The carriage in Borg’s dream comes from the carriage of Bergman’s original fascination with cinema (he first saw Sjöström’s film The Phantom Carriage when he was 15 years old and he would rewatch it every year for the rest of his life). It is a cheeky Magritte-like surrealism that anthropomorphises time-the clock has no hands but it has eyes. But, a pair of eyes hangs from a clock without hands. Without anyone around, Borg moves in isolated anonymity.

Bergman frames his dreamer against buildings, under an alcove, a distant figure consumed by the coldness of the vacant city facades. Borg wanders a deserted city street, with the buildings like preserved ruins, windows and doors boarded up. This first nightmare sequence balances a classicism rooted in silent Swedish cinema and an emerging European arthouse ethos, one that Bergman would come to define to a large/great/huge extent.

He’s having a nightmare, “a weird and very unpleasant dream.”

A spotlight, slightly too theatrical, illuminates his face. In Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film Wild Strawberries, the ailing professor Isak Borg (played by pioneering Swedish actor, director, and screenwriter Victor Sjöström-an early hero of Bergman’s and no doubt someone with whom Bergman identified) lies down to go to bed. “Recently, I’ve had the weirdest dreams as if I must tell myself something I won’t listen to when I am awake, ” – Wild Strawberries (1957)

Wild strawberries 1957