This article examines Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (Smultronstället, 1957) in light of Martin Heidegger’s thought, especially in Being and Time and What Is Metaphysics? It argues that Eberhard Isak Borg’s journey cannot be reduced to the psychological drama of an elderly man confronted with memory; rather, it cinematically stages the passage from an existence pervaded by inauthenticity (Uneigentlichkeit) to a possible appropriation of finitude. The first dream, in which the clock without hands, the empty street, the funeral carriage, and the encounter with his own corpse appear, is interpreted as an experience of anxiety, the nihilation of the familiar world, and an opening onto being-toward-death. The article then analyzes how this opening unfolds through the journey, acts of remembrance, the dream trial, the call of conscience, and Isak’s final gestures, understood as moments of an ontological crossing in which death, far from signifying mere annihilation, can restore density to the possibilities of existence and reopen the bond with others.
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Luan Alves dos Santos Ribeiro (2026) studied this question.
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