The Ingmar Bergman Trilogy (Through a Glass Darkly / Winter Light / The Silence) (The Criterion Collection)
by Ingmar Bergman
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Actor: Birger Malmsten, Gunnar Björnstrand, Gunnel Lindblom, Harriet Andersson, Ingrid ThulinDirector: Ingmar Bergman
Brand: BJORNSTRAND,GUNNAR
Cinematographer: Sven Nykvist
Writer: Ingmar Bergman
Editor: Ulla Ryghe
Producer: Allan Ekelund
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Unknown; English (Subtitled); Swedish (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Black & White, Box set, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 410 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2003-08-19
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Home Vision Entertainment
DVD Reviews of The Ingmar Bergman Trilogy (Through a Glass Darkly / Winter Light / The Silence) (The Criterion Collection)
DVD Review: The Best of Bergman
Summary: 5 Stars
Through a Glass Darkly
The first theme of the film is the isolation of the individual in the world, and the individual's communion with his fellow human beings. The second theme, resulting no doubt from the strict Lutheran upbringing of Bergman that caused him so much pain and anguish, is the Christian notion, and also a modern idea, that only a broken spirit can find a new life. According to this thought, each of the characters in the film must first go to their ruin before being "reborn." In the cases of David and Minus, they found their salvations through the concept of "God is Love," which Bergman will debunk in his next film. Nothing is said about Martin, and Karin by choosing, in spite of herself, the spider-God, is obviously not redeemed.
All four characters in the film are alone within themselves, insulated from the outside world. David, the father, has taken refuge and isolated himself through his writing, to the exclusion of his now-deceased wife and then his children. He could not be more explicit than when he confesses to Karin: "One draws a magic circle around oneself ... Every time life smashes the circle ... one draws a new circle, builds up new barriers." Tragically, he is well aware of his isolation and suffers immensely from it, as Bergman shows us symbolically, through a long shot. In this shot, David, who has gone his room under the pretence of getting his pipe tobacco, is seen his arms extended, staring into space, as a Christ-like figure, reaching out into the empty air.
Martin's communication with his wife is mannered and superficial. He is locked up in his role as a "good" husband. Although he loves Karin, he is too busy with his work and his everyday life to be able to understand, and therefore help, his sick wife. He only goes through the motions of caring for Karin, like David's "caring" for his children when he brings them ill-chosen gifts.
Karin lives equally between her two worlds. The first world, the world of her schizophrenia where she hears voices, is of course totally incomprehensible to others. This world, at odds with her second world, the world of realities, results in her being also misunderstood. Out of desperation, she will eventually choose her schizophrenic world. Karin is the only one of the four characters looking for God. Is it only because she is weak and needs help? If this is so, this selfish relationship with God only serves to save and heal herself. This theme will be explored in Winter Light, Bergman's next film.
Minus also lives in his own world, tormented by his awakening sexuality, which leads to his ambiguous attraction to his sister, the only female with whom he has any form of intimacy. He has no male guidance, as his father has abandoned him. He cannot handle the difficult transition from puberty to adulthood and has locked himself out to the realties of the outside world. His mixed-up feelings, aided by his sister's mental problems, lead him to commit incest.
Regardless, the film shows that in some instances hope is still possible, and these barriers can be broken down. We see David undergoing a transformation following his attempted suicide, opening up to his children and to Martin with love. By the end of the film, as he encourages Minus to face the future, he offers his son a real gift, his simple belief that "God is love, and love is God." Minus has confronted his fear of love, but he is too ashamed of his "sin" to comprehend his action's power of redemption, until his father explains it to him. David asserts that every sort of love proves God's presence: "The highest and the lowest, the most absurd and the most sublime. All kinds of love ... Suddenly the emptiness turns into abundance, and despair into life. It's like a reprieve, Minus, from sentence of death." This is an implicitly Christian message. When Minus finally says, "Papa spoke to me," it's like an absolution from the lost father he has regained, along with his belief in God.
I believe it would be a mistake to assume that Through a Glass Darkly is Karin's film. Only Karin's slide into madness is central to the film, as it forces her father, brother and husband to confront themselves: their experiences, not her illness, shape the film. And of the four characters, Minus is the pivotal figure of the film: it is his consciousness that organizes the film. His struggle, with the coming of adulthood and his desire to create a bond with his father, is the major story of the film.
Winter Light
Winter Light is the most unequivocally religious of all Bergman's films. It deals with the God-Man relationship, but also with human relationships in terms of the divine. The basic theme of the film is the failure of everything to communicate with everything else: God with humans, and humans with humans. It is what Tomas describes as "God's silence." From the beginning, Bergman had been somewhat dissatisfied with the "security-God" who popped up at the end of his previous film, Through a Glass Darkly, and felt the need to correct it. In the film that followed, he intended to repudiate David's "God is Love" as he answers his son Minus's fear and uncertainty. The "love" in "God is Love," implies communication, and since communication between God and Man does not exist, that statement cannot be true.
The first fifteen minutes of the film, a religious service officiated by Tomas, underscore the human disconnection, through the image of eight people widely scattered throughout the church pews. Tomas's first words, "Our Lord Jesus Christ in the night when he was betrayed," points toward what he feels is his own betrayal by Life. Following the communion at the altar, the communicants' demeanors, except for Frovik's, leaves no doubt as to the utter failure of the liturgical act to communicate with the tiny, detached congregation.
Following the service, Tomas meets his first challenge in the person of Jonas. Tomas is totally unable to connect with Jonas's torment, and therefore to be of any solace to him. He hopes for a second chance when Jonas returns to meet him face to face, but again fails miserably at soothing Jonas's anguish. It is as if Tomas is trying to heal himself, rather than Jonas. Tomas talks about his disintegrating faith. The god of his beliefs is "an improbable and private image of a fatherly god. Picture my prayers to an echo-God." When Tomas held up his God to the lens of reality, his God "turned into something ugly and revolting. A spider-God." Tomas concludes that God does not exist: "There is no Creator." Tomas is stunned by his own revelation and loss. The room is suddenly filled with sunlight, underscoring this revelation. He utters Christ's last words on the cross, "God, why have you forsaken me?" He rushes out into the chancel, falls to the floor in a paroxysm of coughing, mumbling, "Now, I am free...free at last." His body is sick and so is his soul, as he now finds himself alone. However, he soon reverts to his echo-God upon hearing the bad news from the old lady. It is also Bergman's conclusion, according to which one must do one's duty, even if one feels it meaningless.
Tomas's encounter with death by the river rapids only reinforces his feelings of emptiness. The roaring of the river covering the speech and overwhelming the human presence, shows Nature's indifference to Man. This directly contradicts Tomas's pronouncements to Jonas that when God is taken out of the human consciousness, "life becomes something understandable" and death just" a dissolution of body and soul."
Tomas's second challenge comes in the form of Marta's letter. Tomas's relationship with Marta is also a failure. Tomas had married a woman who, like his mother, protected him from everything evil and ugly in the world. After she died, Tomas took up with Marta, who, probably not coincidently, physically resembles his deceased wife. When Tomas, alone in the vestry, takes out pictures of his dead wife, we see that he holds pictures of Ingrid Thulin, and they are stamped "rakopia" (i.e. "proofs," or literally "raw copy"). However, Marta does not behave as the protection-wife, and his obsession with his memory of his dead wife prevents him from connecting, or opening himself to Marta's love for him. Tomas reads Marta's letter, but he still has not understood her. She is simply smothering him with her demands, as he so "eloquently" will tell her later at the schoolhouse.
Marta herself is also incapable of real communication with Tomas. She resorts to writing a letter to him, trying to explain herself, her feelings and her love for him, rather than speak to him directly. In her letter, she displays a self-assurance and aggressiveness that she is unable to project in Tomas's physical presence. Marta is a self-declared atheist. She tells Tomas unequivocally, "God has not spoken because God does not exist." But it would seem that she has a connection to God in spite of herself. Having been born and raised in a joy-filled non-Christian home, she is perplexed by Tomas's neurotic, narcissistic relationship with God, and by his "indifference to the gospels and Jesus Christ," which is the main part of the Christian religion that she understands (for viewers to get this point, Bergman has Marta wearing stigmata for a while). She ends her letter with, "I love you and I live for you. Take me and use me...I have only one wish: to live for somebody," which is of course the true Christian creed.
Frovik, on the other hand, has no need for God to talk to him. He knows through his faith that God is present. Frovik is able to connect with love to others, as he shows in his exposition of the Passion of Christ. He understands that Christ's suffering was not so much physical, as it was psychological. Christ's mental agony was being misunderstood by his disciples, and later on denied by them. "Yet this was not the worst. When Jesus...cried out, 'God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' He thought his heavenly father had abandoned him...in the moment before he died...Surely that must have been his greatest hardship? I mean God's silence." This is the same "God's silence" that Jonas has been experiencing.
Through Blom's sarcastic remarks at the end of the film as he quotes Tomas's leitmotif, "God is love and love is God. Love proves the existence of God," Bergman underscores precisely which certainty, the one achieved in Through a Glass Darkly, he wanted to expose as false in Winter Light: the identification of love with God.
The Silence
Ingmar Bergman's The Silence is arguably the most abstract and nihilistic film of the trilogy. The silence in this film goes beyond God's silence of Winter Light: it is now absolute silence, including the complete cessation of communication between human beings. The atmosphere is claustrophobic and suffocating. The film has for its setting Timoka, a strange city, in a strange land on the verge of a war. War is by definition the end result of total, absolute breakdown in communication. The war setting also symbolizes the feelings of antagonism, separation, and fear which engulf the two sisters. The language of this country is totally incomprehensible to the three travelers, even to Ester who is by profession an interpreter familiar with linguistics. Although it is reported that Bergman fell on the word "Timoka" ("pertaining to the executioner" in the Estonian language) by accident, the other identifiable foreign word in the film, "kasi" (hand), is Estonian, a Finno-Ugric language. Estonian is not related to the Indo-European family of languages, but has direct links to Sanskrit. As such, Bergman probably could not have found a more remote language from Swedish.
The communication breakdown in the film is universal. The three travelers can scarcely communicate their basic needs to the porter, and they must resort to hand gestures, grunts, etc, to express themselves. Attempts at communication between the two sisters are merely lacerating verbal jousts. The mother and son are worlds apart. Johan is repeatedly left to himself, as his mother goes about her business of arguing with her sister or fornicating with her lover. Anna and her lover cannot communicate except in a physical way, which Anna finds convenient. "How nice it is we don't understand each other."
The characters of the sisters could not be more dissimilar. They are the opposing elements of a single psyche. Anna is sensual and instinctive. Ester is an intellectual, afraid of her instincts, and pathologically driven by a need to control. She loves her sister, and feels responsible for her, yet needs to control her, as their father once controlled her [Ester] with his love. But Ester is also unable to express this love, which can be misconstrued at time as incestuous, to Anna. Anna loves Ester, but is unable to effectively express her feelings to her. She is overwhelmed by Ester's need to control and restrain her. Regarding Anna's attitude toward her son, she is at once caring and rejecting. Obviously, these mixed signals from his mother are both disturbing and overwhelming to Johan. She is the closest human being in his life and she is unable to communicate unambiguously her feelings to him. Clinging desperately to his mother, he is rejected and forced into the "real" strange and bewildering adult world. The only incident where Johan feels somewhat unthreatened is when he is accepted in the company of the dwarfs. The dwarfs are adults, but they are Johan's size, so he feels at ease with them as he would with children of his own age. Otherwise, Johan is an outside observer of the world around him.
The old floor porter is also struggling to communicate with his guests. He shows his genuine concern for Ester's welfare, but he is still powerless in establishing a real communication. With Johan he also fails, because of the language barrier, because of the age gap, and maybe because his friendliness is instinctively misunderstood by Johan (and I am sure by many viewers).
There is a brief moment of communion between the protagonists provided by few bars of one of the Goldberg Variations (the 25th). They are heard on Ester's radio and result in an instant communication between Ester and the old porter, but also with every one else present, as we see through the large doorway a "Pieta:" Johan is on Anna's lap being caressed and kissed. The old man pronounces the name of the composer "Johan Sebastian Bach," with a stress on the name "Johan," implying everyone's connection with and through the young boy.
God has totally disappeared from the scene. After a prolonged, suffocating attack, Ester implores God to allow her to die in her own homeland. But God is silent and she is left to die alone and abandoned in a strange land.
Although a rather depressing film, The Silence nevertheless ends on a hopeful note: Ester and Johan have been able to communicate with each other. Before leaving, Johan hugs his aunt, in the only display of love in the film, and Ester is able to translate few words from the strange language of Timoka into Swedish, which she passes on to Johan.
Notwithstanding his other masterpieces, these three films, Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence, represents the best that Ingmar Bergman has ever produced.
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Description of The Ingmar Bergman Trilogy (Through a Glass Darkly / Winter Light / The Silence) (The Criterion Collection)
At the beginning of the 1960s, renowned film director Ingmar Bergman began work on what were to become some of his most powerful and representative works?the Trilogy. Already a figure of tremendous international acclaim for such masterworks as The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, and The Virgin Spring, Bergman turned his back on the abundant symbolism and exotic imagery of his ?50s work to focus on a series of impacted, emotionally explosive chamber dramas examining faith and alienation in the modern age. Utilizing a new cameraman?the incomparable Sven Nykvist?Bergman unleashed Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence in rapid succession, exposing moviegoers worldwide to a new level of intellectual and emotional intensity. Each film employs minimal dialogue, eerily isolated settings, and searing performances from such Bergman regulars as Max von Sydow, Harriet Andersson, Gunnar Bjornstrand, Ingrid Thulin and Gunnel Lindblom in their evocation of a desperate world confronted with God?s desertion. Drawing on Bergman?s own severely religious upbringing and ensuing spiritual crisis, the films in the Trilogy are deeply personal, challenging, and enriching works that exhibit the filmmaker?s peerless formal mastery and fierce intelligence. The Criterion Collection is proud to present The Ingmar Bergman Trilogy: Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence.Between 1961 and 1963, Ingmar Bergman released a remarkable trilogy of so-called chamber dramas, each one concerned with the futility of sustaining faith in God, family, love, or much else. The series proved transitional for the internationally renowned Swedish filmmaker, securing his crucial collaboration with cinematographer Sven Nykvist (with whom Bergman would go on to make his many masterpieces--including Persona and Cries and Whispers--of the '60s, '70s, and early '80s), and underscoring a new preference for intimate, relationship-driven stories, austere settings, and haunting tones of emotional isolation and despair.
Through a Glass Darkly concerns a psychologically fragile woman, Karin (Harriet Andersson), who seeks recovery from a nervous breakdown while on a remote-island vacation with her family. Unfortunately, her father (Gunnar Björnstrand), a successful writer, regards her with clinical detachment, her husband (Max Von Sydow), a doctor, feels unavailing in the effort to treat her, and her brother (Lars Passgard) is wrapped up in his own quest for sexual fulfillment. Karin's descent into further loneliness and delusion exacerbates the heretofore unspoken alienation at the heart of this entire family, and drives the characters to brood over the existence of God (or, in Karin's case, imagine that God is the chilling spider hidden behind an attic door). Through a Glass Darkly is a heartbreaking, powerful work of art.
Winter Light reunites Björnstrand, this time playing a pastor suffering a crisis of faith while ministering to a shrinking congregation, and Von Sydow as a parishioner lost to acute anxiety over the possibility of a nuclear holocaust. Neither man can help or heal the other, or even inspire renewed confidence in practiced rituals and older, more certain views of the world. Set on a chilly, Sunday afternoon, Winter Light's heavy stillness, lack of music, preference for intense close-ups and distancing long shots, and barren setting all lead us inescapably into the core of a profound silence, an echo chamber in which love can't grow and religion rings hollow.
The Silence is the most abstract entry in the trilogy, a somewhat eerie story of two sisters, Esther (Ingrid Thulin) and Anna (Gunnel Lindblom), and the latter's son (Jörgen Lindström), all traveling by train to Sweden but forced to stay in a foreign country when Esther's chronic bronchial problems require her to rest. A stifling atmosphere, a desolate hotel, encounters with a troupe of carnival dwarves, Anna's anchoring illness, and an empty sexual encounter for Esther underscore the unnerving feeling that God has abandoned these characters to dubious salvation in their own connection. A highly memorable film. --Tom Keogh
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