Who are HITCH and BERG?
Alfred Hitchcock and Ingmar Bergman: two filmmakers who were most popular in the 1950's and 1960's.
Click on the links of the filmmakers above, and films below, to learn more about them!
The two films in question:
Hitchcock's Marnie
Bergman's Wild Strawberries
Both filmmakers experiment with the science of psychology to complement their famous film techniques. Hitchcock incorporates psychoanalysis into his films explicitly, having another character act as the main character, Marnie's, therapist, while Bergman uses it implicitly, having the main character, Isak Borg, analyze and reflect solely by himself. Both main characters have recurring nightmares as adults stemming from particular stressful or traumatic events as children and they are in need of some type of psychoanalysis.
This is the reason both filmmakers could be spoken about simultaneously.
First, their techniques are radically different, but give similar results. Hitchcock uses color, mainly red, to trigger to audiences that Marnie is having a recollection of a trauma as a child that she has not yet recovered from yet. Bergman, instead, has the nightmares play out on film, which are filled with various camera angles to alert us of the significance of symbols (for example) and to remind us that they are, in fact, dreams and not real. Their content is also different, but come from a similar source - a childhood trauma. Marnie and Isak both had traumas in their childhood - ones that they have not recovered from as of yet. They have recurring nightmares - Marnie because of a murder and Isak because of a betrayal - which tend to plague them and disrupt their waking life as adults. Both filmmakers also have been influenced by a similar source - Sigmund Freud - in which they choose to incorporate psychological elements as a way of merging the art of film and science.
Read more:
An Introduction to Dreams on Film
Who are HITCH and BERG?
What is MARNIE about?
What is WILD STRAWBERRIES about?
So who is influencing HITCHBERG?
RED RED RED!
Is that you...Borg?
Think Psychoanalysis, Think Freud
Dream-work and Wild Strawberries
Concluding Thoughts, Works Cited, Suggested Reading, Image Credits, and About Me