Through a Glass Darkly

 Ingmar Bergman made a trio of films between 1959 and 1962 concerned with God's silence and, perhaps, non-existence.  The first picture in this trilogy is Through a Glass Darkly.  (The subsequent movies are Winter Light and The Silence.)  All three movies are very dissimiliar and, in my view, they comprise a trilogy only in retrospect -- indeed, Bergman wavered himself as to the relation between the three pictures, sometimes casting them as a trilogy and sometimes not.  The movies are masterworks, but each in a different way.  Through a Glass Darkly, which is, perhaps, a horror film, is the first movie that Bergman shot on Faroe Island, the place to which he retreated in the mid-seventies and where he lived until his death in July 2006.  The film is spectacular, with silky black and white camerawork, depicting empty vistas of sky and sea.  For instance, in the first shot with see the four principals in the chamber play or film far out in the shallow water forming a line against the horizon.  There is an old cottage, without running water or electricity, on the bank above the stony seashore.  It's in this place, partially deserted where the events of the story take place.  The soundtrack is as empty as many of the shots:  the music is by Bach, a solo cello playing rather forlornly -- music that is simultaneously sounding right next to your ear and far, far away. 

David (played by Gunnar Bjornstrand) is a writer who has been in Switzerland completing his novel -- it's almost finished but he has come to the family retreat to put in the finishing touches.)  David has two children, Karin who is mentally ill, and Minus, a seventeen-year old son.  David has mostly ignored the children in favor of his art.  Karin is married to Martin, a physician (Max von Sydow). After their evening swim, the family gathers outdoors in the spooky endless twilight of the Swedish summer and eat a meal together.  There are subtle signs that Karin, who has been previously hospitalized and treated with electro-shock, is beginning to lose her grip on reality.  The children (Karin and Minus), after the manner of a Shakespeare put on a play within a play, a creepy skit involving a dead 13-year-old infanta (she is said to have died in childbirth) -- the son is obviously in some sort of oedipal competition with his renowned father and the play implies that one must choose between art and life,implicitly a condemnation of the negligent father, David.  Everyone goes to bed.  Karin rejects Martin's caresses and, then, creeps out of bed to wander around in the empty house.  She goes into the abandoned upstairs of the cottage and stands pressed up against some florid wallpaper, glaring at the camera as if expecting some sort of revelation.  The next morning, Karin, who is manic, wakes everyone up at five a.m. -- she twilight is unceasing.  The air is still and a thunderstorm is, perhaps, looming over the silent sea.  Karin flees the cottage and takes refuge in a wrecked ship, foundered at the edge of the sea.  Her brother, Minus pursues her -- earlier they have been flirting at the picnic table outside and she has snatched away from him a tattered pornographic magazine (the youth was supposed to be conjugating Latin verbs).  In the hold of the crumbling ship, Karin embraces her brother and, perhaps, tries to seduce him.  The thunderstorm sweeps ashore with lightning and torrential rain.  That evening, Karin climbs up into the abandoned second story of the cottage, enters the room with the vivid convoluted wallpaper and stands next to a tear in the paper.  When a door opens inexplicably, she begins shrieking and writhing in horror.  She says that God has revealed himself to her but that he is a huge spider with a stony cruel face.  Karin has become completely mad and her husband, the doctor, sedates her while they wait for an ambulance.  The ambulance arrives -- it's a buzzing helicopter that, itself, seems to be a predatory insect.  Martin leaves with Karin.  Minus confronts his father and asks him why God has allowed his sister to suffer from schizophrenia.  David says that God is love and that wherever there is love there is also God.  Accordingly, David says that the love of Minus and Martin and himself has enveloped and clothed Karin in the protective love of God.  Minus looks awed by this revelation and, as his father walks off-screen, he says in a bewildered wondering voice:  "My Father has spoken to me."   

The movie successfully conveys the horror of madness.  Karin's breakdown is hideous and her revelation that God is a spider is truly spinetingling, (Karin is acted by Harriet Andersson in a performance that is beyond praise.) The scenes in the belly of the wrecked boat have a jagged expressionistic tone -- the set looks like something from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.  This is not a subtle film but a straight-forward horror movie complete with a monster and horror film effects -- for instance, the door opening slowly in the upper room.  The truisms about God being love are clearly insincere, but they are the best anyone can do under the bleak circumstances.  Nothing is learned, no one is reformed or changes for the better on the basis of the events shown in the movie.  Bergman's movies are sometimes criticized for being overly literate, too talky and pretentious -- this film doesn't have those characteristics; it's ninety minutes of straight, undiluted shock to the nervous system.