Ingmar Bergman and
Winter Light
‘On the second day of shooting), I got stuck in a goddam great traffic jam. I sat there looking at the drivers in the other cars. And thought,: “You won’t come and see Winter Light, and you won’t come and see Winter Light and you won’t come and see...’
Ingmar Bergman
Winter Light
is a 1962 film directed by Ingmar Bergman. Somber and relentlessly serious, the movie is often characterized as the middle work in a film trilogy. The other pictures in the trilogy are Through a Glass Darkly (1961) and The Silence (1963). Film-goers and critics discern common themes in these pictures – broadly speaking they seem to be about God’s absence (or nonexistence); God’s silence in the face of human suffering and the apparent meaninglessness of a godless world that parallels people’s inability to communicate authentically – and this failure, in turn, causes love to curdle into possessiveness, misery, and hatred. Bergman, sometimes, endorsed the notion that these pictures comprised a loose unity or trilogy; on other occasions, he discounted that perspective and maintained that the movies were not closely related.
Bergman was the son of a prominent Stockholm clergyman, Pastor Erik Bergman. With the later Fanny and Alexander (1982), Winter Light is one of Bergman’s most personal films. In Fanny and Alexander, two artistically gifted siblings struggle with the dour influence of their conventional and repressive Lutheran family: the film posits the life of the artist as sexually liberated, joyful, and radiant with light – by contrast, the life of a Lutheran cleric and his family is dutiful, grim, and oppressive with shadow. In Winter Light, Bergman seems to imagine what his life would have been like had he followed his father into the clergy – it is surely no accident that Bergman, who wrote the script, the son of Pastor Erik Bergman, named the protagonist of his film, Tomas Eriksson (Eric’s son). This naming raises the question of whether the movie’s spiritually tormented father is modeled on Bergman’s own father or constitutes a self-portrait.
In Fanny and Alexander, the titular brother and sister rejoice when their strict disciplinarian of a father dies. But Alexander has a dream: he sees his dead father in his clerical collar standing before him in a shadowy place. The pastor says: “You think you have escaped from me. But, now, I will always be with you.”
With Michelangelo Antonioni,
Ingmar Bergman exemplifies the director of “European Art Films. The European Art Film, as argued by the late David Bordwell, constitutes a genre of its own, no less strictly defined than the musical comedy, the film noir thriller, or the Western. The characteristics of the European Art Film as a genre are long takes in which the camera lingers on an image, somber and weighty subject matter presented in a tone of high seriousness, plots that assume the absurdity of human existence, sexual candor both pictorially and verbally, formal devices that distance the viewer from the events and characters presented, landscapes and architectural settings that are predominant and determine the action, and, in general, a reversal (or inversion) of the standard film semantics espoused by Hollywood pictures. The genre of European art films (which may be made anywhere – for instance, Turkey or Hong Kong, India or Japan) largely defines itself in opposition to the norms of Hollywood movies. To the devotees of European art films, Hollywood pictures are gaudy but shallow; to the proponents of Hollywood pictures, the European art cinema is simply boring or the sake of being boring and pretentious. Winter Light is, perhaps, a paradigm specimen of the European art film genre: the film contains long takes, including a single shot of Ingrid Thulin reciting the content of a letter that lasts about 8 minutes without any cuts or edits; the film’s subject, in part, questions God’s existence and the fate of man in the post-nuclear age; distancing devices are foregrounded, particularly in the sequence in which Tomas visits the scene of Jonas’ suicide, next to roaring rapids in a stream swollen with melt-water – the sound track hisses and buzzes with the sound of the flowing water and the camerawork is conspicuously reticent, picturing the scene in a long shot and avoiding any close-ups; the wintry landscapes and austere churches provide a setting for the movie’s events – cold, snow and snowfall, and the ascetic empty interiors of the two small churches are objective correlatives to the angst in the film. Movies of this sort are still being made: Jim Jarmusch and Kelly Reichert in the United States make “European art films” (even an “European art film” Western in her picture Meek’s Cut Off) and European directors like Pedro Costas, Michael Haneke, and many others continue to produce movies in this tradition. Most of the movies that you can screen on the streaming service MUBI are exponents of this sort of filmmaking.
The most famous director of European art films was the Italian Michelangelo Antonioni. His movies La Notte and L’Eclisse, among many others are exemplary of the genre and define its parameters. Antonioni’s pictures, together with Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, and Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad are dissected in a very famous essay written by the critic Pauline Kael in 1963, “Come ‘Dressed-as-the-Sick-Soul’ of Europe parties. Kael mocked these pictures as tendentiously moralistic, hypocritical, and pretentious. She asserted that the directors of these movies were “contortionists and sleepwalkers.” Kael memorably opposed Hollywood popular movies as examples of the joi de vivre purged from the European art cinema. Indeed, in an image that will resonant with readers in our group, she argued that the appearance of one actress like Martha Raye (as she appears in Monsieur Verdoux) would knock the stuffing out of these movies, clear out the cobwebs, and insufflate them with vibrant fresh air. Pauline Kael (come as the sick soul of the party). Kael doesn’t condemn the movies of Bergman’s middle period (that is, when directed Winter Light); however, she was later to apply her 1963 critique of the art cinema to Bergman’s work in movies like Cries and Whispers and Autumn Sonata.
Ultimately, the two greatest exemplars of the European art cinema were Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni. So is it merely coincidence or some sort of eerie synchronicity that the two men died on the same day, July 30, 2007 – Bergman was 89; Antonioni was 94.
I blame Israel
for the current usage of “existential” to mean “mortal” as in “Israel is engaged in an existential struggle with Hamas” meaning that only one of the two combatants will survive the conflict. (Similarly, it is said that “Iran’s regime regards the war with the United States as existential.”) To me, this meaning of the word degrades the term’s previously merry connotations: a café on the Left Bank of the Seine in Paris, redolent with pipe smoke, Jean-Paul Sartre flirting with the girls while Simone de Beauvoir pursues her own sexual affairs an another table; a jolly riot in the street with red flags and Maoist slogans; the films of Truffaut and Godard. Appropriating the word to its current grim meaning, traduces the expression and seems to me to be an artifact of the last two decades.
Existentialism, of which Bergman’s films are an exponent presupposes that existence precedes essence, the latter term denoting a quality that is non-existent for all we know. You are what you do, as opposed to previous formulations relying upon ideas such as human nature to argue that people do (or act) because of the way they are. Existentialist thinkers posit a world that is absurd and meaningless. In the absence of meaning in nature (or human nature), actors must construct meaning authentic to their experience. Some existentialist thought is grim and gloomy – an empty heaven and a silent God are oppressive forces. On the other hand, the idea that we are not constrained to act in accord with nature may be profoundly liberating.
The Asiatics
is a 1935 novel by Frederick Prokosch. The book, Prokosch’s first novel, was once a bestseller and a book club selection in the years just before World War Two. Near the end of Prokosch’s book, there is an excellent and eloquent description of existentialist thought. A character named de Hahn has just been poisoned by his ex-lover – she has given him poisoned caviar. De Hahn, who doesn’t know that he will soon be dying, is talking with the novel’s protagonist in Hue, then, French Indochina, on the banks of the Perfume River:
"This is what I think: we’re all lonely little souls, we’ve all got to work out our own salvation. We’ve got to arrange ourselves somehow so that life won’t seem too terrifying. Isn’t that so? Don’t you agree? We’ve got to build up little ideas, pathetic visions about God and immortality and so on, behind which we can pretend to hide. We’ve got to close our eyes to the big thunderstorm that goes on all around us. We’ve got to, if we’re ever going to be peaceful and contented. We’ve got to pretend that life has a point for each and every one of us, that there’s a point to each of our little hearts beating like tom-toms in the midst of this endless black jungle".
This passage in The Asiatics has acquired an additional meaning: Hue is the south Vietnamese city devastated by the Tet Offensive on January 30 and 31 in 1968.
Some people go to church
to worship God or to be uplifted by the preacher’s sermon. I suspect that only a minority of people attend church for this reason. There are many other reasons that people join church congregations and attend services: some are attracted by the music and the esthetics of the worship service (the stained glass, dignified church architecture, the crosses and religious artifacts), some want to see who else is attending and be seen themselves so as to acquire social merit; some desire the opportunity to participate in choir or church volunteer work; some seek moral counsel; but, mostly, I think, people are attracted to church because the experience presents them with an opportunity for Christian fellowship, that is, to be members of the Body of Christ. Particularly, as one ages, and today most churchgoers in traditional denominations are elderly, one feels a need for comrades, for friends, for a society that cares something about you and wishes you well. (Remarking upon White captives who joined Indian tribes and refused “rescue”, David Graeber in his book The Beginning of Everything remarked that these people, victims of a callous economic order, remained with the so-called “savages” because “at least, with the tribe, they were with people who cared whether they lived or died.” I think Christian Fellowship has the same tenor.)
In the opening scene of Winter Light, Pastor Tomas Eriksson is celebrating Holy Communion with his tiny flock. The sequence carefully documents the ritual – the liturgy of Holy Communion is presented intact and without elisions; the film begins as an ethnographic study. But the staging of the scene depicts the communicants as isolated, sitting in groups remote from one another. The camera picks out individuals but not groups. The notion of Christian Fellowship is rendered problematic in the way that the Communion scene is filmed. Everyone occupies their own space; they are in “silos” to use popular contemporary lingo.
Even if God doesn’t exist, we should be able to still gather in some sort of fellowship. There are clubs of all kinds and God’s silence doesn’t necessarily preclude gathering in his (fictional) name for mutual consolation, aid, and solace. But this aspect of Christian worship is implicitly rejected by Rev. Erikson’s memories of his youth. Eriksson says that his “mother protected (him) from everything cruel; everything ugly; everything cruel, everything dangerous...of cruelty and evil, I knew nothing.” Saying that he was as “innocent as a babe in arms,” Eriksson went to Spain where he was “a seaman’s pastor in Lisbon.” Tomas tells Jonas that “...everything happened. It was the Spanish Civil War. We had a front seat in the stalls.” Bergman, a man of theater, has Tomas say that his experiences in Lisbon gave him a “front row seat” to the spectacle of human depravity, evil, and violence – but, he adds that he refused to see and refused to accept reality. “I and my God lived in one world, a specially arranged world in which everything made sense.” (Script for The Communicants at 84).
It’s curious that Bergman locates Pastor Erikson in Lisbon during the Spanish Civil War. Portugal was theoretically neutral during the war in Spain between the nationalists and republicans that began in 1936. The dictator of Portugal, Salazar entered into a non-aggression pact with the Spanish nationalists and, although Portugal was nominally neutral, in fact, Salazar strongly supported Francisco Franco and the Nationalist cause. The Spanish Civil War was characterized by a Red Terror (Communist republicans murdering Catholic clergy and supporters of the defunct monarchy) and, then, a protracted White Terror in which Franco’s regime slaughtered thousands of Trade Unionists, Communists, and Republicans caught behind the lines. (The last Nationalist concentration camp in Spain wasn’t closed until 1947.) In Portugal, Germany funneled arms and money through the country with Salazar’s complicity. Nationalist partisans hid themselves in the mountain in Portugal and, in general, the government strongly supported Franco, although covertly. (I think the situation in Portugal more resembles Sweden under the German occupation in which many Swedes were complicit with Hitler under the guise of neutrality.) Most importantly for Winter Light, the Catholic church reeling from atrocities against its clergy in Spain vociferously supported the Fascist side of the conflict. Pastor Erikson, accordingly, would have been witness to the Catholic Church, at least, taking the part of the Fascists in the war with the Communists.
Communism, of course, presupposes solidarity among worker (“Workers of the World Unite!”) and represented to European idealists the promise of an utopian society built on principles of brotherhood and community. This was the fiction that drove idealists of all kinds to join the Spanish Civil War only to find that both sides to the conflict had tarnished their principles by engaging in egregious examples of murder and atrocity. (The experience of George Orwell recounted in Homage to Catalonia is a testimony to this experience.)
How does this enter into an interpretation of Winter Light? The Spanish Civil War demonstrated that a idealistic views of human solidarity and community may yield mass murder. I think it is this disillusionment that colors Eriksson’s depression and despair. The film begins with a representation of “communion” – that is, a demonstration of the integrity and importance of Christian fellowship. But Eriksson is disenchanted with the notion of human community – this disenchantment, as Bergman, is careful to signal, derives from his experiences in Lisbon, the late thirties.
(The anecdote of Eriksson’s involvement with the Spanish Civil War gives us a clue to the Pastor’s age. If we assume that Erikson was 25 in 1938, we can infer that he is 47 - 52 at the time of the events depicted in the movie. Bergman’s script, rife with unnecessary specificity, tells us that Maerta Lundberg, schoolteacher at “the Mitsunda Elementary School” is “33 years” old – see page 33 of the published script.)
Nattvardgaesterne
is the Swedish name for the movie. Nattvard means Holy Communion – the reference is to the “night on which he was betrayed: Natt means “night”. Gaesterne means “ guests” or “people gathered together.” Accordingly, the word means “people taking communion together” or The Communicants. “Communicants” is an unfamiliar word in English – it simply means “those taking Communion”. Accordingly, for both British and American distribution, the movie was called Winter Light. This title derives from anecdotes that Bergman and Sven Nykwist sat in a pew all afternoon in November watching how the “winter light” exposed itself in the rural church where some of the film’s exteriors were shot. (This is the church in Dalarna County, a landlocked county in central Sweden where Skattungbyne, pop. 310, is located. The Church built in the early 19th century on the site of a 16th century sanctuary, and equipped with a “primitivist” old altar and religious images, is called Skattungkyrke. This place is about 39 miles north of Stockholm.) The Swedish name selected by Bergman for his script and film suggests the importance of community or group fellowship in the film.
The Sickness unto Death
is an 1849 book written by Soren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard derives his title from the Gospel of John 11:4 which narrates the story of Lazarus. Someone says as to Lazarus’ illness that “this sickness is not unto death.” Kierkegaard reversal of the phrase denotes despair, traditionally regarded by Christians as a sin. Despair, of course, haunts Winter Light in the depression afflicting Tomas and Jonas. For Kierkegaard, despair arises when a person realizes that he is living inauthentically – that is, living in a way that denies his true nature. (In typical Hegelian fashion – and Kierkegaard had a peculiar love-hate relationship to the German philosopher – “the Sickness unto Death” describes various types of “despair”; this analysis need not detain us.) Clearly, this diagnosis applies to Tomas (“doubting Thomas”); he stands in the pulpit proclaiming God’s goodness and mercy but doesn’t believe in God or, even, worse, is tempted to believe that God is malevolent, that is a great, hideous spider – “Every time I confronted God with the reality that I saw, he became ugly, revolting, a spider God – a monster.” (Script at 85) The “reality” to which Tomas refers is the evidence of human suffering and cruelty, exemplified by the Spanish Civil War (and the Chinese acquisition of the nuclear bomb while teaching their children to hate.) Tomas inflicts this message on poor Jonas (or his hallucination of poor Jonas or, perhaps, his ghost) when the man mysteriously appears in his office. With pastoral counseling of this kind, it’s not surprising that Jonas commits suicide. The schizophrenic, Karin, in Bergman’s preceding film, the first in the trilogy Through a Glass Darkly has also seen God as a spider, albeit one with six legs. (Script of Through a Glass Darkly at 58 - 59). Perhaps, Swedish spiders have six legs.
Tomas’ “sickness unto death” is objectively manifested in his bad cold or influenza. Throughout the film, he is very ill, feverish, and, even, perhaps hallucinating – for instance, the encounter with Jonas when that man may already be dead. Despair, embodied as sickness, is contagious. When Marta Lundberg kisses Tomas impulsively after she has announced her project of saving the despairing pastor from himself, he remarks “Now, you’ll get the ‘flu.” She responds: “And like having it, of course, having caught it from you.” (Script at 78).
References to Tomas’ illness are pervasive throughout the book. And there are other aspects of illness also important to the film’s atmosphere and texture. The sexton at the two country churches served by Tomas Bjornstrand is a hunchback. The sexton, Algot Froevik, suffers from some form of rheumatoid arthritis that has twisted his back and crippled him. The character is modeled on P. A. Lundgren, Bergman’s art director – Lundgren devised the sets and located the ecclesiastical accoutrement, including two hymn boards loaned by local churches that dated back to the 16th and 17th centuries. Lundgren was afflicted with anklyosing spondylitis, a rheumatoid disease that results in joint pain, inflammation, and, ultimately, fusion of joints with resulting immobility. (Joints most frequently attacked by this illness are the sacroiliac joint in the low back, hips, pelvis, arms and, most notably, spine.) Algot has this sickness which has contorted his body and caused him immense pain. It is Algot who argues that the highest form of misery arises from silence, from being misunderstood or betrayed. Christ suffered the worst agony when God was silent when he cried out to him from the cross. Algot’s pain has been such that he regards Jesus’ death by crucifixion as a relatively easy fate – after all, Algot who has suffered from pain all his life, says that the “actual torture” couldn’t “have been that bad” and was, after all, “rather brief. About four hours or so?” (Script at 101).
Two other instances of sickness are noteworthy. Marta Lundburg suffers from disfiguring eczema. She perceives that Tomas is disgusted by her condition and, in fact, may have rejected her as a result of this ailment. Lundburg’s crisis occurs when Tomas seems unwilling (or unable) to pray to his God for the remission of her eczema – the leads Marta to grasp that Tomas is fundamentally selfish and can’t love her. Tomas rejects Marta in part out of loyalty to his young wife who has died four years earlier. This young woman perished as a result of a lingering illness that emaciated her. In another unnecessary aside in Bergman’s highly explicit script, we are told that Tomas’ wife, Anna Magdalena Eriksson died at “27 four months and twelve days”. Tomas keeps a picture of his wife in his breast pocket inscribed to him on his 47th birthday – the picture shows a woman “whose mouth is bitter and twisted and her throat has two jagged scars after her operation.” (Script at 78).
Sickness is unto death and, of course, where illness ravages, death follows. Peter Cowrie, a notable critic has observed that the scene in which Eriksson and Marta wait at the railroad crossing for a train to pass presents an image of a row of black caskets (the coffin-shaped cars) being dragged in procession before their eyes. Bergman’s script contains more dialogue than the movie presents. In the script, Tomas recalls waking when aroused by the “shriek” of a train in his father’s old vicarage. It was early evening “with a strange wild light over the ice and the forest.” The house is empty and the boy begins “screaming and crying for (his) father.” Tomas recalls that “it was a completely dead world’ and no one answers his scream of anguish.” The empty, dead world seems to have been a dream. Tomas’ preacher father comforts him: “Father sat up and watched over me all night.” “What a nice father!” Marta exclaims. Tomas, then, remarks “Father and Mother wanted me to become a parson and I did as they wanted.” (Script at 98). This last remark is the only part of this scripted sequence that exists in the movie. Bergman opts for a visual metaphor, a procession of coffins rolling across the snowy landscape to make his point that to one who is “sick unto death” the world is the dominion of death.
Bergman had made
24 films before Winter Light. The picture marks the exact middle point in his directing career. He would make another 24 films during the second half of his life. (By some counts, including TV work, Bergman directed 62 films; he also directed 170 plays.) After Winter Light, Warner Brothers offered Bergman $500,000 a year to work with the studio in the USA. Bergman’s whose earnings were less than $40,000 a year in Sweden turned the American studio down and continued to work exclusively in Sweden until 1976.
Before Winter Light, Bergman made a number of undisputed masterpieces including The Seventh Seal (1957), Wild Strawberries (1957), and the transcendent sex comedy Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) . After Winter Light, Bergman directed internationally famous films such as Cries and Whispers (1972), Persona (1966), and Autumn Sonata (1978). He returned to box office prominence with Fanny and Alexander, a family epic released in 1982. Several of his Tv productions are legendary including the harrowing Scenes from a Marriage (1973) and the equally lacerating, Saraband (2003). He wrote scripts for TV and movies, including Best Intentions, a six hour mini-series in which Bergman finally reconciled with his preacher father and long-suffering mother. (Best Intentions released as a three hour film in 1992 was skillfully directed by Bille August.) Along the way, he had innumerable love affairs with the most beautiful women in Scandinavia and managed to be married (unhappily until his last wife) five times. He fathered 8 children (by some counts 9); mostly, he ignored his children, although they revered him – several are writers, one was a commercial airplane pilot. Bergman maintained close relations with his ex-wives and ex-lovers all of whom also admired him.
The painful watershed in his life was on January 30, 1976 when Bergman was arrested by plainclothes revenue officers and taken from the set of Strindberg’s The Dance of Death, a play he was directingat Stockholm’s Royal Academy Theater. Bergman was outraged at what he regarded as the ingratitude of the Swedish government and absconded to Munich, Germany where he lived for several years. (The tax case cast a harsh light on both Bergman and the Social Democratic Party, the SDP, that had ruled Sweden for forty years at the time of his arrest and that was enforcing a confiscatory marginal tax rate on the wealthy. (Bergman hated German food and had his many girlfriends send him parcels of Swedish delicacies while he was in exile in Munich.) After four or five years away, Bergman’s lawyers negotiated a return to Sweden where he lived until the end of his life. (In the interim, he made films in German about the Hitler era, The Serpent’s Egg, 1977, Bergman’s only film made with Hollywood financing).
Bergman shot another masterpiece Shame (1968), a movie that chronicles the collapse of marriage during a civil war, on Faroe Island. (The picture, which is majestic and terrifying, stars Max von Sydow and Liv Ullman.) Bergman became infatuated with Faroe Island and, ultimately, purchased a compound at Daemba village, Faroe. (A recent indie film, Bergman Island, depicts a married couple visiting the island in the hope of seeing Bergman.) On the island at his Daemba refuge, Bergman built his own private cinema, a structure that he called “The Cinematograph”. He inaugurated the theater by attending a film on July 14, 1975, his 57th birthday. The tax scandal ensued about six months later and Bergman remained away from the island for several years. At the end of his life, he lived exclusively on Faroe Island. Bergman’s daughter noted that he watched one film a day six days a week, either alone or in the company of invited guests. She estimated that Bergman spent 8000 hours watching movies. (He had two 35 mm projectors and a 16 mm machine – his housekeeper ran the films for him.) Bergman kept a log of the movies that he watched, his so-called Visningsjournal. In July 1981, the “viewing journal” shows that he watched Tarkovsky’s Stalker, Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein as well as the original James Whale version of Frankenstein from 1931; he also watched Brian de Palma’s erotic thriller with Angie Dickinson Dressed to Kill and Kubrick’s The Shining.
One would like to say that this story has a happy ending. But it’s a human life on which we are deliberating, and if it’s happy, as they say, it isn’t the end. Bergman’s last wife engineered reconciliations between Bergman and his many children and grandchildren. She invited the extended family to the island for reunions and Bergman seemed relatively content in his old age. He lamented, however, exclaiming: “Why did no one tell me how difficult it is to get old?” (Like all of us, he was told and, indeed, many times, but just didn’t listen.) In his last couple years, Bergman was confined to a wheelchair and, at last, lost his sight so that he was no longer able to watch movies in his Cinematograph. It is said that one of his ex-wives visited often (his wife Ingrid had died) and played piano for him to soothe Bergman’s restlessness. Bergman left exacting and theatrically precise instructions for his funeral. Only three of his children attended his obsequies. Bergman’s mistresses Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullman were present. The director was buried in a plain wooden coffin in the churchyard at Faro Island.
Winter Light
was used as a weapon in the battle pending in the Lutheran Church between high church and low church factions. Bergman didn’t take sides. He declared that the “Lutheran Church is busily digging its own grave.”
Bergman told his cameraman
Sven Nykwist that he wanted the photography to depict Swedish reality as “naked and obvious.” Nykwist was told to abandon any notion of “beauty” and to flatten out all contrasts to a “monotonous grey”. To achieve this effect, some surfaces with a tendency to reflect light were covered in white wax paper. Nykwist was to shoot the movie to be totally “without shadows.”
Notwithstanding this austere program, Winter Light is often commended for its aesthetic beauty. Susan Sontag proclaimed the movie as suffering from “the callow pseudo-intellectuality of the story and someof its dialogue.” But she praised the film’s “visual sophistication and the beauty of its images.” Against Interpretation (1964).
Bergman gave conflicting accounts
of how he came to write Winter Light. In one account, Bergman says that he was inspired by a performance of Stravinsky’s “Symphony of Psalms” and that he had heard an anecdote about a pastor preaching a sermon to an empty church. In his poetic autobiography Magic Lantern, Bergman said that he was in Uppsala with his elderly father. (Bergman was born in Uppsala in 1918 and lived there as a child and youth; this was the location of his father’s first parish.) Bergman and the old pastor went to a service at a small rural church a few miles north of the city. Arriving at the church, Bergman saw a couple of sextons whispering on the church porch. He recalled that it was a beautiful day in early Spring and that the weather was clear with brilliant sun blazing off the snow-banks. The church bell tolled summoning the faithful to worship. There were four members of the congregation in the pews as well as Bergman father and son. The organist sat ready at his instrument but the pulpit and front of the church remained empty. Then, a car was heard outside, skidding into the parking lot. An old pastor with red-rimmed eyes, moving his arms back and forth like a skier entered the sanctuary. He said that he was very ill and that he had been given permission to conduct the service but without the sacrament of Holy Communion. Then, he vanished into the sacristy to put on his vestments. Bergman’s father muttered that this would not do. Limping on his cane, Bergman’s father hobbled back to the sacristy and emerged with the sick old man. The pastor announced that he would conduct the service with the help of a colleague and that, indeed, there would be Holy Communion for the congregants on that Sunday.
Here is what Bergman wrote in Magic Lantern:
The introductory hymn was sung by the organist and us few churchgoers. At the end of the second verse, Father came in, in white vestments with his stick. When the hymn was over, he turned to us and spoke in his calm free voice, “Holy, holy, holy Lord of Hosts, heaven and earth are full of thy glory. Glory be to thee, O Lord most high.”
Thus it was that I discovered the ending to Winter Light and a rule that I was to follow from then on: irrespective of everything that happens to you in life, you hold your communion.
So what do you make of Winter Light’s ending
in which Pastor Eriksson “holds his communion” in spite of the fact that he has lost his belief in God?
Martin Luther is supposed to have said: “If I knew the world was going to end tomorrow, I would plant an apple tree”. (The German is sweeter, ein Aepfelbaemchen, “a cute little apple tree”.) Research has shown that Luther never said this. Luther did analogize the role of the Christian as a soldier on the field of battle fighting against the Devil and his legions. (This ethos underlies the famous hymn Ein’ feste Burg, “A Mighty Fortress is our God.” Luther is supposed to have said: “Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved; and to remain steady on the battle front...” Well...Luther didn’t exactly say this either – the number of misattributions to Martin Luther is legion. But this statement to close to some of his utterances and writing and probably reflects what he believed. But, if there is no God, there is no Devil, nor his army of demons, to fight. So what is the point of remaining steadfast on a battlefield onto which a nonexistent enemy never ventures?
I submit that Pastor Eriksson’s steadfastness has existential dimensions. We create our own reality and practice our own creed. Eriksson’s proclamation of the glory of a God in which he does not believe is an existential gesture, a proclamation of identity in the face of an encroaching void.
At the end of his life, when he was 87, Bergman attended a screening of the first picture in the trilogy Through a Glass Darkly. Bishop Koskinen of the Swedish Evangelical Church was in the audience to talk about the picture and its theology. Bergman was in the audience and someone asked him if he believed in God. Bergman evaded the questions and said that he was totally convinced that he would see his last wife, Ingrid, who had predeceased him, again. He added: “Christ is a philosopher who gives testimony to the existence of other worlds. Just as Bach does.”
Bergman says that Eriksson
...goes through with his service for no other reason than that Maerta Lundberg is present. If one has religious faith, one could say that God has spoken to him. If one does not believe in God, one might prefer to say that Maerta Lundberg and Algot Froevik are two people who help raise a fellow human being who has fallen and is digging his own grave. At that point, it doesn’t matter if God is silent or if he is speaking.
Bergman finished the script for Winter Light
on August 7, 1961. On the front-page of the handwritten manuscript, Bergman wrote:
And, behold, they brought to him a man sick of palsy, lying on a bed: and Jesus seeing their faith said unto the man sick of palsy: “Son, be of good cheer: they sins are forgiven.” (Matthew 9:2)
The typed screenplay is inscribed “Toroe, 7 August 1961, S.D.G.”
The initials “S.D.G.” are present on all of Bach’s published musical works on the bottom of each page.
S.D.G. means ‘Soli Deo Gloria’ – “Glory to God Alone.”
August 9, 2026 S.D.G.
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