Through A Glass Darkly
December 20th 2007 22:49
Through A Glass Darkly is a sparse, melancholic film, that starts off bleak and gets increasingly painful to watch. Peter Matthews at the Criterion Collection gives it straight about the film:
"...it’s almost poignant that the slow, ponderous rhythms of Through a Glass Darkly should have been sanctified by an Oscar for best foreign film. The movie wouldn’t stand the ghost of a chance these days, thanks to the ubiquity of the shopping-mall demographic and its corollary, snappy postmodern irony.
We in the west no longer feel guilt over our affluent lifestyle––neither the emptiness of the void nor the need to fill it with a second-hand spirituality. As for art, it’s a game like everything else, and what we mainly ask of it are prankish, self-referential surfaces that admit the fact."
Ouch. A painful statement, but one that is embarrassingly true.
Through A Glass Darkly is a masterful film, of that there is no doubt. Every shot is carefully constructed and lit to bring out the heavy contrast, deepening dark shades and glorifying whites. Bergman filmed this movie on the Swedish island of Faro, using the long twilight to paint unnerving horizon shots, reminiscent of religious paintings in European history.
Some scenes:
The title refers to a line in the Bible, which suggests that, as long as we live, we're unable to see the true Nature of God, a depressing idea that is played around with by Bergman.
The film is about a group of four people vacationing on an island: a father, his son and daughter, and his son-in-law. They attempt to have a happy reunion, eating outside in the slowly falling sun, putting together theatre for each other, and expressing warm sentiments.
It's all an illusion, though, and Bergman makes this perfectly clear with his cold, robotic camera, and use of long, awkward silences. We see that this is not a happy family.
In fact, it's a miserable group of people. The daughter, Karin, has just been released from a mental institution, and hears voices of a dark and cruel God. Her father is a coward, abandoning his children after his wife died, only now coming to see that his love for them feeds his spirituality, yet he still cannot bring himself to really help Karin.
The brother, Minus, is an isolated boy, running up a feverish lust, reading pornography, attracted to his sister and disgusted by her expression of love for him.
Karin's husband, Martin, played by Max von Sydow, is a doctor, by nature a clinical man, yet unable to treat the mental illness of his wife, his sexual advances rejected, he feels impotent. He is unable to bridge the gap between them, and as she declines further into madness, we can see that he yearns for her to snap, so he can get on with his life.
Depressing and cold. A miserable group of people, filmed in eternal twilight, as if they were sitting around in Purgatory, waiting to swing one way or the other. Would you watch this movie?
Perhaps not. Nevertheless, I do recommend it... though it left me feeling bleak last night, this morning, upon reflection, it's hard to ignore the fact that it's an incredible film, and Bergman is one of the few directors that could pull off this sullen, Scandinavian masterpiece. A mesmerizing expression of faith and the search for spirituality, and how that search can come between human relationships. We can only hope to avoid this dearth of emotions.
I say: Brilliant. Worth watching several times, and definitely worth a discussion. It's tough to get through, though, filmed in black and white, with less than admirable acting.
See it for: Sydow spits out some venomous insults for the father, and it's marvelous.
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Comment by Tracy
Movies and Life
Tracy
Comment by Cibbuano
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Comment by Tracy
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Comment by KylieW
Celebrity Obsession
Great review. I've never seen any of Bergman's films. I might give this one a try - when I'm in the mood for something a bit bleak!
Kylie
Comment by Nonymous
Philosophy Blog
I once went to a Bob McKee (of "Adaptation" fame) scriptwriting workshop where he went through this film scene by scene, highlighting its economy, its various patterns and progressions and structure, and its motifs. Among other things, McKee claimed that though Through a glass darkly relies on Bach, few films can use classical music, because few films can muster the emotional intensity to match.
Biographically, I seem to recall that this trilogy of films (Winter light, Silence, Through a glass darkly) all have something to do with Bergman's painful loss of faith (even though all these films are also about relationships and love -- which Bergman seems to try to see, without entirely convincing himself, as a meaningful replacement for religion).
I don't know to what extent people can empathize anymore with the religious emotions, particularly in the Silence.
By the way, I think Bergman ended up spending the rest of his life on that island...
Comment by Mike Crowl
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Comment by Cibbuano
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Kylie, this is definitely something different...
Nonymous, you went to a McKee seminar? He gets ripped in adaptation, but I'd love to sit through this movie with someone, scene by scene.
Comment by Mike Crowl
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Comment by Nathan 1
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