Through a Glass Darkly
When I first watched it several years ago, Ingmar Bergman’s “Through a Glass Darkly” confounded me. I was still relatively new in my journey through Bergman’s work, and I wasn’t quite ready for the way he tells stories. Also, I was expecting an image of a woman imagining God as a spider that I didn’t get, or at least, I didn’t get it the way I expected. Now, I’m ending my look at Bergman’s “Silence of God” trilogy, ironically, at the beginning, and I’m more prepared for it.
If people talk of “trilogies” of work, most people look at it in the context of a continuing story with the same characters, whether it’s “Lord of the Rings” of “Star Wars” or Marvel. More interesting is when you begin to dig deeper into cinema, and find that filmmakers don’t follow by that conventional logic, and actually make thematically-similar films that fit outside of the framework of how we tend to view that term. Martin Scorsese has a trilogy of films he’s done on faith in “The Last Temptation of Christ,” “Kundun” and “Silence.” Sergio Leone did his “Man With No Name” trilogy with Clint Eastwood. Bergman’s trilogy, consisting of “Through a Glass Darkly,” “Winter Light” and “The Silence,” is more abstract, and focuses on thematic ideas of loss of faith, what it means to have a personal connection to God, while dealing with personal subjects. It’s fascinating to see a master like Bergman approach these subjects, even if I don’t always connect with it.
The film begins after Karin (Harriet Andersson) has been released from a mental institution. She has retreated to an island home with her father (David, played by Gunnar Bjornstrand), brother (Minus, Lars Passgard) and lover (Martin, Max von Sydow). She has been diagnosed schizophrenic from doctors, who have brought her along as much as they can before releasing her to her family, and the prognosis for a full recovery is not great. Everyone is trying to get to normal around Karin, but nobody is able to quite get comfortable. Martin wants to get close to Karin, but she isn’t up for it. Minus and Karin shares moments, but they both feel uneasy together. And Karin’s father, a writer, has his thoughts on the prospect that she will never be fully cured of her schizophrenia, and when Karin finds them and reads them, they threaten to undue what progress was made.
I don’t really know what it is about “Through a Glass Darkly” that doesn’t resonate with me. Over the past decade, I’ve delved deep into mental health and mental issues, not just my own, but those of people close to me. That should make the drama in “Through a Glass Darkly” fascinating to view, but while Bergman and his actors do strong work with this material- and Sven Nykvist shoots the film with a stark beauty that he and Bergman excelled at. This film is the embodiment of what Bergman did really well, and it’s a compelling subject for him to look at. That makes my emotional removal from the film all the stranger, for me, but like Tarkovsky, emotions have a tendency to be distant with Bergman, and some subjects feel more distant than others. With “Winter Light” and “The Silence,” I felt those emotions more deeply than I did here.
Let us return to the scene I mentioned earlier, wherein Karin is confronted by a spider she thinks is God. It happens late in the movie, and if you, like I did, expected something literal in reading that coming from Bergman, I have a beach house in Montana to sell you. Of course this is not a visual we’ll see, because it’s only in Karin’s mind. By this time, she has gone back into her cocoon of mental anxiety, and they are waiting for the helicopter to take her away. The ending is the film at its most powerful, and it gets to the pain of watching someone struggle with mental health issues as profoundly as anyone has ever done on screen, with a final scene that shows how helpless family and loved ones can be in this situation, and how we attempt to calm ourselves from the outside. I may not love “Through a Glass Darkly” on the whole, but this ending shows that what Bergman was building up to is a moment of pain and catharsis that he was better than anyone else at delivering.
