With seven films of his nominated for an Academy Award, including three winners of Best Foreign Language Film, six wins in the same category at the Golden Globes, and endless more at awards ceremonies and film festivals around the world, Ingmar Bergman is easily the greatest Swedish film-maker of all-time, and the greatest European film-maker, in this writer's subjective opinion. One of the things that fascinate me about Bergman's career is how his films can often feel 'grouped' together. Works released in a close chronological stretch often feel similar and expand on the same themes. This is not uncommon, as directors professionally and personally obviously change over their careers, but what intrigues me is how clear these divisions are while often exploring the same key themes as his earlier works. No better example of that is his film trilogy surrounding the theme of faith, Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence, and how it ties in with the themes of one of his richest and most interesting works, The Virgin Spring.
The Trilogy
Bergman's trilogy is centered around perhaps his most frequently hammered topic in his earlier works -- that, of course, being faith. Born of a powerful Lutheran minister in Sweden, Bergman's complicated relationship with his stern father in turn led to a complicated relationship with the Christian faith. Each of the three works in this trilogy heavily emphasizes the silence of God within the characters' lives.
Through a Glass Darkly
The best place to start is at the beginning with Through a Glass Darkly. This stars Harriet Andersson as a woman who struggles with her unnamed schizophrenia while with her father, brother, and husband on their house on the sea. There are two essential moments in the film that connect to the theme, both are arguably the most iconic of the film. The first is Karin's (Andersson) vision of the spider god. Throughout the film, Karin believes there is something that is to be happening in the attic. As they prepare for Karin to return to the mental hospital at her request, she then has a belief that God is going to exit through the closet door. She then screams out in terror and tells of what she sees -- a spider god that attempted to penetrate her.
Karin's vision of this evil spider god is fearful, clearly. She has seen God, Karin says, and God is an evil spider that attempts to penetrate her. It's a horrifying vision and represents this recurring theme we will see in the trilogy of God as not all-loving and merciful, but uncaring at best and monstrous at worst. This fits into the overarching theme of God's silence as well as throughout the film Karin is seen as being quite excited for this idea of God's appearance. So when "God" shows up this spider, it is clear that this is not what she expected. Whatever God she thought existed up to that point was shattered with this vision. The silence of God, here, is because he is an angry deity.
The second key moment in this film is the final scene. Karin's brother, Minus (Lars Passgard), and father, David (Gunnar Bjornstrand) have a conversation. Throughout the film, Minus's deepest desire is for his father to like him, hell, even just have a true, meaningful, conversation with him. This certainly could parallel the relationship that Bergman himself had with his father and makes the relationship on-screen that much more intimate. When they do speak, in the final scene, they talk about Karin and the idea of god. "It's knowing that love exists for real in the human world," says David about how he knows God exists as we may understand him. Minus then asks, "Papa, if it is as you say, then Karin is surrounded by God since we love her." David responds with a simple "yes" and then when Minus asks if that can help her, David states, "I believe so." When David leaves, Minus says the final line of the film, "Papa spoke to me."
This version of God, so to speak, is the most optimistic in the entire trilogy. This conversation gives both David and Minus their shining moments. David finally connects with his son. David comes to the realization through many conversations, but especially one with Martin (Max von Sydow), Karin's husband, that he has been neglectful to his daughter in a malicious and exploitative way. This conversation can now get the ball rolling and serve almost as a sign of peace between the two to bridge their gap and have a relationship that is healthier, unlike the one between David and Karin. Minus gets his conversation with his father, exactly what he needs. It's a sign of actual love, which is, in that final conversation of the film, what Bergman tells is God truly is.
Winter Light
Winter Light, simply by its nature, is the most explicit in presenting its themes around the silence of God and faith. Gunnar Bjornstrand plays Tomas, a pastor who interacts with a woman named Marta (Ingrid Thulin) who is constantly trying to help him and a suicidal fisherman named Jonas (Max von Sydow) who is in grave despair over news that China is developing an atomic bomb. Tomas is this film. He is cold, he has lost his faith, he is so willing to hurt the one woman who seems to adore and care about him. For Tomas to be such a cruel and unloving character ties into the theme that Through a Glass Darkly presents initially -- that love is God. Tomas is a pastor, the physical manifestation of God on Earth. If he is unloving to Marta, who almost is a disciple to his needs, then perhaps this is Bergman imagining the relationship between God and those of faith, but just on a smaller, intra-personal scale between these two characters.
A reference to the spider-god is once again made in this film. Tomas refers to the idea of a spider-god when referring to suffering in a conversation with Jonas. He calls this form of God an "echo-god" who once gave blessings to humanity but now sits cold and indifferent to human suffering. The parallels between this idea of the 'spider-god' and the one that Karin in Through a Glass Darkly are very interesting. At first look, the one that Tomas outlines seems more indifferent than evil, for lack of a better term. Karin's vision of God is, after all, forcing itself onto her. However, stepping back, the idea of God that Tomas presents is one that sees all of the human suffering (the Spanish Civil War is given as an example) on Earth and chooses to ignore it despite being theoretically all-powerful. These are two incredibly bleak representations of God and his relations with humanity.
God's silence is on the most explicit display in any of the three films in this trilogy here, again, given the subject matter. One of the most powerful lines in the entire film is when Algot, the church's sexton states, "Wasn't God's silence worse?" in reference to Jesus's suffering, both physically on the cross and mentally in terms of betrayal. Tomas says yes. A theme throughout the film is Tomas's running indifference or hostility towards Jesus and the crucifixion story. However, this film is Tomas's own version of that. There is a beautiful shot of Tomas in his office and an absolutely massive crucifix in the background. This is Tomas's own mental struggle. The ending of this film is Tomas holding his usual service despite the fact that no one showed up. Whether this is positive, that Tomas still has faith somewhere in his heart, or a negative, Tomas continues to go through the performative motions of faith with no conviction, is up to the viewer. But one thing is clear by the end; Tomas's own internal struggles with love and his faith have changed his outlook on life.
The Silence
Last but not least, we have the film that is titled The Silence, in a trilogy about the silence of God, which features very limited religious symbolism compared to what you may expect. Our two main characters are Ester (Ingrid Thulin) and Anna (Gunnel Lindblom), two sisters in a European country that is gearing up for war. Ester is ill, and getting more and more ill, and the two and Anna's child, Johan (Jorgen Lindstrom), need to leave soon. The 'silence' that is being referred to is many-fold, but the key connecting aspect of it is that silence between one another.
This form of silence is both theoretical, the two sisters are on two entirely different wavelengths, but also literal, they are stuck in a country where they know none of the language of the nation they are in. The sisters are entirely different and Ester, in particular, has a sort of love/hate relationship with Anna. Like Karin and Minus in Through a Glass Darkly, there is an incestuous tone to the relationship, albeit significantly less outward, specifically on the side of Ester. In this sense, the two films parallel quite heavily with both Karin and Ester being seriously ill (Karin mentally and Ester physically), both being the aggressors of these relationships, and ultimately both ending up feeling either guilt (Karin, through her vision of the spider) or end up worse off (Ester, being left for dead at the end of the film).
The ending of this film, and thus the trilogy, is far and away the darkest of the three films and is, to me, the key to understanding the sort of faith in this film. As we are told in Through a Glass Darkly, Bergman's optimistic idea of God is love. Just like in Winter Light, though, love is completely absent, especially between the two sisters, which means so, too, is God absent from the frame. Ester is left to die in a foreign country with a butler (Hakan Jahnberg) who does not speak the language. Not only is she dying with no love, but she is dying in literal silence. Her cries of a desperate and increasingly hopeless desire not to die in a foreign country fall upon deaf, or nonexistent, ears. If God is knowing that person-to-person love exists in the world according to Bergman in Through a Glass Darkly, then this film is wholly lacking it it.
Bergman does offer one bit of optimism in this film: Anna's son, Johan. Johan is a young child, likely not over the age of 11 or 12. He is curious, he makes friends in the hotel, and he enjoys exploring the environment that he is in despite the fact that he is also trapped in the big, empty, hotel. He is also the one common link between Ester and Anna. His youth and spirit seem to represent optimism even in the face of being ignored, primarily by his mother, at times. Even as his mother ignores him, his father ignores him, and his parents are looking to send him to his grandparents at their first opportunity, there is still something that can be salvaged from his youth and make him into a sensible person. That opportunity is long gone for Ester and Anna.
The Virgin Spring
Where does The Virgin Spring factor into this, and why am I discussing it in combination with what is an established trilogy. Upon watching the film, I came upon the realization that it feels very much like a spiritual predecessor to the trilogy's films. Released in 1960, it was Bergman's first film to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and the first of his back-to-back wins with Through a Glass Darkly. The film itself is one of Bergman's darkest in tone and subject matter. Karin (Birgitta Pettersson) is the golden child of her family. She is beautiful, she is young, she is a virgin and immensely proud of it in correlation with her faith. However, on a trail, she is taken by three men and brutally raped and murdered. The three then happen to stumble upon her home and her family realizes, through the men trying to sell Karin's clothing, that they are the reason she is not home. Her father, Tore (Max von Sydow), takes vengeance into his own hands and murders the men.
Looking at even this basic outline of the plot of the film, I think it is very easy to see just how easily this film fits into the 'Trilogy of Faith'. With the character of Karin, Bergman, and screenwriter Ulla Isaksson, present the absolute perfect woman within the context of what we know as the Christian faith. Her truly awful death is in itself a questioning moment for her family. I can only imagine that within the context of the film, Tore and Karin's mother Mareta (Birgitta Valberg) surely thought that God was silent to their prayers and the life that their daughter led for him to allow her to meet such a heinous demise. Tore even says at the end of the film that he does not understand why God allowed what he did, yet he will still honor him by building a church.
What is different with this film, though, is this incredibly upbeat ending to the film that sees a spring emerge from where Karin's head laid on the ground after Tore's vow to build a church. Throughout the trilogy, we never see any actual miracles as we do here. The God that is or isn't present for much of Bergman's later three films can be represented through humans loving one another in the way that we can see them acted out on screen or through unanswered prayers. The spring is Karin's innocence manifesting itself through a miracle. Bergman's highlighting of love as a source of God, or being God in itself, is one thing, but seeing this spring here at the end of The Virgin Spring is far and away the most optimistic example of concrete proof that perhaps God is watching and not ignoring the suffering of humanity.
Wrapping Up
Bergman is constantly presenting deeper and more ponderous themes and questions in his films. Regardless of whether it was in his early career or his later works, many common themes continue to pop up. However, when it comes to pondering the nature of God, Bergman was never more on form than with The Virgin Spring and his 'Trilogy of Faith'. These four films all share a certain gloom over them -- a sense of spiritual hopelessness. However, whether it's the final scene of The Virgin Spring, the inter-personal love in Through a Glass Darkly, the unrequited love of Marta in Winter Light, or the childlike innocence of Jonas in The Silence, each of these films provides us something to point to and say that maybe, just maybe, there is something worth continuing forward for.
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