Through a Glass Darkly

01/12/2025

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   Ingmar Bergman’s idea of a plot twist or an inciting moment is almost always inward, a moment of despair, a confession, a revelation. Events are frequently elliptical, while the opening up of a character by themselves or by others is not. A key sexual scene in Through a Glass Darkly is bypassed, while characters constantly get to talk about their thoughts and feelings. This might seem contrary to a solid narrative, where actions speak louder than words. But this is also where car chases are common, and the fight sequences are empowering. There aren’t too many cars in Bergman and nothing so crass as a chase sequence, but we could claim he has quite a few fight scenes, though with no hint of a martial art. The fights are much more psychological than that. If they do turn physical, it is out of inner frustration, not outer prowess. Yet his films are, in their way, often very cinematic indeed.

   Twelve minutes into Through a Glass Darkly, David, a widower and a writer, leaves the outdoor dinner table where he has been eating with his grown-up children, Karin and Minus, and his daughter’s husband, Martin. He goes into the house, and through a door frame, we see him in the medium distance walking restlessly around the room, sobbing. Is he thinking of his deceased wife whose picture we may assume is the one we see in the distance on the table, of the writer’s block that we will find out more about later in the film, or fretting over his daughter, whose illness Martin, a doctor, has told David may be incurable — the very illness David’s wife and Karin’s mother died from? We don’t quite know, less because Bergman is vague than that people are complex, a common enough claim but inevitably rare in cinema that demands action. Literature can insist on a complicated relationship with thought and feeling, based on a medium that unravels a mind, which the prose has easy access to; in film, this is potentially harder since cinema is closer to a medium of behaviour than of thought. Bergman’s achievement is partly to find a way out of this impasse by absorbing the theatrical, imposing the locational, and insisting that, because we don’t have access to interior thought processes, this gives people’s claims a useful ambiguity.

    There is no reason why, when we see David collapsing in the house, that he isn’t thinking of Karin, his late wife and writer's block. Yet we can only assess his behaviour knowing he is unhappy, without knowing quite the reasons why. Later, the film proposes that he may feel guilty and that he himself claims he has been suicidal. He is discussing with Martin that he recently attempted to take his own life: when he was in Switzerland, he hired a car and hurtled towards a cliff, only for the gearbox to fail. Instead of showing immediate sympathy, Martin asks why he is telling him this. David claims the worst has already happened, that “out of my void, something was born, something I can’t touch or name.” Is he telling the truth or trying to gain sympathy?

     In Bergman’s work, it is often hard to tell. Complicated egotism and narcissism accompany a crisis, leaving us unsure of a character’s motives. It is why we can insist his characters are complex. What interests the director is observing behaviour and witnessing the symptoms evident from it, and the justification characters have for it. While cinema frequently works off motive and action, and partly why villainy and heroism are so prevalent, Bergman minimises action all the better to make motive intricate and behaviour potentially incomprehensible. “I want very much to tell, to talk about, the wholeness inside every human being. It’s a strange thing that every human being has a sort of dignity or wholeness in him, and out of this develops relationships to other human beings, tensions, misunderstandings, tenderness, coming into contact and what happens then." (Ingmar Bergman Interviews) When seventies American cinema created characters who were more antiheroic than in previous eras, containing more strongly aspects of both the villain and the hero within their personalities, this was still relatively straightforward next to Bergman’s determination to show that all his characters were in ongoing states of crisis.

       Bergman’s work was always influenced by theatre. He put on plays by many of the great late 19th and 20th-century playwrights, including Chekhov, Ibsen, Strindberg, Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee. What he took from modern theatre was the introspection and enclosed environment, the need for many characters to explain and explore their feelings, as though the soliloquy found in Shakespeare’s work had become the dominant mode of feeling. Yet Bergman also insisted on making these explorations more elaborate because we often don’t see the character as expressing a truth, but just as plausibly offering a lie. When Martin asks why David is telling him of the suicide attempt, it suggests that David might be lying. Even if he isn’t (since we do see him suffering when alone), he nevertheless seems to be using it as a dubious rationale in defending himself against Martin’s accusations. It comes after Karin has told Martin about looking through David’s diary — where David says, when writing of Karin’s disease, that “I’m horrified by my curiosity.” Martin accuses David of knowing nothing about life; that everything is about his work: “There’s no room for emotion in your void. And you lack common decency.” David mentions his attempted suicide as proof that he does care about life, even if by showing this consideration for it, he wished to end his own. It makes him appear more sensitive after Martin proposes feeling is precisely what he lacks. Just as in Persona, where we never quite know whether the actress is testing out a role, offering ‘truths’ all the better to extract ones from the nurse looking after her, or is constantly playing the part, so here Bergman leaves us musing over the sincerity of David’s feelings. Bergman may often directly invoke theatre (as he does here when Minus puts on a play he has written), but the director's importance rests more on how he has absorbed developments in modern drama for his own ends.

      While Bergman is clearly theatrical in some ways, he is no less cinematic in others. If he wished to take the enclosed environment of the modern theatrical situation into cinema, he wanted not so much to open it up (which might have destroyed the intensity he sought), but to make the locations vividly plausible. Through a Glass Darkly was his first on the island of Faro, a decision that was initially out of his hands but soon became central to his aesthetic. He wanted to shoot the film in Orkney, but this would have been a 3,000km trip for cast and crew. The producers managed to convince him that Faro would work just as well and be a lot cheaper - it is only 278 km from Stockholm. Bergman said after first seeing Faro: “This is your landscape, Bergman. It corresponds to your innermost imaginings of forms, proportions, colors, horizons, sounds, silences, lights and reflections.” (The Magic Lantern) He would often go on to film there, including for Persona, Shame, The Passion of Anna and Cries and Whispers.  

     The landscape becomes a means of comprehending character, and to work plausibly with a dramatic situation that resembles the theatre but where the film needn’t mimic it in its artificiality, nor lead us to question the film’s insularity. If Bergman had set all the above films in Stockholm, then he would have had to focus on interior shots because the presence of the city and its inhabitants would have reduced the claustrophobia his work demands. But then it would have resembled theatre. By finding an island environment, he manages to retain the restrictive aspect of the play within the scope of cinema. Throughout the film, Bergman makes use of the landscape (and even more the seascape). This is a hard, rocky surface that gives to the film an indifferent force to counter the potential sentimentality and melodrama in the story; one about a husband who has lost his wife to the same disease his daughter is suffering from, where the daughter’s husband is a medical professional trying to help, and where the daughter then has intercourse with her sexually frustrated late-teen brother. The director films in a way that insists this isn’t the whole story, even if it is the dramatic one. Bergman is more interested in how thoughts are locked in people's heads, rather than promptly sprung from cranial incarceration. He is interested in people’s states of mind, rather than the actions which come out of their thinking. Frequently, Bergman shows characters at the beach, swimming in the water, on a boat, or inside a wrecked ship. Or he shows the sea through the window, and often allows us to hear the lapping of the waves. Bergman generates an atmosphere that is contrary to a ready plot synopsis.

  While several of Bergman’s scripts could be staged, this would remove the tension Bergman generates between the dramatic aspect of the story and the choices made when filming it. As he insists: one of the reasons he wanted to film on Faro was “to find a counterweight to the theatre. If I were to rant and rave on the shore, a gull at most would take off. On the stage, such an exhibition would be disastrous.” (The Magic Lantern). The gull would be artificial and thus be taken as an inevitable symbol. Though critics may be drawn to reading Bergman’s work symbolically (and The Seventh Seal helped them along), when the director speaks of the island allowing him to work through his “innermost imaginings of forms…”, this is about moving beyond the limits of realism without falling into symbolism.

        Cinema is a very literal medium, and this is why Bergman can show a gull in a film as he could not on the stage. The gull is chiefly a gull and only secondarily signifying something else. The gull in the theatre isn’t a gull at all and will be read primarily for its connotative value. The gull in the play reflects the drama; the gull in the film can suggest an indifference to it. Even the ship Bergman shows Karin retreating into, and where she and Minus copulate, needn’t be read symbolically - even if it was present in the original script. As Bergman says when initially looking around the island: “We swung round the corner of a cliff, and there was the wreck, a Russian salmon cutter, just as I had described it." (The Magic Lantern) Some might see this as fate; all we need to acknowledge is that it is one of the happy accidents cinematic locations can throw up. Bergman may have found in Faro the landscape of his imaginary, yet it was also a very real place, somewhere he would go on to live and work.  

     Thus, to understand an aspect of Through a Glass Darkly, and Bergman’s work generally, is to comprehend the tension between the enclosed, dramatic story he tells, and the locations that force upon these stories a world that both reflects them and counters them. Often in the film as the characters speak, the sound of the waves is almost as loud as their voices; when the film cuts from Minus kissing Karin to a shot of the rain hammering down on the water, as the film elides the sexual act, the film captures the seediness of Minus’s lusts and Karin’s capacity to ignore her surroundings because she is lost in her head. When a moment later, Minus rushes into the house, the film’s low angle shows us the intensity of the downpour as he steps into a deep puddle. The rain is an element in the film and, like many a great director who has used rain (Kurosawa, Tarkovsky), or wind (Bela Tarr, Tarkovsky), Bergman knows that the viewer will assume this is real, even it isn’t. Kurosawa used wind machines on Ran, Bela Tarr, a helicopter to whip up a storm in The Turin Horse. Yet few would know this if it weren’t acknowledged. Nobody would assume the gull in the play was real.  

     Slavoj Zizek proposed that Tarkovsky, without the director’s relationship with cinematic reality, what he calls his “inert texture’ and how he films it, would be “just another Russian religious obscurantist.” (The Fright of Real Tears). It is one of the ironies of cinematic authorship: that many of the finest filmmakers are at their best accepting the locations they use bring out a vision they're no longer entirely responsible for depicting. Yet that is part of their creativity: to know which locales bring out their inner voice and give it external form. Faro was central to this for Bergman. The Swedish filmmaker may be known as one of the great directors of interiority, but if no man is an island, few were better at suggesting they were by filming on one.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Through a Glass Darkly

   Ingmar Bergman’s idea of a plot twist or an inciting moment is almost always inward, a moment of despair, a confession, a revelation. Events are frequently elliptical, while the opening up of a character by themselves or by others is not. A key sexual scene in Through a Glass Darkly is bypassed, while characters constantly get to talk about their thoughts and feelings. This might seem contrary to a solid narrative, where actions speak louder than words. But this is also where car chases are common, and the fight sequences are empowering. There aren’t too many cars in Bergman and nothing so crass as a chase sequence, but we could claim he has quite a few fight scenes, though with no hint of a martial art. The fights are much more psychological than that. If they do turn physical, it is out of inner frustration, not outer prowess. Yet his films are, in their way, often very cinematic indeed.

   Twelve minutes into Through a Glass Darkly, David, a widower and a writer, leaves the outdoor dinner table where he has been eating with his grown-up children, Karin and Minus, and his daughter’s husband, Martin. He goes into the house, and through a door frame, we see him in the medium distance walking restlessly around the room, sobbing. Is he thinking of his deceased wife whose picture we may assume is the one we see in the distance on the table, of the writer’s block that we will find out more about later in the film, or fretting over his daughter, whose illness Martin, a doctor, has told David may be incurable — the very illness David’s wife and Karin’s mother died from? We don’t quite know, less because Bergman is vague than that people are complex, a common enough claim but inevitably rare in cinema that demands action. Literature can insist on a complicated relationship with thought and feeling, based on a medium that unravels a mind, which the prose has easy access to; in film, this is potentially harder since cinema is closer to a medium of behaviour than of thought. Bergman’s achievement is partly to find a way out of this impasse by absorbing the theatrical, imposing the locational, and insisting that, because we don’t have access to interior thought processes, this gives people’s claims a useful ambiguity.

    There is no reason why, when we see David collapsing in the house, that he isn’t thinking of Karin, his late wife and writer's block. Yet we can only assess his behaviour knowing he is unhappy, without knowing quite the reasons why. Later, the film proposes that he may feel guilty and that he himself claims he has been suicidal. He is discussing with Martin that he recently attempted to take his own life: when he was in Switzerland, he hired a car and hurtled towards a cliff, only for the gearbox to fail. Instead of showing immediate sympathy, Martin asks why he is telling him this. David claims the worst has already happened, that “out of my void, something was born, something I can’t touch or name.” Is he telling the truth or trying to gain sympathy?

     In Bergman’s work, it is often hard to tell. Complicated egotism and narcissism accompany a crisis, leaving us unsure of a character’s motives. It is why we can insist his characters are complex. What interests the director is observing behaviour and witnessing the symptoms evident from it, and the justification characters have for it. While cinema frequently works off motive and action, and partly why villainy and heroism are so prevalent, Bergman minimises action all the better to make motive intricate and behaviour potentially incomprehensible. “I want very much to tell, to talk about, the wholeness inside every human being. It’s a strange thing that every human being has a sort of dignity or wholeness in him, and out of this develops relationships to other human beings, tensions, misunderstandings, tenderness, coming into contact and what happens then." (Ingmar Bergman Interviews) When seventies American cinema created characters who were more antiheroic than in previous eras, containing more strongly aspects of both the villain and the hero within their personalities, this was still relatively straightforward next to Bergman’s determination to show that all his characters were in ongoing states of crisis.

       Bergman’s work was always influenced by theatre. He put on plays by many of the great late 19th and 20th-century playwrights, including Chekhov, Ibsen, Strindberg, Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee. What he took from modern theatre was the introspection and enclosed environment, the need for many characters to explain and explore their feelings, as though the soliloquy found in Shakespeare’s work had become the dominant mode of feeling. Yet Bergman also insisted on making these explorations more elaborate because we often don’t see the character as expressing a truth, but just as plausibly offering a lie. When Martin asks why David is telling him of the suicide attempt, it suggests that David might be lying. Even if he isn’t (since we do see him suffering when alone), he nevertheless seems to be using it as a dubious rationale in defending himself against Martin’s accusations. It comes after Karin has told Martin about looking through David’s diary — where David says, when writing of Karin’s disease, that “I’m horrified by my curiosity.” Martin accuses David of knowing nothing about life; that everything is about his work: “There’s no room for emotion in your void. And you lack common decency.” David mentions his attempted suicide as proof that he does care about life, even if by showing this consideration for it, he wished to end his own. It makes him appear more sensitive after Martin proposes feeling is precisely what he lacks. Just as in Persona, where we never quite know whether the actress is testing out a role, offering ‘truths’ all the better to extract ones from the nurse looking after her, or is constantly playing the part, so here Bergman leaves us musing over the sincerity of David’s feelings. Bergman may often directly invoke theatre (as he does here when Minus puts on a play he has written), but the director's importance rests more on how he has absorbed developments in modern drama for his own ends.

      While Bergman is clearly theatrical in some ways, he is no less cinematic in others. If he wished to take the enclosed environment of the modern theatrical situation into cinema, he wanted not so much to open it up (which might have destroyed the intensity he sought), but to make the locations vividly plausible. Through a Glass Darkly was his first on the island of Faro, a decision that was initially out of his hands but soon became central to his aesthetic. He wanted to shoot the film in Orkney, but this would have been a 3,000km trip for cast and crew. The producers managed to convince him that Faro would work just as well and be a lot cheaper - it is only 278 km from Stockholm. Bergman said after first seeing Faro: “This is your landscape, Bergman. It corresponds to your innermost imaginings of forms, proportions, colors, horizons, sounds, silences, lights and reflections.” (The Magic Lantern) He would often go on to film there, including for Persona, Shame, The Passion of Anna and Cries and Whispers.  

     The landscape becomes a means of comprehending character, and to work plausibly with a dramatic situation that resembles the theatre but where the film needn’t mimic it in its artificiality, nor lead us to question the film’s insularity. If Bergman had set all the above films in Stockholm, then he would have had to focus on interior shots because the presence of the city and its inhabitants would have reduced the claustrophobia his work demands. But then it would have resembled theatre. By finding an island environment, he manages to retain the restrictive aspect of the play within the scope of cinema. Throughout the film, Bergman makes use of the landscape (and even more the seascape). This is a hard, rocky surface that gives to the film an indifferent force to counter the potential sentimentality and melodrama in the story; one about a husband who has lost his wife to the same disease his daughter is suffering from, where the daughter’s husband is a medical professional trying to help, and where the daughter then has intercourse with her sexually frustrated late-teen brother. The director films in a way that insists this isn’t the whole story, even if it is the dramatic one. Bergman is more interested in how thoughts are locked in people's heads, rather than promptly sprung from cranial incarceration. He is interested in people’s states of mind, rather than the actions which come out of their thinking. Frequently, Bergman shows characters at the beach, swimming in the water, on a boat, or inside a wrecked ship. Or he shows the sea through the window, and often allows us to hear the lapping of the waves. Bergman generates an atmosphere that is contrary to a ready plot synopsis.

  While several of Bergman’s scripts could be staged, this would remove the tension Bergman generates between the dramatic aspect of the story and the choices made when filming it. As he insists: one of the reasons he wanted to film on Faro was “to find a counterweight to the theatre. If I were to rant and rave on the shore, a gull at most would take off. On the stage, such an exhibition would be disastrous.” (The Magic Lantern). The gull would be artificial and thus be taken as an inevitable symbol. Though critics may be drawn to reading Bergman’s work symbolically (and The Seventh Seal helped them along), when the director speaks of the island allowing him to work through his “innermost imaginings of forms…”, this is about moving beyond the limits of realism without falling into symbolism.

        Cinema is a very literal medium, and this is why Bergman can show a gull in a film as he could not on the stage. The gull is chiefly a gull and only secondarily signifying something else. The gull in the theatre isn’t a gull at all and will be read primarily for its connotative value. The gull in the play reflects the drama; the gull in the film can suggest an indifference to it. Even the ship Bergman shows Karin retreating into, and where she and Minus copulate, needn’t be read symbolically - even if it was present in the original script. As Bergman says when initially looking around the island: “We swung round the corner of a cliff, and there was the wreck, a Russian salmon cutter, just as I had described it." (The Magic Lantern) Some might see this as fate; all we need to acknowledge is that it is one of the happy accidents cinematic locations can throw up. Bergman may have found in Faro the landscape of his imaginary, yet it was also a very real place, somewhere he would go on to live and work.  

     Thus, to understand an aspect of Through a Glass Darkly, and Bergman’s work generally, is to comprehend the tension between the enclosed, dramatic story he tells, and the locations that force upon these stories a world that both reflects them and counters them. Often in the film as the characters speak, the sound of the waves is almost as loud as their voices; when the film cuts from Minus kissing Karin to a shot of the rain hammering down on the water, as the film elides the sexual act, the film captures the seediness of Minus’s lusts and Karin’s capacity to ignore her surroundings because she is lost in her head. When a moment later, Minus rushes into the house, the film’s low angle shows us the intensity of the downpour as he steps into a deep puddle. The rain is an element in the film and, like many a great director who has used rain (Kurosawa, Tarkovsky), or wind (Bela Tarr, Tarkovsky), Bergman knows that the viewer will assume this is real, even it isn’t. Kurosawa used wind machines on Ran, Bela Tarr, a helicopter to whip up a storm in The Turin Horse. Yet few would know this if it weren’t acknowledged. Nobody would assume the gull in the play was real.  

     Slavoj Zizek proposed that Tarkovsky, without the director’s relationship with cinematic reality, what he calls his “inert texture’ and how he films it, would be “just another Russian religious obscurantist.” (The Fright of Real Tears). It is one of the ironies of cinematic authorship: that many of the finest filmmakers are at their best accepting the locations they use bring out a vision they're no longer entirely responsible for depicting. Yet that is part of their creativity: to know which locales bring out their inner voice and give it external form. Faro was central to this for Bergman. The Swedish filmmaker may be known as one of the great directors of interiority, but if no man is an island, few were better at suggesting they were by filming on one.


© Tony McKibbin