There's a dream sequence in Wild Strawberries, and in it Ingmar Bergman had the good sense to understand that a dream, for the dreamer, is very real; there is no strange music or wobbly focus. A horse-drawn hearse catches a wheel against a lamppost, and the horses try again and again to get that wheel past the lamppost. Who has not had that sort of dream of stupid frustration? Then the wheel breaks off and a coffin tumbles onto the street.
Bergmanesque? The great Swedish director, who died yesterday at age 89, certainly brought a thick dark streak and brooding fixation on death to some of his most remarkable films. There's the character of Death, for instance, who shows up in a lugubrious frame of mind on the beach in The Seventh Seal. But when asked by the hero if he isn't pretty good at chess, Death brightens immediately and replies with a clipped "ja, ja" that lets you know, here's one Scandinavian who's ready to play.
Mr. Bergman personified High Art in Cinema to a generation, because his movies could be so serious and weighty and symbolic and, to some, ponderous - at a time, like now, when Hollywood was anything but. Yet as a young man, he made Smiles of a Summer Night, and as a much older man he made The Magic Flute, and both are warm and deceptively easygoing. Fanny and Alexander is barely disguised autobiography, in which it seems that the wonderful northern summer twilight will, like childhood, go on forever. It doesn't, of course. It always grows dark in the end.
Mr. Bergman once greeted an interviewer from Playboy with the question, "Well, are you depressed yet?" He said he hated Sweden for being so remote and sparse and burdened by winter, but would be unable to work anywhere else (though eventually he did). Maybe that deep contrast between June and December, all lightness and all darkness, preyed upon him.
For many Americans, a Bergman film summons up memories of college film societies, roundy old Volvos and what seemed like a Swedish disinclination to remain fully clothed. He offered, to those just fresh from home, a window to a different view of life - exciting, scary, difficult. If you were watching a Bergman film, you had to work your way through it. But he repaid the labor.