For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. 1 Corinthians 13:12
For me, Ingmar Bergman is the cinematic genius.1 During my thirty-plus years as a philosophy professor, I had hopes of writing a book and leading a seminar on his films. Other books and other courses always seemed to get in the way.2 But my deep appreciation of his oeuvre hasn’t lessened. If anything, it’s deepened.
That’s because Bergson tackles the Big Questions all of us should wrestle with at some time in our lives, the ones scrawled in the upper corner of Gauguin’s famous triptych: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?
Bergman invites us to ponder the meaning of life, the somber inevitability of death, the indifference of the universe, the sweet but fragile moments of joy that punctuate our days—in Bergman’s argot, “wild strawberries”—the entangled complexity of human relationships, the sometimes razor-thin border between sanity and psychosis, and the thorny question of whether or not God exists. He’s often called an existentialist. But that label has become so attenuated through over-use that I prefer to think of him simply as an astute chronicler of the human condition.
In the middle of what is arguably his most creative period, Bergson made three films, collectively called the “faith” or “silence of God” trilogy: Through a Glass Darkly (1960), Winter Light/The Communicants (1963), and The Silence (1963). Like his earlier The Seventh Seal (1957)—the film that earned him an international audience—the trilogy is Bergman’s attempt to work his way through and beyond traditional God-belief. The son of a rather stern and aloof Lutheran pastor, Bergman wrestled with unresolved religious issues in many of his films. But nowhere are they more explicitly or brilliantly explored than in the faith trilogy.3
Here I’ll focus on Through a Glass Darkly, and turn to its two partners in future essays. If you haven’t seen the film, you might want to view it before reading any further. It’s available for free on YouTube as part of the Criterion Collection. When I quote from the film, the parenthetical numbers designate time stamps.
The Bare Bones Plot
Through a Glass Darkly chronicles the final breakdown of a young woman (Karin) while vacationing on a desolate island with her widowed novelist father (David), her adolescent brother (Minus), and her physician husband (Martin).4
David has been an unresponsive father who, in keeping with his craft, is more of an observer than a parental nurturer. Minus in particular suffers from his father’s emotional absence. Karin suffers from schizophrenia, the same illness that killed her mother. Martin, utterly unimaginative but loyal, sees himself primarily as his wife’s caretaker.
Karin becomes fixated on a wall-papered upper room in the guest house where the family is staying. She hears whispers from behind one of its wall, and believes that they’re the voices of heavenly beings promising the advent of God. Her illness catapults her between moments of lucidity and delusion—“between two worlds,” as she puts it, one inner and the other outer. (108:41)
At the play’s climax, Karin suffers a devastating psychotic break and is transported by helicopter off the island to an asylum, where she presumably spends the rest of her life. Minus and David, traumatized from witnessing Karin’s fate, turn to one another and finally establish an emotional connection.
“I Have Seen God”
Like all Bergman’s best plays, Through a Glass Darkly is richly multivalent. Symbolism abounds and individual characters can play more than one role. Take David, for example. On the one hand, he’s the distant, aloof father. In the film’s first shots of him, he clasps his arms tightly across his chest, as if sealing himself off from his children. On the other hand, David can easily be a stand-in for an austere, remote God—the God of the philosophers, as Pascal said, not of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob5—who sets the universe in motion but then coldly observes it from afar.
In one scene, Martin rebukes David for what he sees as his self-absorbed inability to relate to Karin. “It’s always about you and yours. Your callousness is perverse.” When David rather unconvincingly responds that he loves Karin, Martin flares up: “Love her? You’re void of all feeling. You lack common decency …. You’re a craven coward, but a genius at evasions and excuses.” (54:00)6
It takes little imagination to see that this rebuke has all the earmarks of a disgruntled person shaking an angry fist heavenward. I suspect it captures an essential feature of Bergman’s own religious attitude.
The layered symbolism in Through the Looking Glass is also present in the play’s primary focus, Karin’s encounter with God. The episode has been variously interpreted as a simple psychotic delusion, a mystical encounter gone bad, a literary expression of Bergman’s distaste for Lutheranism, or a brutally honest depiction of a malevolent God.
In the film’s longest monologue (beginning at 47:07), Karin tries to explain to Minus why she’s so drawn to the wall-papered upper room. (Perceptive viewers of the movie will recognize that “upper room” has Christian significance.) The passage is worth quoting at length.
“Early in the morning,” says Karin, “I’m woken by someone calling me in a firm voice. I rise and come to this room. One day someone called me from behind the wallpaper. I looked in the closet but there was no one there. But the voice kept calling me, so I pressed myself against the wall, and it gave way, like foliage, and I was inside.
“I enter a large room. It’s bright and peaceful. People are moving back and forth. Some of them talk to me and I understand them. It’s so nice, and I feel safe. In some of their faces there’s a shining light. Everyone is waiting for him to come, but no one is anxious. They say that I can be there when it happens.”
It’s tempting to write this off as the delusion of a mentally ill woman. Walking through a wall?! But more than one Christian mystic has described an experience of crossing over a liminal threshold into a spiritual region of indescribable peace, a return to which they ever after yearn. In Walden, Henry David Thoreau beautifully expressed this longing:
“I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtledove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves.”7
Karin likewise longs for the coming of the God promised by the whisperers. “Sometimes I have this intense yearning,” she tells Minus. “I long for that moment when the door will open … and all the faces will turn to him.” (49:33) In part, her longing is surely born from the fact that her bouts of insanity are increasingly frequent and burdensome. But just as certainly, she’s experiencing a very human—and eminently sane—craving for the Transcendent.
So she awaits the arrival of the God. And in the film’s finale, he comes.
Karin is in the upper room. She’s taken off her shoes—it’s holy ground—and falls to her knees. David and Martin are with her, and she invites them to kneel also: “I know you don’t believe,” she tells them, “but for my sake.” As we hear the arrival of the ambulance helicopter, the look of beatific anticipation on Karin’s face is replaced by stark horror. She screams, clutching her groin, her breasts, her face, running from one corner of the room to the next, desperately struggling against an unseen assailant, and calms down only when Martin injects her with a sedative. Then she describes what’s so upset her.8
“The door opened. But the God who came out was a spider. He came towards me and I saw his face. It was a terrible, stony face. He crawled up and tried to force himself into me, but I defended myself. The whole time I saw his eyes. They were cold and calm. When he couldn’t penetrate me, he continued up my chest … up onto my face and on up the wall.
I have seen God.” (122:36)
This is a terrifying vision that conjures up all sorts of associations: mythic legends of god-raped women, erotic fantasies of divine ravishment, visions of a crude tribalistic deity who demands total submission, the Old Testament story of fallen nephilim taking human women as their wives, God as a cruel entity who entices only to destroy, the masochism/sadism relationship between humans and God spawned by corrupt Christianity, the malevolently invasive divine gaze. My guess is that Bergman had all these in mind. They all speak to his personal conviction that the God preached by his father was a brutish, untrustworthy tyrant.
But there’s another explanation of Karin’s experience, one that hearkens to the biblical warning that no one can look upon the face of God and live. (Ex 33:20) The glory of the living God is so utterly powerful that it consumes whoever gazes upon it. So the longed-for coming of God is too much for Karin to bear. Its sheer intensity gets hideously transmogrified in her imagination into a horrific spider who seeks to penetrate her very soul, robbing her of autonomy and will.
She has, as she says, seen God, and the encounter destroys her. The mystics in our midst can be ego-emptied for the better by their experience of divine glory. But Karin, already teetering on the edge of insanity, is not one of them. Her experience of God incinerates her mind. For all his skepticism, Bergman has succeeded in capturing the genuine risk of an encounter with God.9
Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, which premiered in 1953, famously introduces two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, who await in a wasteland for someone—Godot—who never comes. Godot is obvious God, and Beckett’s point is obvious: part of what makes the human condition absurd is that we continue pining for a deity who, in our heart of hearts, we know will never appear. In Through a Glass Darkly, Bergman, hostile to the God of his father, warns us about what we just might encounter were Godot ever actually to show up. Be careful what you wish for, he seems to be saying. The God whose arrival you await may not be the safely domesticated creature you want him to be.
A “Darkly” Reprieve
Karin’s experience is a dark revelation of where God-yearning may lead us. But Bergman doesn’t end his film on that bleak note. Almost despite himself—he later confesses in his autobiographical Images that the ending was “an unconscious falsehood”10—he introduces a gentler experience of God, one more in accord with the Pauline observation from which the film takes its title. Godot here comes in a quite different guise.
After Karin is helicoptered off the island, an obvious ironic twist to her desire for spiritual ascent, Minus confesses to David that he’s terribly shaken by what’s happened. “I’m scared, Papa. Reality burst opened and I tumbled out,” he says. (127:31) The peculiar expression he uses—“reality burst open”—connects with an earlier scene in the film when David reflects on the “magic circle” strategies we humans employ to insulate ourselves from reality:
“One draws a magic circle around oneself to keep everything out that doesn’t fit one’s secret games. Each time life breaks through the circle, the games become puny and ridiculous.” (112:42)
“I can’t live in this new world, papa,” says Minus. “Yes, you can,” counters David. “But you must have something to hold onto.” “What would that be?” his son asks. “A God? Give me some proof of God? You can’t.” (127:31)
“Yes, I can,” says David.
“But you must listen carefully, Minus. I can only give you a hint of my own hope. It’s knowing that love exists for real in the human world …. The highest and the lowest, the most absurd and the most sublime. All kinds of love. I don’t know if love is proof of God’s existence or if love is God himself. That thought helps me in my emptiness and my dirty despair …. Suddenly the emptiness turns into abundance and despair into life. It’s like a reprieve from a death sentence.” (128:20)
For all his efforts to repudiate Christianity—or, rather, the harsh version of it preached by his father—Bergman ends Through a Glass Darkly on a note that unmistakably gestures at the hopeful heart of the Gospels. No other religious tradition so emphasizes the identity of God with love (1 John 4:8). We intuit that great truth only darkly in this life, as St. Paul said. But one day we will stand face-to-face with Love, see it totally and exultantly, and in knowing it come to know ourselves as well.
Several commentators have insisted that the film’s ending is contrived, out-of-place, or pat: a “terminal sugaring on the pill,” as one of them asserts.11 Years afterwards, as already mentioned, Bergman himself agreed by insisting that in writing it, he unconsciously promulgated a falsehood. But with all due respect, the artist isn’t always the best interpreter of his or her own work. Bergman continues to wrestle with God-belief in general and Christianity in particular in Winter Light/The Communicants and The Silence. But his “pat” conclusion about the saving grace of love remains with him for the rest of his life, cropping up again and again in subsequent films.
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Stay tuned for a discussion of Winter Light/The Communicants, the second film in Bergman’s faith trilogy.
With Bresson, Tarkovsky, and Kurosawa coming in as close runner-ups.
Perhaps it’s just as well. Once, casually mentioning to one of my publishers that I’d like to do a book on Bergman, her response was lukewarm. “He’s not exactly en vogue anymore, is he? I doubt we’d be able to sell many copies of your book.” And when from time to time I ventured to show a Bergman film in any of my classes, students were disappointingly unimpressed.
From a cinematic perspective, the trilogy introduces a change of style in Bergman’s direction. Henceforth he focuses on small “chamber” ensembles, minimal scenery, and natural lighting, masterfully captured by cameraman Sven Nykvist.
The island was Fårö in the Baltic Sea, just north of Gotland. It was Bergman’s first visit to the island. He was so taken by it that a few years later he built his permanent home there.
An allusion, of course, to the memo Pascal wrote to himself following his “Night of Fire” on 23 November 1624.
It can also be argued, using the same quoted passage, that David is a stand-in for the Church."
Walden, in The Portable Thoreau, ed. Jeffrey S. Cramer (New York: Penguin, 2012), p. 210.
Harriet Andersson’s performance throughout the entire film is magnificent. But in this scene, her acting is so spectacular that it sears itself into memory.
A similar story of mind-crippling divine encounter is John Pielmeier’s 1979 play Agnes of God.
Ingmar Bergman, Images: My Life in Film, trans. Marianne Ruuth (New York: Arcade, 1994), p. 248.
Irving Singer, Ingmar Bergman, Cinematic Philosopher: Reflections on His Creativity (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2007), p. 25. See also Robert E. Lauder, God, Death, Art & Love: The Philosophical Vision of Ingmar Bergman (Mahweh, NJ: Paulist Press, 1989), p. 154. Marc Gervais, on the other hand, sees the film’s final episode as an homage to the “sheer gratuitousness of Grace as proclaimed by Christianity.” See his Ingmar Bergman: Magician and Prophet (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), p. 77. Although a bit more muted, Arthur Gibson is sympathetic to Gervais’ interpretation in his The Silence of God: Creative Response to the Films of Ingmar Bergman (New York: Harper & Row, 1969).