What if you examined, with a surgical attention to secret passions and paranoia, that seemingly endless moment when the bottomless pit is so bottomless that you give up trusting you’ll ever come to rest? Then you’d be Ingmar Bergman. And if you were, you’d do it so well that it translates as a kind of love for us poor sods stuck with the human condition in an age of anxiety.
A trio of films, the Bergman Faith Trilogy (Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light and The Silence), has just been released. A must-have set. But why? All right, so he raised the status of movies to that of literature or art. All right, so he was arguably the greatest film-maker of all. But isn’t he also required culture? Don’t people go to a Bergman film to feel “smart”, just as they go to a Fellini film to feel “circus thrills” or (forgive the inclusion) a Russell film to feel “depraved and over-sexed”? Think again. Watch again. Forget the pressures to be smarter than you aren’t. The guy was a magician.
Through a Glass Darkly (1961) won an Oscar for Best Foreign Film. It was filmed on F?r?, the remote Baltic island where Bergman spent his last years before he died last July, at the age of 89. Easily the most moving of the boxed trio, it concerns a family gathering at which the bright jewel at the centre - the delightful Karin, who is respectively wife, sister and daughter to the other three characters, all men - is celebrating her release from a mental hospital. But her condition is retriggered, sending the holiday spiralling into schizophrenia, incest, the inadequacies of genuine love and the horrific vision of a rapacious spider God.
The Silence (pictured, 1963) was originally called God’s Silence, and the dialogue is sparing. It’s about two sisters and the lonely ten-year-old son of the younger one, all of them stranded in a hotel in a sweltering foreign country while military tanks gather in the streets. Bergman called it a “vision of Hell - my Hell”. All three characters have different agendas: one is confined to her bed with a deadly illness, one driven by her sexual needs, and the boy is left wandering endless hallways more spooky than those in The Shining.
Bergman said Winter Light (1962) was his favourite of all his films. It’s perhaps the most powerful of the trilogy, as well as the bleakest. A widower priest is having the mother of all spiritual crises, which his former lover misunderstands by pressing her unwelcome romantic attentions on him as a form of antidote. Asked to comfort a parishioner, a fisherman who is worried about the nuclear bomb, the priest delivers such a scathing view of a godless world that comfort is more than snatched from the poor parishioner, it’s strangled at birth.
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For Winter Light “I did not want to ingratiate,” Bergman said, “the way I do in all my other films”. Bergman ingratiate? I don’t think so. More like flay you alive. And yet you’re glad to be flayed - there’s something so masterful in his combination of technique and bravery. That stark light, those claustrophobic interiors, the dour or lust-crazed characters, his fascination with the unconscious as it reveals itself in all its hideous, shadowy longing and naked aspiration. There’s begging here - and rejection. God doesn’t want to play with me. What do I do now? Give up? Remember a time when I hoped? Keep on hoping, but this time without hope?
The dark night of the soul is his speciality. Yet for Bergman, and for us watching Bergman, there’s light in all that darkness. Figuratively and literally. One thing these three films have in common is an unvarying, flat Northern light - Bergman boasted that his cameraman Sven Nykvist had invented a light that cast no shadows.
Nor do Bergman’s stories. He’s not a grumpy old man, he’s a psychological laser light. If he weren’t so compelling, with those prolonged close-ups of people’s faces, and the superficially simple characters and settings - a family holiday, a parish church, an amateur play in the back garden, a promise kept in a letter to a small boy - one might be tempted to forego those unsparing journeys where Bergman squeezes you through a needle’s eye.
But there is one major problem that is common to all three films: in each one we are thrown in at the deep end of a complex situation that has been building to a tragic climax for years. Consequently, it can be difficult to identify with the characters involved, especially as we are fed only scraps of information. There’s a tease going on, a tantalising mystique that can drive one to distraction. But boring? No way.
The Bergman Faith Trilogy is released by Tartan (£29.99)