10.54103/ai/15448



From its very origins, cinema has demonstrated a particular interest in the representation of altered states of consciousness: memories, visions, nightmares and dreams are a common feature of narrative films and usually interrupt a flow of events by inserting different temporalities in the present of the story. Following the arguments explored by Gilles Deleuze in his groundbreaking works on cinema, this essay will address the issue of how narrative cinema has represented altered states of consciousness. If in early cinema of attractions altered states were represented as physical realities intertwined with the world, classical Hollywood films progressively exorcised the disruptive potential of such images by defining a visual grammar in order to normalize them within the narrative. It will be modern cinema which will focus on this issue in depth, given its new interest in the link between the moving image and the mechanisms of thought. In this regard, the essay will in conclusion address the hallucinations experienced by Isak Borg in Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, a complex and highly illuminating case of various forms of altered mental states. 



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Screening the human mind: A Deleuzian approach to altered states of consciousness in cinema history: Toward an idea of the virtual image in the cinema (II)
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Giuseppe Previtali
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Screening the human mind: A Deleuzian approach to altered states of consciousness in cinema history: Toward an idea of the virtual image in the cinema (II)
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1
             Screening
             the human mind:
A Deleuzian approach
to altered states
of consciousness
in cinema history.
Toward an idea of the virtual
image in theDeleuze
               cinema (II)
by Giuseppe Previtali
                        Cinema
                        Temporality
                        Hallucination
                        Bergman




                                        Issue №1 Year 2022
                                        → Altered states
                                        Edited by Giancarlo Grossi
                                        and Andrea Pinotti
Screening the human mind:
A Deleuzian approach to altered
states of consciousness
in cinema history.
Toward an idea of the virtual
image in the cinema (II)
by Giuseppe Previtali

Abstract                       From its very origins, cinema has demonstrated
                 a particular interest in the representation of altered states of
                 consciousness: memories, visions, nightmares and dreams
                 are a common feature of narrative films and usually inter-
                 rupt a flow of events by inserting different temporalities in
                 the present of the story. Following the arguments explored
                 by Gilles Deleuze in his groundbreaking works on cinema,
                 this essay will address the issue of how narrative cinema
                 has represented altered states of consciousness. If in early
                 cinema of attractions altered states were represented as
                 physical realities intertwined with the world, classical Hol-
                 lywood films progressively exorcised the disruptive poten-
                 tial of such images by defining a visual grammar in order
                 to normalize them within the narrative. It will be modern
                 cinema which will focus on this issue in depth, given its
                 new interest in the link between the moving image and the
                 mechanisms of thought. In this regard, the essay will in
                 conclusion address the hallucinations experienced by Isak
                 Borg in Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, a complex and highly
                 illuminating case of various forms of altered mental states.
Deleuze            Cinema             Temporality              Hallucination                Bergman
To quote this essay: G. Previtali, “Screening the human mind: A Deleuzian approach
to altered states of consciousness in cinema history. Toward an idea of the virtual image
in the cinema (II)”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 37-50

GIUSEPPE PREVITALI                                 37                                         AN-ICON
                            Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright (1950) begins
              with a shot of a young couple (Jonathan and Eve) in a car.
              We immediately understand that they are running from the
              police and they are heading towards a dock. The girl asks
              the man (who we will later recognize as her boyfriend) what
              happened and, when Jonathan starts to tell his story (“I
              was in my kitchen, it was about 5:00”) the close-up shot of
              the two begins to fade out. He explains that earlier in the
              morning he had received a visit from the singer and actress
              Charlotte Inwood, who showed up at his house with a dress
              covered in the blood of her husband. Jonathan managed
              to sneak into Charlotte’s house but was glimpsed by the
              housemaid and forced to run away. He later received a visit
              from two policemen, from whom he was able to escape
              only thanks to Eve. The description of this long sequence,
              which corresponds to the first fifteen minutes of the movie,
              would be incomplete without stressing the fact that Jona-
              than’s tale will prove to be a lie, despite the fact that visually
              it adopts those criteria of clarity, legibility and transparen-
              cy which were typical of classic Hollywood cinema and in
              which the spectator usually put his trust.
                            The exceptionality of this sequence and its ex-
              emplarity in showing how the temporal dimension (the se-
              quence is a recollection of a supposed past) and the mental
              dimension (it is a false recollection of a certain character)
              are linked, is such that Deleuze identifies in it the first ap-
              pearance of the mental image in the history of cinema. This
              crucial analysis, programmatically located in the last pages
              of The Movement-Image, explicitly connects the distorted
              evocation of the past and an altered state of conscious-
              ness. It is precisely this relationship which, questioning the
              omniscience of the spectator, heralds the advent of a new
              kind of filmic image:




GIUSEPPE PREVITALI                    38                                AN-ICON
The mental image not only frames the others, but transforms them
by penetrating them. For this reason, one might say that Hitchcock
accomplishes and brings to completion the whole of the cinema
by pursuing the movement-image to its limits.1
                                  Altered states of consciousness
                                  in early and classical cinema

                               Deleuze’s arguments, which will later be dis-
                cussed more extensively, attempt to address the excep-
                tionality of Hitchcock’s movies in the context of classical
                narrative cinema. However, it is important to recognize
                that from its origins, cinema has continuously sought to
                make visible altered states of consciousness. If film theory
                immediately stressed the role of visual media in preserv-
                ing the memory of what is absent (thus “presentifying” it),2
                another of the great obsessions of cinema has to do with
               “the aspiration to visualize what dwells in the human mind,
                to represent thought, to exteriorize what is internal”.3 As
                Dagrada acutely pointed out, this urge was not limited to
                cinema itself, but was rather a common feature in the vi-
                sual culture of the 18th and 19th centuries. Theatre, magic
                lantern shows and optical toys were just some of the most
                common examples of this interest shown in the visual ex-
                ternalization of mental states. Cinema, nevertheless, played
                a crucial role in this sense, given its specific ability to visu-
                alize reality. Long before the institutionalization of classical
                filmic syntax, early cinema developed a specific way of
                visualizing mental states. What is peculiar to this historical
       1 G. Deleuze, Cinema 1. The Movement-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
       1986): 204. The use of Deleuzean concepts in film studies is an established trend and this
       paper follows this tradition addressing a perhaps slightly different problem. For a general
       understanding of this theoretical link, see: P. Pisters, The Matrix of Visual Culture. Working with
       Deleuze in Film Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); P. Maratti, Gilles Deleuze.
       Cinema and Philosophy (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2008); D. Angelucci,
       Deleuze e i concetti del cinema (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2012); D. Martin-Jones, W. Brown eds.,
       Deleuze and Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012).
       2 I am referring to the fundamental remarks by theoreticians such as A. Bazin, “The ontology
       of photographic image”, in Id., What is Cinema? Vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
       204): 9-16 and R. Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981): 96. Moreover, see
       the relevant passages in A. Boschi, Teorie del cinema. Il periodo classico 1915-1945 (Rome:
       Carocci, 1998).
       3 E. Dagrada, Between the Eye and the World. The Emergence of the Point-of-View Shot
       (Brussels: Peter Lang,2014): 193.

GIUSEPPE PREVITALI                                39                                            AN-ICON
                period is that those states were not presented as individual
                and abstract perceptions, but rather as phantasmagorical
                apparitions, as forms of visual attraction.4 Hallucinations,
                forms of altered perceptions,5 apparitions of demons and
                other creatures were extremely common in early cinema,
                to such an extent that it is often difficult to differentiate
                clearly between these various types of altered conscious-
                ness. Besides the different ways in which these images
                are visually presented in early cinema,6 what needs to be
                stressed here is the fact that these forms of alteration pos-
                sessed a “physical nature”, a “potential interchangeability
                with the real”.7 Consider for instance the case of Histoire
                d’un crime (Ferdinand Zecca, 1901). The film begins with
                the killing of a bank employee by a burglar and is built on
                the juxtaposition of self-contained tableaux, in accordance
                with the stylistic conventions of the time. When the burglar
                is arrested and taken to prison, we see him sleep; here,
                thanks to an explicitly theatrical solution, Zecca is able to
                visualize what is at the same time both a dream and a rec-
                ollection of key events of the character’s life. This form of
                mise en abyme, which has more or less the same function
                as thought balloons in comics,8 is typical of the period. It
                confirms that, while the linguistic status of these “altered
                images” was still unclear, early cinema already stressed the
                problematic and still to be analyzed relationship between
                the mental and the temporal dimension.

       4 I use the term in the sense outlined in the influential study by T. Gunning, “The cinema of
       attractions: early film, its spectator and the avant-garde”, in W. Strauven, ed., The Cinema of
       Attractions Reloaded, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006): 381-388.
       5 Consider for example the hallucinatory drunkenness represented in Rêve à la lune (1905)
       or the nightmarish consequences of the main character’s dinner in Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906).
       6 For an inventory of these techniques, see E. Dagrada, Between the Eye and the World. The
       Emergence of the Point-of-View Shot: 197-210.
       7 E. Dagrada, Between the Eye and the World. The Emergence of the Point-of-View Shot:
       198. Later on, the concept is further emphasized as follows: “The objective physical quality
       forcefully inscribed into the continuity between subjective oneiric space and waking space
       characterizes all forms of representation of dreams developed by early cinema. It is not
       surprising, then, that in this context […] mixing the objective and the subjective, oneiric
       representation simultaneously assumes both the material characteristics of a physical
       apparition and the supernatural characteristics of a clairvoyance, as if it constituted a magical
       way of communicating with somewhere else, a place that is just as real, but also supernatural”,
       ibid.: 205. Even if here the author speaks explicitly of dreams, her argument seems to be
       applicable to all the types of altered consciousness explored by early cinema.
       8 L. Albano, Lo schermo dei sogni. Chiavi psicoanalitiche del cinema (Venice: Marsilio, 2004):
       93. If not otherwise stated, the translations of Italian texts are always the author’s.

GIUSEPPE PREVITALI                                40                                          AN-ICON
                                                          Fig. 1. Ferdinand Zecca, Histoire d’un crime, 1901


                              With the institutionalization of the film industry
                and its language, the various manifestations of the mental in
                early cinema were progressively neutralized and reduced to
                figures of altered temporality.9 The variety of mental states
                encountered in the cinema of attractions, and the different
                stylistic devices used to present them, were replaced by
                recurrent and recognizable linguistic elements which neu-
                tralized the subversive potential of mental images in a con-
                text in which a clear and coherent narrative was required.10
                The case of A Letter to Three Wives (Joseph L. Mankiewicz,
                1949) is emblematic in this sense. The protagonists of this
                sentimental drama are three women who receive, from a
                fourth woman, a letter stating that one of their husbands
                has run away with her. Haunted by doubt, each of the
                three gives rise to a flashback in which she remembers a
                specific episode of her life. The second flashback, which
                has as its protagonist Rita (a radio writer married to a mod-
                est but proudly intellectual teacher), is highly instructive

       9 I am specifically referring to the flashback as a form of visualization of the past. On the
       various types of flashback, see at least: Y. Mouren, Le flash-back (Armand Colin: Paris, 2005);
       F. Centola, Il flashback nel cinema. Il tempo riavvolto nell’eterno presente cinematografico
       (Novara: UTET, 2019). For a theoretical and historical introduction to the topic, M. Turim,
       Flashbacks in Film: Memory & History (London-New York: Routledge, 2013). On the role of
       flashback in literary theory see the quintessential study by G. Genette, Figures III (Paris: Seuil, 1972).
       10 It should be noted that, according to many theoreticians such as Balázs and Bluestone,
       the only temporality of narrative cinema is the present. On this topic, S. Ghislotti, Film Time. Le
       dimensioni temporali della visione (Bergamo: Bergamo University Press, 2012): 54-63.

GIUSEPPE PREVITALI                                   41                                               AN-ICON
              of the way in which classical cinema connects the men-
              tal and the temporal dimensions. Rita is laid on the grass,
              and while the camera delicately zooms in on her face, we
              hear her thoughts in voiceover (she obsessively repeats a
              couple of troubling questions: “Why couldn’t George go
              fishing? Why the blue suit?”). Then, a crossfade marks
              the beginning of the flashback, a sequence that tells the
              story of a highly problematic and unhappy marriage. The
              long flashback will then be visually presented according
              to the conventions of classical narrative cinema: a set of
              objective shots connected through the use of linear and
              transparent montage.

                          Beyond Classicism: from Hitchcock
                          to Resnais

                           When confronted with the ways in which clas-
              sical cinema elaborated the theme of mental images – re-
              ducing them to forms of altered temporality – Hitchcock’s
              exceptionality becomes even more apparent. As already
              mentioned, Deleuze identifies the false flashback of Stage
              Fright as a crucial moment for overcoming the move-
              ment-image. Indeed, the falseness of this sequence radi-
              cally challenges the idea that memories can be objective-
              ly visualized, without the deforming effect always implicit
              in subjectivity. Even more problematically, in the final se-
              quence of Marnie (1964), Hitchcock shows the emergence
              (or rather re-mergence) of a traumatic mental image of the
              protagonist, which she experiences not just optically but
              in a much more radically bodily sense. Influenced by the
              circumstances and as if hunted by a younger version of
              herself, Marnie actually re-experiences the dramatic events
              of her childhood. While being presented to the spectator
              through objective shots, these images – marked moreover
              by a chromatic alteration – have a material consistency
              for Marnie and she finds herself re-immersed in a past
              that she has already lived through. The discussion on the
              ways in which cinema reflected on the tension between the
              mental and the temporal dimension has shown that, while
GIUSEPPE PREVITALI                  42                            AN-ICON
                in early cinema a variety of altered states of consciousness
                was represented as hallucinatory but “physical” realities,
                classical narrative cinema progressively institutionalized
                figures of temporality11 within canonic filmic syntax.12 The
                link between mental and temporal will become crucial in the
                context of so-called modern cinema,13 specifically because
               – according to Deleuze – in this cultural context cinema will
                finally be able to assign a central place to thought and its
                mechanisms: “the essence of cinema […] has thought as its
                higher purpose, nothing but thought and its functioning”.14
               This process will be made possible by the emergence of
                the category of mental image, which will on the one hand
                reassume and re-signify other kinds of images (such as the
                action-image) and on the other hand unleash the “modern-
                ist potential” inscribed in the flashback.15
                             The mental image is for Deleuze something
                profoundly related to the issue of time, but in an ex-
                tremely complex and problematizing way which implies




       11 More specifically, classical narrative cinema tried to visualize almost exclusively the
       past and it is probably no coincidence that Hitchcock was one of the few directors who tried
       to imagine an image in the future. I am referring here to the sequence of Sabotage (1936) in
       which the protagonist sees the water of a fish tank in the city aquarium dissolving and acting
       as a sort of screen on which is prefigured the brutal outcome of a bombing. It is worth noticing
       that in this case the future is considered as a time of pure possibility, because the imagined
       event will take place in a completely different way.
       12 Deleuze insists on the rhetorical function of the flashback in a poignant passage of
       The Time-Image: “We know very well that the flashback is a conventional, extrinsic device:
       it is generally indicated by a dissolve-link, and the images that it introduces are often
       superimposed or meshed. It is like a sign with the words: ‘watch out! recollection’. It can,
       therefore, indicate, by convention, a causality which is psychological, but still analogous to a
       sensory-motor determinism, and, despite its circuits, only confirms the progression of a linear
       narration”. G. Deleuze, Cinema 2. The Time-Image, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
       Press, 1989): 48.
       13 For a critical definition of this concept, see the still relevant remarks by G. de Vincenti,
       Il concetto di modernità nel cinema (Parma: Pratiche, 2000): 11-24.
       14 G. Deleuze, The Time-Image: 168.
       15 M. Turim, Flashbacks in Film: Memory & History: 189. On the same issue, Ghislotti points
       out: “While in the classical flashback the scenes became part of the coherent narrative of the
       movie, that is of a set of knowledges that helped the public to have a trustworthy idea of the
       story, in the case of modernist flashback this aspect falls short: the flashback often becomes
       the subjective vision of a fact, and is consequently a possible version of the events, but not
       the definitive one […]. At the end of the film, the public is unable to have an idea of the story
       free of doubt and is forced to choose between this or that version of it”. S. Ghislotti, Film Time.
       Le dimensioni temporali della visione: 130-131.

GIUSEPPE PREVITALI                                43                                            AN-ICON
                the coexistence of different temporalities.16 In modern cin-
                ema, the visualization of mental states is made possible
                by the collision of /clash of /conflict of different temporal-
                ities that not only coexist, but can merge to the point of
                becoming indistinguishable:

The images have to be present and past, still present and already
past, at once and at the same time. [...] The past does not follow
the present that it is no longer, it coexists with the present it was.17
                             Take for instance a movie such as Mirror (An-
                drei Tarkovsky, 1975), in which the continuous oscillation
                between various states of consciousness (from memory to
                dream and beyond) would be inconceivable in the context
                of classical narrative cinema, especially when we consider
                that in the movie “there is a constant retroactive reverber-
                ation of almost every scene”.18 The memorial act of the
                protagonist Aleksej generates a flux of memory and visions
                that will involve not just his own life but also the life of his
                son and even collective and historical memory (both in an
                allusive form and through the insertion of historical visual
                documents).19 In this sense, Mirror seems to fully resonate
                with the Deleuzian idea of time as a topological construct,
                a field composed of peaks and sheets which continuously
                involve each other and are freely explorable. This idea be-
                comes even more explicit when we consider the cinema
                of Alain Resnais, in which both the association between




       16 “There is no present which is not haunted by a past and a future, by a past which is
       not reducible to a former present, by a future which does not consist of a present to come.
       Simple succession affects the present which passes, but each present coexists with a past
       and a future without which it would not itself pass on. It is characteristic of cinema to seize
       this past and this future that coexist with the present image”. G. Deleuze, The Time-Image: 37
       (emphasis added). The use of the term “haunted” is specifically interesting here and seems to
       foreshadow the arguments of J. Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of
       Mourning and the New International (London-New York: Routledge, 1994).
       17 G. Deleuze, The Time-Image: 79 (emphasis added). Also, on this point: S. Shaw, Film
       Consciousness. From Phenomenology to Deleuze (Jefferson-London: McFarland&Company,
       2008): 147.
       18 S. Shaw, Film Consciousness. From Phenomenology to Deleuze : 94.
       19 T. Masoni, P. Vecchi, Andrei Tarkovskij (Milan: Il Castoro, 1997): 72-74.

GIUSEPPE PREVITALI                               44                                          AN-ICON
                mental and temporal,20 and the conflict between various
                temporalities are quintessential. In his movies, the temporal
                oscillations do not involve issues of narrative clarity – as
                in classical cinema – but are rather used to visualize con-
                tradictory mental states that are always on the verge of
                undecidability. As pointed out by Deleuze, it is pointless
                to discuss Resnais’ cinema dissociating the issue of time
                from that of mental states:

It is not difficult to show that dreams and nightmares, fantasies,
hypotheses and anticipations, all forms of the imaginary, are more
important than flashbacks.21
                             It is possible to identify a trend in Resnais’ cin-
               ema which, from Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) to Je t’aime,
               je t’aime (1968) through Last Year in Marienbad (1961) and
               Muriel (1963), questions and problematizes the mental
               dimensions of perception and their link with temporality.
               Consider for instance the emblematic case of Last Year
               in Marienbad: the claim of the man to have met a woman
               the year before could have easily offered the chance for a
               chain of illustrative flashbacks. On the contrary, the baroque
               setting of the hotel in which the two characters meet trig-
               gers a series of obsessive repetitions, uncertain memories
               (whose are these memories? Are these facts real or just
               imagined?), while the continuous and uncanny immobility
               of the bodies generates “a space-time in which there is no
               before or after, past or present, here and elsewhere, real
               and imaginary”.22 The film is structured by the connection
               between ambiguous and confusing mental states, altered
               forms of experience that continuously merge with halluci-
               nation. Deleuze sums up the issue as follows, underlining


       20 According to Ishaghpour, the great issue of Resnais’ cinema is to understand “the way
       the mind functions”. Y. Ishaghpour, D’une image à l’autre (Paris: Gonthier, 1981): 182; quoted
       in G. Deleuze, The Time-Image: 121. Shortly after, Deleuze comes back to this argument,
       stressing that “Resnais is always saying that he is interested only in what happens in the brain,
       in cerebral mechanisms – monstrous, chaotic or creative mechanisms”, Ibid.: 125.
       21 Ibid.: 122.
       22 L. Albano, Lo schermo dei sogni. Chiavi psicoanalitiche del cinema: 113-114.

GIUSEPPE PREVITALI                               45                                           AN-ICON
               once again the inextricable interweaving of times and per-
               ceptions offered by the movie:

In Last Year in Marienbad it is X who knew A (so A does not re-
member or is lying), and it is A who does not know X (so X is mis-
taken or playing a trick on her). Ultimately, all the three characters
correspond to three different presents, but in such a way as to
complicate the inexplicable instead of throwing light on it; in such
a way as to bring about its existence instead of suppressing it:
when X lives in a present of past, A lives in a present of future, so
that the difference exudes or assumes a present of present (the
third, the husband), all implicated in each other.23
                                The hallucination of Isak Borg

                            Even if Deleuze never discussed Ingmar Berg-
               man directly in the pages of The Time-Image, his cinema
               seems to benefit from the aforementioned theorizations,
               especially if compared with the new possibilities provided
               by virtual reality in terms of immersivity. Indeed, the pres-
               ence of altered mental states is recurrent in his movies,
               which continuously address the link between temporality
               and perception. Consider for instance the hallucinatory
               visions of Persona (1966) or the nightmares that haunt the
               painter Johan in Hour of the Wolf (1968). The explicitly me-
               ta-filmic opening of this movie,24 as a matter of fact, seems
               to suggest that for Bergman cinema is defined precisely by
               its specific ability to visualize altered states of conscious-
               ness. This idea becomes even more explicit (especially in
               connection with time) in Wild Strawberries (1957), in which
               Bergman sets out what is probably his most acute reflec-
               tion on the topic. As is well-known, the protagonist is the
               elderly bacteriologist Isak Borg, who is about to receive
               his doctorate. The night before the celebration he has a
               terrible nightmare and decides to travel to the event by car,
               together with his daughter-in-law Marianne. During the trip,

       23 G. Deleuze, The Time-Image: 101.
       24 While the initial credits are running, we see voices that we can unmistakably associate to
       a film set: “Quiet all! Rolling! Take! Camera… and begin!”.

GIUSEPPE PREVITALI                              46                                         AN-ICON
               Isak will experience a whole set of daydreams, hallucina-
               tions and visions which will shed a new light on his former
               way of life. At the end of the day, after the celebration of
               his career, something will be changed in him, and he will
               start to approach life with more joy and respect for those
               around him.
                              Wild Strawberries is a movie that reflects on
               memory and on the possible link between various tempo-
               ralities and forms of perception; thus, the fact that it has
               almost no flashbacks is even more striking.25 None of the
               sequences in which Isak experiences some altered form of
               consciousness can be considered flashbacks, since Isak
               physically takes part in them with his old man’s body “al-
               most as if he was observing the world to finally understand
               it”. 26 This is true for the oneiric scene that opens the film
               but also for the quintessential sequence in which Isak –
               taking a break from the trip near the house where he used
               to spend the summer during his youth – has a strange and
               highly interesting experience. We see him sitting under a
               tree, watching in close-up the old and now abandoned
               house, while we hear his thoughts in voiceover:

Perhaps I got a little sentimental [...]. I don’t know how it happened,
but the day’s clear reality dissolved into the even clearer images
of memory, which appeared before my eyes with the strength of
a true stream of events.27
                            Then we see him in counter-shot and, through
               a crossfade, we see the old house regaining its former ap-
               pearance. With a subsequent series of rapid crossfades we
               take part in what at first sight may be considered a flashback.
               Here, we see his beloved cousin Sara picking strawberries
               for her uncle. However, we immediately understand that
               what we are experiencing is not a flashback, for at least two
               different reasons. First of all, Isak takes part in this particular
       25 The only real flashback in the film is in fact not experienced by Isak Borg but by his
       daughter-in-law, who confesses to the old professor an argument that she had with her
       husband about the child she is expecting.
       26 P. Baldelli, Cinema dell’ambiguità. Bergman e Antonioni (Rome: Samonà e Savelli, 1969): 95.
       27 Emphasis added.

GIUSEPPE PREVITALI                              47                                         AN-ICON
              “presentification” of the past with his elderly body and is
               able to move in this hallucinatory experience with a certain
               degree of freedom; secondly, the events that Isak is seeing
               are not his memories, because it is immediately clear that
               (as a young man) he never saw what he is experiencing
               now (Sara and Sigfrid flirting).




                                                      Fig. 2. Ingmar Bergman, Wild Strawberries, 1957

                            Albano rightly argued that we cannot concep-
               tualize this important sequence in terms of a flashback:

We may speak of rêverie éveillée, of daydream or — in German
— of Tagtraum, of conscious fantasy. A reverie that shares with a
dream [...] the sense of living [...] what is being dreamt.28
                           Isak knows very well that he is experiencing
               an impossible past, because he addresses his young and
               beautiful cousin in an unmistakable way: “Sara, it’s your
               cousin Isak. Well, I’ve become quite old, of course, so I
               don’t look the same. But you, you haven’t changed at all”.


       28 L. Albano, Lo schermo dei sogni. Chiavi psicoanalitiche del cinema: 76. On this point,
       see also: R. Campari, Film della memoria. Mondi perduti, ricordati e sognati (Venice: Marsilio,
       2005):16, 22-28.

GIUSEPPE PREVITALI                               48                                          AN-ICON
                            In this passage, we are confronted with a con-
               figuration of temporalities that is far more complex of those
               addressed above: it is a sort of double temporality because
               the present of the old Isak overlaps with a past that is –
               moreover – nonfactual, but rather seeped in the percep-
               tions, regrets and hopes of the young Isak. This conflictual
               combination of temporalities seems to resonate perfectly
               with a crucial passage by Metz:

Memory is in effect the only vision [...] that posits its object as
simultaneously real and imaginary, that is, real in the past and
imaginary in the present.29
                            What Isak sees really happened, but the way
               in which he experiences it is hallucinatory and gives the
               spectator no reassurance about the fact that it happened
               in that way. It is worth noticing here that Deleuze actually
               theorized this kind of situation, even without referring to
               Bergman: “the present is the actual image and its contem-
               poraneous past is the virtual image, the image in a mirror”.30
                            Finally, it seems important to notice that, de-
               spite his being immersed in an altered perception in which
               he can more or less freely move, Isak has no possibility of
               interacting with it. He “stands before the theatre of his life
               as a spectator-voyeur, terribly attracted, morbidly intrigued,
               but never seen, in complete isolation”.31 Both the dialogue
               between Isak and Sara and the subsequent scene in which
               he hears her confessions after the family lunch are highly
               instructive in this regard. It is symptomatic, in this respect,
               that this long sequence ends precisely when Sara moves
               to the garden to meet with the Isak of the past. The percep-
               tion of the old Isak grants him the possibility to experience
               a time that he never lived and probably only imagined but

       29 C. Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film (New York: Columbia University
       Press, 2016): 96 (emphasis added).
       30 G. Deleuze, The Time-Image: 79 (emphasis added). It is worth noticing that the situation
       that Deleuze imagines (the simultaneous presence of past and present within a mirror image)
       is explicitly visualized in Wild Strawberries, during a subsequent passage in which the old Isak
       sees himself reflected in a mirror held by a young Sara.
       31 L. Albano, “Il posto delle fragole”, in A. Costa ed., Ingmar Bergman (Venice: Marsilio,
       2009): 77.

GIUSEPPE PREVITALI                               49                                           AN-ICON
              he is at the same time confronted with an insurmountable
              limit: he is precluded from every contact and any chance
              of interaction with this time that is not his own. Only in his
              present will he be given the chance to undo his mistakes,
              thanks to the apparition of a sort of double of the beloved
              Sara. The specific way in which Bergman approaches the
              representation of altered mental states, working on the
              dialectic between absence and presence, nostalgia and
              desire, seems to have more than one similarity with the
              contemporary form of immersivity promoted by various
              technological desire. In this sense, a wider archaeological
              account of the issue of virtuality should be developed, in
              order to establish a more complex theoretical framework
              to address this kind of images.




GIUSEPPE PREVITALI                   50                             AN-ICON
AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON.
The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan.



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