ArnoldRetro-Review: Through a Glass Darkly: ****
Directed by: Ingmar Bergman
Cinematography: Sven Nykvist
Starring: Harriet Andersson
This will be the first of three reviews in the coming week or so that will address Ingmar Bergman’s films of the early sixties, in particular the trilogy including ‘Winter Light,’ ‘The Silence,’ and ‘Through a Glass Darkly.’ For anyone who isn’t familiar with Bergman or, perhaps, with this trilogy, they are more of a theoretical or conceptual trilogy. These come at a point in Bergman’s career when his films began to have a slight shift into what could be considered his “later work.” These films begin to reveal Bergman dealing with the issue of god in his life. Raised by a clergyman who eventually become consultant to the queen of Sweden, he rebelled against his father’s teachings but never came to grips with where he really stood and how interpreted the question of god. These film show Bergman trying to answer the question for himself.
Through a Glass Darkly marks one of the first collaborations between Bergman and his long time cinematographer Sven Nykvist (who passed away this last September). Nykvist shot films as varied as Lasse Hallestroms ‘What’s Eating Gilbert Grape’ to Woody Allen’s ‘Crimes and Misdemeanors.’ The signature mise-en-scene of Bergman owes a great deal to the Nykvist-Bergman collaborations.
Bergman’s screenplay is a transitional one because of the scarcity of saturation, which marks many of his early films (expressionistic tendencies, casts of hundreds, sweeping scenery, etc.). Using a cast of only four and one location, a country home on an island off the coast of Sweden. Karin (Harriet Andersson) is slowly going mad, her family (fiancée, father and brother) are trying to understand and hoping not to send her away, trying to let her know that things may be alright as she descends into hysteria, talking to walls, waiting for god to come out of the closet.
The film is quite simply a masterpiece. A tense portrayal of descent into madness and the effect on others that feels more grounded in reality than even the best of films on madness (see: Shock Corrider – Samuel Fuller, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Milos Foreman, or The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada – Tommy Lee Jones) Nykvist’s mostly static camera gives the film a brooding sense of anticipation, lingering motionlessly, allowing the actors to move freely into deep frames, marginalizing themselves as they move about the large empty frame. The camera even goes so far as to linger a little too long at times, waiting long after the actors have exited the frame, making sure that the audience is aware that the hollowness, these spaces they live and think in exist without them, these voids the audience is watching never go away.
These sentiments are echoed by the well penned script. The father’s regret over the madness of his deceased wife, the husbands jealousy, his inability to act, the nearly sexual love the brother feels for Karin, his isolation and inability to get over his immaturity. It’s a delicately woven, exquisitely beautiful film on the landscapes of the mind and the solitude of life and the search for god. A good introduction to the psychological drama of Bergman for anyone unfamiliar with one cinema’s masters.
Click here for a great essay on the film from the Criterion Collection DVD
