The Remembrance of Wild Strawberries Past

Imagine a schema in which you appeared at your present age as someone who's now senior to a mentor or other parental figure who you knew at the prime of your and their lives. In fact, there's nothing new under the sun, but imagination is the most advanced scientific invention ever created; there’s a time machine in your mind which will allow you to enter a room as the senior of someone who you once looked up to. “The Child is father of the Man,” wrote Wordsworth. You’ll want to take advantage of this portal since despite all the reports of parallel universes, string theory and multi-dimensional travel, it’s the closest you’re ever going to come to effectively transmigrating your soul. Here you get a chance to redo things. How you hated that pompous advisor in college or graduate school! How dismissive and self-involved they seemed as they enunciated their perfect locutions, preening themselves with their familiar vocabulary and paying little attention to your sputtering engine! Now you come back and see them from another point of view, as immature personalities suffering from the pains of growing up, even at the late stage of life where they’d already become noted figures in their field. In Wild Strawberries Ingmar Bergman imagined such a character, returning to the scene of his own early years, wizened, but no less pained by the limitations of his own character. The movie may not have been science fiction, but through the wonders of his cinematic genius, Bergman engineered his own prototypic voyage to the past.