischer, with music by Erik Nordgren, edited by Oscar Rosander; black and white, in the Academy ratio, with mono sound. It won the Golden Bear at Berlin in 1958, and its screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award. The film as released is the object; no materially different cut is known, and restorations are repair. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Every axis is judged on the Swedish film; English renderings are used for sense, are a reader’s aid rather than the object, and nothing here is charged to them. No Swedish line is held to the word with certainty, so no dialogue is quoted and all speech is described. Details that could not be verified, among them Isak’s age and his mother’s as the film gives them, the author and words of the hymn at lunch, the critics who have written on the film, the place and date of Erik Erikson’s essay, the number of shots, scene timings, the shooting schedule and the state of the original negative, are not given.