Last winter's cocktail parties were much enlivened by a new game: What does The Seventh Seal mean? This year Ingmar Bergman has thrown two equally puzzling chefs-d'oeuvres among the hors d'oeuvres: Wild Strawberries and The Magician. And both have all the symbols needed to keep the do-it-yourself allegorist busy until Bergman's next two films appear. Of course, there are always partypoops who say we should not trouble ourselves with the symbolism but just "appreciate" the film–there is pictorial beauty and excitement enow. So indeed there is, but to try to enjoy a Bergman film without understanding its symbolism is like trying to see night baseball without lights.

In the case of Wild Strawberries, the outfielders are, to say the least, rather shadowy. A wide variety of film critics have proclaimed Wild Strawberries Bergman's "masterpiece." Certainly, when compared to the films of other directors, it is a brilliant, complex, and fervent film. But compared to Bergman's other work? He has dived in where his skills are weakest: ordinary, realistic human relations, and the effect is more or less what you would expect from using a public-address system to play small talk.

Wild Strawberries deals with the education of a professor. Dr. Isak Borg (played by the grand old man of the Swedish film, Victor Sjöström) is about to get an honourary degree on the occasion of his fiftieth year as a physician and professor of medicine. The night before he is to appear at the university, he dreams Caligarishly of death and, somewhat unnerved, decides to drive instead of flying. On the way, he accumulates passengers: his daughter-in-law Marianne (played by the Isis-like Ingrid Thulin); three hitchhikers, two young men and a girl; a squabbling husband and wife. Borg also accumulates dreams, recollections, and episodes. He visits his old, cold mother. Marianne makes him "see" his son Evald's icy, death-like command that she not bear the child she is carrying. He joins in a squabble between the two young hitchhikers as to whether or not God exists.

The education of the professor makes him (we are to believe) a warm, loving, feeling human being of the type demanded in the endings of teen-age movies and "mature" westerns. At the beginning, we are told–and one of the weaknesses of the film is that we are not shown, but told–he is a chilly old man who has withdrawn from others because he thinks people only criticize one another. At the end of the film, after his spiritual journey, he has become kindly, drawn again into fumbling efforts at affection. His education comes about through the pneumatic enthusiasm of the brash young hitchhikers who give him tributary bouquets, floral and choral, through a gas-station attendant's recalling his kindnesses of younger days, and through the frank accusations of his daughter-in-law. Besides these "real" stimuli, there are "surreal" ones, dreams and half-dreaming recollections of his childhood, and it is in these that Bergman delivers the richness of image and the eerie wyrd of allegory that made The Seventh Seal so marvellously discussable.

The professor's first dream is a surrealistic, soot-and-chalk sequence, much in the manner of Murnau. On a deserted street, the old man sees first a clock without hands, then a dead man, a sort of bag-of-blood man, who spills into the gutter. Next, he sees a hearse which tips over like a baby carriage, spilling its passenger who tries to drag the professor into the coffin and turns out to be (naturally) himself, When they drive to the summer home of his childhood, he revisits the thicket of wild strawberries where he dreams of his first love, Sara; he sees her surrender to his ne'er-do-well brother who had the sexual warmth he, even then, lacked. This dream is followed by his meeting with the young hitchhiker, also called Sara, also played by the sprightly Bibi Andersson. In a second dream, Sara reappears to Isak, accuses him again of coldness, and leaves him again for his brother. Her confronting him with a mirror merges into a classical examination-dream out of Die Traumdeutung in which the professor is examined on his life: he looks into the microscope of scientific knowledge, but sees only his own eye; he diagnoses a patient as dead, but she lives. Finally, he is forced by the examiner to witness again a scene in which his long-suffering (and long-dead) wife goes through one of her periodic seductions. His final dream-vision, before sleep, is of his father and mother at the shore of the lake at the summer-house; there are, Sara tells him, no more wild strawberries in the thicket.

Now all this seems pretty profound, but there are a number of problems. First, Victor Sjöström, playing Borg, simply looks too furry, too much like Lewis Stone in the old Andy Hardy series, to be the chill old curmudgeon we are told he is. Second, his transformation comes too easily; a man of sixty does not change his basic character because of a few dreams and conversations unless he is Ebenezer Scrooge–and Wild Strawberries does somewhat uncomfortably resemble Dickens' Christmas Carol. Most important, I do not think the symbols jell, either in tone or meaning. Naturally, a critic hates to make a remark like that–it may simply mean he didn't catch on, particularly when so many other critics have so enthusiastically, if vaguely, endorsed Bergman's ambiguities. To me, however, they remained cryptic, and I have enough confidence in my vision of symbols to come right out and say the obscurity is a beam in Bergman's eye and not a mote in mine. The symbols do develop the realistic theme in a number of different directions: the professor's approaching death, his already dead feelings, the fact that he is a doctor who cannot "feel" his patients, the existentialist angle that one cannot avoid the claims of life, Marianne's hope that the child she will bear will somehow break the iciness of the chain that is the famille Borg. Yet the complicated, surrealistic, usually Freudian symbols mix with the homecooked main plot about as well as some catachrestic kirschwasser would with an ordinary martini. Further, the symbols are redundant. The constant references to heat and cold seem a too-obvious strategy to describe the unfeelingness of the professor. The many, many images of death say the same thing over and over again until you are forced to ask yourself what the differences in their sayings say, and to that I found no answer.

Consider Borg's final vision. An old man, as he always is in his dreams, he is led by the young Sara of his adolescence to find his parents. He stands, snowy-haired, at the edge of an inlet and waves to them on the opposite shore. His mother is painting; his father is fishing, his pole, as one critic has it, "forming a perfect arc into the still water." The image suggests with great power, admittedly, but what? the happy home of childhood? that the old professor will soon join his ancestors? Does the father's pole represent a phallus out of Freud or a Fisher King out of Jessie Weston? The difficulty is that the realistic theme of the film, the old man's rejoining humanity, is far too small to hold the crowd of symbols Bergman packs into it, and the fringy elements on the edge of this imagistic soirée drift all over. The dreams act together in a loose way on the central theme of deadness; their details, however, do not.

Nevertheless, three themes do emerge out of and beyond Borg's insensitivity–call them time, woman, and confrontation. With many of his symbols, a clock without hands, the sound of ticking or a heart beating, Bergman seems to be saying that the essence of life is to be in time. The professor's opening dream of death is timeless, while the life-giving action of the picture, his journey, his honorary degree, his acceptance of his age, and particularly his appearance in dreams of his childhood as an old man, these are all very much involved in time. Death, in short, seems to be thought of as no-time, life as multi-time.

Woman plays a key role in time: she is, as the heartbeat is, the living measure of it. All through the picture objects are found in boxes or coffins or caskets, and much of the action takes place in the confined space of the professor's automobile, an image for the confined space of life itself. Woman, in other words, seems in Wild Strawberries like woman in Freud's "The Theme of the Three Caskets." She is a sort of triple goddess, first the mother, then the beloved, finally the ultimate mother, mother earth. In the film, the professor's mother has outlived all but one of her ten children; the professor's beloved Sara lives again as Sara the hitchhiker (and Sarah was Isaac's mother). When the professor receives his new academic hat, we see him do it before an audience of women. Woman seems real, timeful, while man is the mere creature of timeless abstractions and illusions (academic hats, the hereafter, God, or, for that matter, atheism). As Bergman himself has written, "It was Adam who was made from Eve's rib....Man is mainly a supplement. It is woman who makes life function." So perhaps the professor's final vision serves to show how man fishes for what woman has already caught. In any case, Bergman is saying the central experience of life is not the intellectual activity which opens the picture or which earned the doctor his new degree; nor is it religious questions which reduce to a silly squabble between sophomores. The central thing in life, Wild Strawberries seems to say, is the relation of parenthood, represented physically by Marianne's pregnancy, spiritually by "Father Isak's" befriending the hitchhikers.

Man, the symbolic level says, has three ages: child, mate, and sage. Isak Borg missed the middle, the meat in the sandwich, entirely. Never (until the end) do we see the professor as parent; never do we see him in the middle years between boyhood and old age; never do we see him as a lover, though repeatedly he watches the lovemaking of others. All through the picture, his spectatorship raises questions, What can you see, what can you know? The answer seems to be that you really know only what you live; spectatorship is, like abstraction, unreal, dream-like. In the end, the old professor learns to confront his own children and, in his dreams, his parents. He becomes, in the Biblical sense, as a little child. In short, Wild Strawberries, I think, says that only by being a child or a parent can man see and hear and know beyond the confined space, the closed car, of his own lifetime.

Far more successful, however, than Wild Strawberries is The Magician, perhaps because in it Bergman does not attempt a crenellation between symbolic dream-level and realistic plot. Instead, he uses an unreal donnée which merges the two levels from the start. The Magician deals with a quack mesmerist who in fact has the powers he professes. (Once you accept this premise, the film ceases to be confusing–and becomes paradoxical.) The central idea of the movie is thus illusion or, to use the graduate student's rubric, appearance-and-reality. Its Swedish name, Ansiktet, means "face," and the face of the remarkable Max von Sydow, playing the mesmerist, is one of the film's most striking features, one of its many illusions. The magician dare not appear ordinary to his illusion-hungry public, so he wears eerie, yet Christ-like, make-up and pretends to be as mute, dumb, and palpable as the poem in Professor MacLeish's famous lyric. Yet he has a perfectly ordinary face when we finally see it halfway through the film, and he can speak–when he is being a man instead of an artist.

After the dark wood of reality, seen from the confining space of the coach, the troupe proceeds to Stockholm where the show is examined by the authorities, the foreshortened representatives of science, culture, and the law: a doctor, an aristocrat, and the police chief, respectively if not respectfully. From their positivistic stance ("Science can penetrate all mysteries"), they humiliate the mute mesmerist, Vogler (literally, the bird-catcher), and they send the artists down to the servants' quarters. During the night, however, either with or without the troupe, it becomes clear that people want to be deceived, to project their own dreams onto the illusionists. The aristocrat's wife, longing for her dead child, tries to seduce Vogler. A serving-girl falls in love (despite an intoxicating philtre) with the mesmerist's inept coachboy. The cook persuades the barker that he should come and live with her and be a preacher. The skeptical doctor tries to seduce the magician's assistant, Aman, when he finds out she is Vogler's wife (another illusion). The police chief simply gets drunk, and his toupee (excuse me, hair-piece) slides off. Mixed in with the illusions of these particular characters, Bergman has ransacked mythology for the archetypal illusions of the race: the hanged man, the love goddess, ghosts, the bacchanal, the coffin, the spells and prophecies of the old crone, and the figure of Christ as expressed in Vogler's tragic mask. There is at least one illusion that speaks for Bergman himself, the image made by a magic lantern (which he has written was the most important toy of his childhood).

After the hurly-burly of the night, the troupe puts on its show for the censors the next morning. The first tricks are outrageously fake, much to the glee of the skeptics (people like to be deceived, but only if they know they are being deceived; no mysteries, please!). Then Vogler, angered, does real tricks: first with the mind, making the police chief's wife blurt out under hypnosis the less savoury aspects of their relationship; then with the body, binding a hefty coachman with invisible (hypnotic) chains. Suddenly, when released, the enraged coachman kills (or seems to kill) the hypnotist, and here Vogler plays his deadliest trick–with the soul. The doctor brutally insists on an autopsy which he completes to his satisfaction. Locked alone in the dark attic, he suddenly finds an eye in his inkwell, a hand on his papers; finally he is pursued all through the attic in a marvellously gothic sequence by the body he has just dissected. (It turns out that the vengeful Vogler substituted the actor's body and carried off the rest with hypnotism.) Nevertheless, despite these "real" illusions and the coachman's hanging himself, the skeptics remain sublimely unconvinced. The doctor who had been scared out of his wits dismisses Vogler's death-and-resurrection by saying he had merely created a "little fear of death."

Just as the skeptics are about to punish Vogler and his wife (who now appear without make-up or costume as the shabby, troubled people they are), Bergman tacks on the grandest illusion of all, a splendidly improbable ending. As at the end of The Threepenny Opera Victoria's messenger comes riding, riding, now a message comes from the King (surely the same King as in Tartuffe) summoning the troupe to a command performance. Bergman, in effect, shows that we, too, his audience, want to be deceived (but not deceived) just as the skeptics did. We, too, want to know we are being deceived. Death and love, the actor's death and Vogler's love for his wife or the serving-maid's for the coachboy, these, Bergman seems to say, are the only realities; all other human activity, artist's or police chief's, is an illusion, a role played by dying actors. Yet we ask the artist (and abuse him for it) to deceive us, to show us other illusions. So long as he makes it clear that they are only illusions, they excite us, they make life seem even realer. As the dead actor says, "I didn't feel really dead until I became a ghost." But should the artist show us the "real unreality" he knows, a real miracle, should he break down the barrier we erected between reality and unreality so we could live, then we simply deny him. We shut the "ghost" up in a coffin. To admit such a "real unreality" would show us that life itself and all we take for real is really fake. This is the magician's secret–and Bergman's, who has called himself a conjuror working with a gimmick that makes us think still pictures move. Only woman (the crone-goddess who gives the mesmerist his powers) can create real life; Bergman, and all artists, are but tricksters.

So far, less than a dozen of Bergman's twenty-one films have received much circulation here (three more are scheduled for late 1959 release). It is probably too soon to attempt a comprehensive view, but critics, I suppose, are entitled to create illusions, too. Bergman, it seems to me, shoots with one foot in existentialism and the other in psychoanalysis. Basic to his sensibility is the idea that death is an ultimate reality and we live life (even love) by consciously accepting it as brief and illusory. As he himself expresses it, "Each film is my last." Mixed with this dark view is small cheer from psychoanalysis, the concept of woman as life-bearer and man as abstraction-mongerer, the concept of the artist as a dream-peddler, and a preoccupation with the characters' spying on the lovemaking of others, primal scene fantasies, which, the analysts say, one would expect to find at the heart of the psyche in both film-maker and film-goer. In sum, Bergman's sensibility pivots about one central and eminently cinematic issue: What is real, or, put another way, What is it you see?

Because of this essentially visual theme of illusion or imagination, Bergman's technique takes less from the ideological montages of Eisenstein, Dovshenko, and the Russian school than from the surrealism of Vigo, Cocteau, Hans Richter, and the early Buñuel. He has also drawn heavily on his own Swedish tradition, mixing the sheer pictorial beauty of Mauritz Stiller's long shots with the expressionism of Strindberg (as brought to celluloid by Alf Sjöberg, for whom Bergman wrote his first film script). Though his earlier models are heavily psychological, Bergman is also mythological. He draws from folklore and such primitive art-forms as the puppet-play, the commedia dell'arte, medieval woodcuts, mystery plays, and the films of Méliès.

More important, Bergman has added his own existentialist touches, which most obviously take form as his extensive use of close-up and his "confined-space" technique (which he first developed in Waiting Women in 1952).

Our work in films [he has written] begins with the human face. We can certainly become completely absorbed in the esthetics of montage, we can bring together objects and still life into a wonderful rhythm, we can make nature studies of astounding beauty [a glance askance at countryman Sucksdorff?], but the approach to the human face is without doubt the hall-mark and the distinguishing quality of the film.

This view is natural enough for a theatrical director who is denied close-ups on the stage, but Bergman has turned his over-compensation into a distinctive style. In all of his pictures, close-up rather than montage or composed long-shot dominates the technique. He sets many of his most effective scenes in almost coffin-like confinement: a stalled elevator (Waiting Women), a confessional (The Seventh Seal), a closed car (Wild Strawberries), a locked attic (The Magician). Bergman's technique reflects Bergman's existentialist image of man, a face in a frame of death; Bergman's films are themselves acts of confrontation.

In essence, however (as opposed to existence), we are dealing with an artist who deceives us with life. Bergman preaches love, but he seems rather chilly and intellectual as he does it. He is at his best when he bridges this dissociated sensibility by using a consciously mythy mixture of realism and unrealism, the allegorical visions of death and life in The Seventh Seal, the midsummer-night rituals of Smiles of a Summer Night, the mesmeric tricks of The Magician. When he tries to deal with immediate, realistic human relations as in Three Strange Loves or Wild Strawberries, the effect is rather like a Ma and Pa Kettle movie scripted by Kafka. Yet we would all, I suppose, prefer a Ma and Pa Kettle movie by Kafka to one by the rusticated hacks of Hollywood, and Bergman's failures would be almost any other man's triumphs. We sometimes forget, in the fervor of our emotionality, that art–even moving pictures–should be intelligent as well as "moving." At his least, as in Wild Strawberries, Bergman towers over all but a handful of today's directors for intelligence. At his best, as in The Seventh Seal or The Magician, Bergman is a second Eisenstein–as, given enough time, even the chatter at cocktail parties will show.