The Fenland Gent

Film 4 is showing Ingmar Bergman’s “Through A Glass Darkly” tonight.

“Through A Glass Darkly” is the first of what are sometimes called the Faith Trilogy , the three films Bergman made in the early 60s with the other two being “Winter Light” and “The Silence”. 

Bergman was never really compromised as a director and screen writer and throughout his career he made pretty much the films he wanted  even if did mean that his films can be troubling, bleak and difficult to watch. And amongst his oeuvre of bleak and miserable films the films in this trilogy are probably the bleakest.

Here’s a rather pompous trailer for Through A Glass Darkly:

In the three films that make up the Faith Trilogy Bergman is exploring his own crisis of faith. Interpretations vary but you can argue that in  “Through a Glass Darkly” God’s presence is everywhere but he is oblivious to human suffering, so God becomes “manifest” in a schizophrenic’s vision as a stony faced spider god who is indifferent to providing solace for our troubles. In “Winter Light” God is absent and with no God comes no possibility of solace. (The scene of the Priest, wracked by religious doubt,  performing his religious rituals in an almost empty cold church illuminated by the winter light is, for me, the most important scene in the trilogy). In “The Silence” we see the consequences of this absence of God and solace – there is only suffering where characters lead random, meaningless lives, and who try to fill this emptiness with random, pointless acts of sexual intimacy or, as they die, try to fill the indifferent universe’s void with screams of pain and realisation and horror.

I’m currently reading 2 books about Bergman and both book’s authors keep making the point that whilst this bleak vision is at the heart of Bergman’s work it is the director’s search for redemption in this indifferent universe that marks his genius.

Maybe?

I struggle to see much that is redemptive in the these films. There are the merest hints, a helicopter arrives to take the mentally ill girl away in “Through A Glass Darkly”, the Priest’s ritual provides some sort of solace in “Winter Light” and there is a scene with a dead woman’s child at the end of “The Silence” which may possibly hint at some sort of “children are the future” moment – but if that sounds ridiculous in a Bergman film it’s because it is. It’s certainly not very convincing.

Someone, (I can’t remember who), asked the question on Twitter “If something is truly depressing can it be great art?” It’s a good question when considering the work of Bergman.  I can see that “Winter Light”  is a pitch perfect film and I’d also argue that it is Bergman’s  extraordinary talents as a  filmmaker which made “The Silence” fill me with the same cold terror that I’ve felt on my occasional visits to the crematorium. He is a great craftsman and he can press the right buttons. But does that make his films great art?

I’m not sure, and this may be an old fashioned view of creativity, but I want to believe that for art to be art there has to be something transformative or redemptive or enlightening about it.

This is why I’m reading a few books about Bergman and am re-watching his films. Good for him for documenting with forensic clarity a world of anguish, loneliness, frustration, dysfunction and anger and I don’t have any difficulty in accepting Bergman’s view that the Universe is Godless and therefore possibly pointless*. But I do think I’ve missed something? Is there anything more to the works of Bergman than this resolutely bleak vision? Is it possible to argue that by the very act of making these films Bergman’s own creativity somehow negates the very pointlessness that these films preoccupy themselves with.

Or maybe I should stop worrying about Bergman and just laugh at him.  It’s not hard:

*Obviously this is not true and I have immense difficulty in accepting that we live in a Godless and possibly pointless universe. We do I think but I’m hardly jumping for joy about the fact. It would be idiotic to react otherwise.