No other art medium–neither painting nor poetry–can communicate the specific quality of the dream as well as the film can.
Ingmar Bergman’s Dreams
No other art medium–neither painting nor poetry–can communicate the specific quality of the dream as well as the film can. When the lights go down in the cinema and this white shining point opens up for us, our gaze stops flitting hither and thither, settles and becomes quite steady. We just sit there, letting the images flow out over us. Our will ceases to function. We lose our ability to sort things out and fix them in their proper places. We’re drawn into a course of events–we’re participants in a dream. And manufacturing dreams, that’s a juicy business.
Ingmar Bergman
Mai Zetterling in a dream sequence of the early Ingmar Bergman’s melodrama Musik i Mörker (Music in Darkness, 1948)
The drama had its origin in a dream. I depicted the dream in the flashback about Frost (Anders Ek) and Alma (Gudrun Brost). Gycklarnas Afton (Sawdust and Tinsel, 1953)
Doris (Harriet Andersson) and Söderbymalm (Gunnar Björnstrand) in Kvinnodröm (Dreams, 1955)
The dream scene of Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries, 1957)
One of Johan Borg (Max von Sydow) many painful memories that has as a dream in Vargtimmen (Hour of the Wolf, 1968).
Bergman sets the dream scene with Katarina(Christine Buchegger) and Peter (Robert Atzorn) in Aus dem Leben der Marionetten (From the Life of the Marionettes, 1980).
Fanny (Pernilla Allwin) and Alexander (Bertil Guve) (Fanny och Alexander, 1982)
