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A Film Trilogy by Ingmar Bergman - Criterion Collection (Through a Glass Darkly/Winter Light/The Silence)
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| Part No: | B0000A02TX |
| Manufacturer: | Home Vision Entertainment |
| MFG Part: | PMIDBER130D |
| Customer Rating: | 5.0 / 5.0 |
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| A Film Trilogy by Ingmar Bergman | 2008-11-09 | 5 / 5 |
| In Green Eyes, when asked to comment on fellow filmmakers, Marguerite Duras extolled Bresson and Tati while dismissing Bergman as the equivalent of hot air. Duras, who supposedly only wrote two of her novels in a state of sobriety, was being, along with some other critics, unfair, needlessly harsh. Since when is it hot air to engage in ideas? Sure, once in a while the ideas, the philosophy, is right there almost as a character in its own right or an overly obvious symbol. But if it makes you think, if the characters are still spot-on, what's the criticism? I enjoy Ingmar Bergman the same way I do reading the novels of Iris Murdoch. In novels like The Book and the Brotherhood or The Good Apprentice, there are so many things that just make you stop and think. Admittedly, I never want Murdoch novels to end, that's how intellectually engaging I find them. Sometimes Bergman can be so bleak that there is a sigh of relief when the film is over. But no matter; it is the power of Bergman that the films stay with you days, weeks, months later.
Religion, the idea of God, faith or its absence...all things central to this loose trilogy of films, "Winter Light" being the most satisfying for me. In it, a pastor, Tomas, is suffering a moral crisis; he doubts the existence of God, a concept he supposedly has given up his life to. The schoolmarm who is in love with him seeks to give up her own life in slavish service to this pastor, he becoming her own imperfect god. Meanwhile, a young parishioner, looking at the world's crises, doesn't see God anywhere and is prodded by his pregnant wife to seek counsel from the privately troubled Tomas. The arguably facile "God is love," while seemingly embraced in "Through a Glass Darkly," is spoken of witheringly by a character towards the end of "Winter Light."
There seems to be a temporary moral reconciliation of sorts in "Darkly," though it takes a lot to get there. An author mines his daughter's slow descent into insanity for his latest novel, a fact treated with some understandable horror by the family and with some shame by the father himself.
Absence writ large seems to drown the two sisters in the suffocating and surreal "The Silence." Her love of language, books, the writing life, doesn't make up for the absence of love in brittle, frustrated Ester's life. Anna's beauty and carnal self-possession doesn't make up for the absence of intimacy in her life. Both women suffocate under the weight of the choices they've made, or to paraphrase Ester, the attitudes they've adopted.
Each film has a major turning point scene that I am not going to spoil here. With Sven Nykvist's able eye, the films are also beautiful to look at. The isolation of an island in one, the sound of gulls screeching in the eerie morning light. The driving wind and water's dull roar while a character stands watch, alone with his thoughts, in another. In yet another, the manic rush of fresh air and the spray of rain through a speeding train's open window cooling an overheated body.
The performances are terrific, especially Gunner Bjornstrand as the conflicted pastor Tomas in "Winter Light." In that same film, Ingrid Thulin is fabulous as the sickly, sticky, obsessive Marta. A powerful moment is Tomas reading a rather strong letter she has written. Bergman has the camera just focus on Marta staring straight at us, reciting her letter for five minutes, reciting it as if she was composing it right then and there. It is a powerful scene that keeps you transfixed to the screen just as is Tomas's later face-to-face verbal onslaught in response. In "Through a Glass Darkly," Harriet Andersson's Karin, in and out of madness, is likewise jarring. Sometimes if you are overly familiar with a film, you turn back to it and decide to focus completely on a particularly skillful performance. Andersson's is worthy of such attention. In the Bergman films I have seen in which she has been featured, Gunnel Lindblom's ripe, hothouse performance in "The Silence" is arguably her best.
Vilgot Sjoman's documentary is included in this box set as are short interesting video essays on each film by Bergman scholar Peter Cowie. |
| WHEN FAITH IS LOST | 2008-10-13 | 4 / 5 |
| Although presented as a trilogy, these stark, somber chamber pieces tell distinct stories. But they are tied together by an overlapping theme: God's silence.
Through a Glass Darkly's religious theme is already declared in its title. It is also apparent in the symbolic representation of crosses and crucifixion throughout the movie. The story revolves around a young woman's psychological disintegration. Her schizophrenia, inherited from her mother, is exacerbated by her distant, suicidal father, a novelist who coldly uses her illness as fodder for his fiction; and by a well-meaning but doting husband whom she no longer loves. After Karin seduces her younger brother, she goes mad. In a secret room where voices come out of the wall, she awaits the arrival of God. But when He reveals Himself, God turns out to be a monstrous spider.
In Winter Light, the pastor of a rural congregation loses his faith. The movie opens during a service where everybody is merely going through the motions. Worship is depicted as a miserable affair, a meaningless ritual nobody believes in anymore, but which still gets observed. When one member of the congregation goes to the pastor for guidance, it's the pastor who ends up spilling his insecurities and confessing his lost faith: "Whenever I confronted God with the reality I saw, he became ugly, turned hideous--a spider-god, an odious monster...If God doesn't exist, what does it matter then? Life can be explained. What a relief...Man's cruelty to man, his haunting fears and loneliness, it all becomes clear." After their meeting, the man commits suicide. The movie explores the aftermath.
Although I find the first two films intellectually stimulating and visually stunning, I must confess they leave me cold emotionally, they're so bare and austere. These are the first movies Bergman made with cinematographer Sven Nykvist, with whom he would work for the next two decades. Nykvist helped define what we today think of as the Bergman style, which includes revealing close-ups of the actors and a general aesthetic simplicity where everything, even inanimate objects, seem stark naked.
My favorite film in the trilogy is The Silence. In the first two films, the characters either still believe in God or struggle with their faith, but the third depicts a world devoid of belief. The movie revolves around the rivalry between two sisters. Ester is frigid, sexless, intellectual, bookish; her younger sister Anna is maternal, carnal, sexual. Their relationship reflects the conflict between intellect and flesh. The sisters are on their way home after a trip abroad. But because of the older sister's rapidly declining health, they are forced to stop in a strange city. The younger sister has a child in tow, and much of what happens is seen from his perspective (the child is played by the same boy who will later appear at the beginning of Persona).
Consider the following dialogue between mother and child. Mother: "What are you doing?" Child: "I'm just looking at your feet." Mother: "What for?" Child: "They walk around...all by themselves." This exchange seems strange and enigmatic, but reflects a world where there is no longer a higher power guiding things, no hidden agency directing our steps. People are on their own. Feet move by themselves.
The town they stop in is a brutish, nasty place in some undefined country. The streets outside the hotel are populated almost entirely by men milling around aimlessly (there seems to be a severe economic depression). The movement of tanks and the sound of jets flying overhead threaten war. The large, ornate, nearly empty hotel's only occupants are a mysterious old porter (whose intentions toward the child seem less than honorable) and a troupe of Spanish dwarves. Anticipating Bergman's Cries and Whispers, the death of the chain-smoking, consumptive, alcoholic Ester is portrayed in agonizing detail. The Silence is about sickness and death, and offers very little comfort. The silence referred to in the title is God's. But silence is also an important element in the movie, which has little dialogue. At times, it almost seems like a silent film.
When it was released in 1963, The Silence was groundbreaking in several respects. Anticipating Persona, what Bergman and Nykvist do with the camera is nothing short of genius. Pausing the movie at any point results in stunning black-and-white photography. It was also groundbreaking for its cavalier attitude toward nudity, its depiction of female masturbation, and anonymous sex. The movie, although brilliant, is pretty strong stuff, some of it quite harsh and hard to watch.
All three pictures are dubbed into English. I usually hate dubbing, but Criterion did an excellent job. You can also watch them in Swedish with optional English subtitles.
The last disc in the set is Ingmar Bergman Makes a Movie, a documentary about the making of Winter Light. Filmmakers might find it instructive, but most viewers will think it tedious. We're shown take after take, and Bergman's laborious attention to detail makes for a tiresome process. |
| The human condition: shadows & light, despair & hope | 2008-07-07 | 5 / 5 |
| A God steps down from the mountain: "Through a Glass Darkly"
Although Bergman considers "Through a Glass Darkly" to be a failure (and, to a certain extent, I agree), it was an important step (he says) in liberating himself from the gloomy Lutheran theology of his childhood. Ostensibly, the story is about the relapse of Karin (Harriet Andersson) into mental illness--a relapse, one suspects, which is incurable. Karin is convinced that a god lives on the other side of a strangely papered wall (in fact, Bergman's original title for the film was "The Wallpaper"). It's a god of darkness and sensuality (at one point, Karin orgasms in solitude with her god; at another, she fancies that the god has entered her younger brother Musin [Lars Passgard] and she seduces him), but ultimately it's a god that reveals itself as a horrible, devouring spider.
Bergman's point seems to be that the gods which attract us ultimately reveal themselves to be monstrous destroyers--or, perhaps, that humanity can't survive in the presence of the absolute it so craves. While Karin's godlust drives her into madness, her novelist father (Gunnar Bjornstrand) discovers toward the film's end that the only real god is love, the only safeguard against madness is companionship, and the only chance of fulfillment in this life is learning to love and be loved.
The ending, as Bergman himself notes, is overly didactic (although Musin's "Papa spoke to me!", the final line in the film, gestures at the ending of the later and better "The Silence"). Moreover, as Bergson notes, the father character never quite seems authentic, and even a fine actor like Bjornstrand can't breathe life into him. But flawed as the film is, it's still a thoughtful (and perhaps Jungian-inspired?) exploration of the human yearning for gods and what happens when the gods honor our yearning and step down from their mountains. And Harriet Andersson's performance throughout is absolutely breathtaking.
When God goes silent--what then?: "Winter Light"
At one point in this best of all Bergman films, the despairing pastor Tomas (Gunnar Bjornstrand) realizes that life would be comprehensible if there is no God. All the paradoxes and dilemmas of faith would vanish, and evil, revealed to be meaningless and nonpurposeful, would at least no longer be mysterious. This realization immediately leads into Tomas' final loss of the last shreds of his faith. The silence of God which has been tormenting him is at least seen to be a necessary silence, and that realization gives him a momentary sense of liberation.
But it also leads to a troubling existential quandary: when God goes silent, once and for all, how does one lead one's life? How can broken, lonely, and frightened people make meaningful contact with one another? How can long-held habits of relying on what Tomas comes to call an "echo God"--an imagined deity who tells you exactly what you want to hear--be broken? How does one manage not, as Marta says, to "hate yourself to death"?
Bergman's "Winter Light" is an exploration of these questions (and surely is as autobiographical as it is philosophical). There are no definitive answers here. A life liberated by God's silence is still a life full of ambiguity and suffering, disappointment and unfulfillment. The silence of God--of ultimate meaning and purposefulness to the universe--is still a Christ-like passion many of us must endure in our own Gethsemanes. But the end of "Winter Light," with Tomas acknowledging the hear-and-now presence of Marta, offers some hope, filtered even as it is through the winter light of a new and godless world.
The Long Loneliness: "The Silence"
I can think of no better portrait of alienation and loneliness than Bergman's "The Silence," which I think is one of his three best films. Everything about the film suggests silence, emptiness, aloneness: the huge, baroque, but strangely empty hotel; the silent lonely crowd that fills the streets; the ominous preparations for war; the inability of Anna and Ester to speak the language of the country in which they're stranded; the loveless, desperate coupling of Anna and the waiter she picks up; the frigid, despairing masturbation of Ester; the hotel porter's nostalgic but sad fondness for photographs of his past.
The essential thing is that the sisters Anna and Ester, for all their estrangement from one another, really are kindred. Bergman seems to be suggesting that they represent two irreducible aspects of personality, sensuality and intellect, and that individuals suffer from an inner sense of fragmentation if the two are unreconciled. (In this regard, the message of "The Silence" is not unlike Hermann Hesse's in Narcissus and Goldmund.) So the exterior loneliness in his film is mirrored by the interior loneliness personified by the sisters' feud.
At the end of the film, the silence is broken by Ester's final note to her nephew, Johan, a "translation of words in a foreign language." Words are what create communities. They bind humans together. As such, the end of the film offers a possibility that the long loneliness can be ameliorated by a human invention. In the last analysis, that's all there.
The acting in "The Silence" is superb, from beginning to end. Ingrid Thulin's Ester is frozen, emotionally blocked, but yearning for connection. Gunnel Lindblom's Anna is a sullen carnality that occasionally breaks out in despairing loneliness. Jorgen Lindstrom's Johan is inquisitive, innocently absorbing the world around him. And Hakan Jahnberg's porter, while silent for most of the film, masterfully and poignantly expresses all he needs to in his gestures and face.
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| INGMAR BERGMAN, OPUS 23, 24 AND 25 | 2008-06-15 | 5 / 5 |
| ***** 1961-1963. A box set that should already be in your library. The movies presented are :
***** 1961. THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY. Written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. A prize in Berlin and Academy award in the Best Foreign Language Film category. A young woman, her husband, her brother and her father pass their vacation on a Swedish island. Karin is schizophrenic and, soon, suffers from hallucinations. This film marks a radical change in Bergman's cinematic language. One year only separates THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY from The Devil's Eye while the esthetics of these two motion pictures changes so essentially and dramatically thanks to a new photography director (Sven Nykvist), shootings on location (Farö island) and fewer characters on screen. Bach's cello suite, Harriet Andersson's performance and God's presence as a spider will shook you for life. Masterpiece.
**** 1962. WINTER LIGHT. Written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. Three hours of a pastor's life in the Swedish countryside. Gunnar Björnstrand doesn't manage to find the right words to prevent Max von Sydow's suicide. Note also the 6 minutes long close-up of Ingrid Thulin reading the letter she sent to Gunnar Björnstrand, a scene that has nothing to envy to the then recent innovations of the French New Wave. WINTER LIGHT is an austere and ascetic film worthy to stay in your library. Highly recommended.
***** 1963. THE SILENCE. Written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. Three Swedish Academy awards (Best Film, Best Director and Best Actress). Two sisters argue in an hotel room while Johan, a 10 years old kid, is discovering the corridors and the strange guests of the hotel. The train compartment, the hotel room and the town, three claustrophobic places that Ester and Anna can't leave while Johan seems to be the only one able to open doors and communicate. THE SILENCE is a huge film which, like some books, can be enjoyed again and again. In my opinion, one of the most beautiful films ever made and one of my most intense experiences in a theatre, ever. Masterpiece.
The fourth DVD presents an indispensable documentary about Ingmar Bergman shot by the Swedish director Vilgot Sjöman. Ingmar Bergman is interviewed while he is writing WINTER LIGHT, then during the shooting of the movie, in the editing room and finally after the premiere of WINTER LIGHT in Stockholm. A documentary which will reconcile you with television. |
| Winter Light--Bergman's Masterpiece | 2008-04-15 | 5 / 5 |
| | Winter Light is Bergman's masterpiece, his most concentrated chamber cinema--bleak and snowy Sunday afternoon in a small parish; a fisherman asks "Why must we live?" in response to a world of poverty, war, and possible nuclear holocaust and commits suicide; a tormented priest in crisis cannot save him and questions his own isolation from others and inability to love, his lack of faith due to the abyss of "God's silence". |
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