Screen Memories: A Video Essay on Smultronstället / Wild Strawberries

Abstract

Screen Memories is a short split-screen video about Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film Smultronstället / Wild Strawberries and its connections with the Freudian concept of ‘screen memories’ that began as a piece of free-associational audiovisual exploration. Rather than an explicit work of scholarly exposition, explication or argumentation, it is an instance of creative practice as a mode of enquiry: a concise compilation made to perform or frame a new audiovisual encounter—in this case turning on a technique of gentle defamiliarisation (Ostranenie)—in order to engender new material thinking and feeling. The video is accompanied by a detailed written exegesis and contextualisation that aim to expand on its central topic, to make more manifest its audiovisual methodology, and to situate it as practice-led research, that is, as a work attempting to produce new knowledge, both through its particular form and through the reflections generated by this.