And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.
I Corinthians 13:12-13 (KJV)
Another Ingmar Bergman movie set in the bleak beauty of the Swedish coast -- this one on Faro Island where Bergman himself lived for several years. Through a Glass Darkly, shown last night, was the seventh in the current series of Bergman films by the Seattle Art Museum.
After watching a number of Bergman films set in the Middle Ages or at least in past centuries, it was interesting to view a film set in the present (released in America in 1962). The black and white cinematography -- like that in The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring -- was as impressive as the story. As in those two earlier film, the camera caught a haunting silence and solitude, with human figures and faces frequently set against a screen filled with Scandinavian sky, clouds gathered in disturbing patterns. Darkness is rare -- the skies are white with filtered light when characters awake in the early morning and when they go to bed late at night.
Living on the island, fishing daily, were Karin, her physician husband David, and her 17-year-brother Minus. As the movie begins, Karin's and Minus's father Martin had just returned from Switzerland, where he had been working on a novel. We quickly learn that Martin is a commercially successful author, but has not achieved his goal of acceptance as a literary writer. Although he assures the family that his latest novel is going well, we soon learn he is suffering from writer's block.
The four family members seem exuberantly happy as they dine al fresco and put on a clever stage show for the father. Minus, it appears, is not only a high school student but a young writer himself. Unfortunately, the theme of his play is the distinction between enjoying the status of calling oneself an artist and the ability to actually create art. The father takes the play bravely, but personally. He is hurt.
Minus is a nice boy, and young for his age. He loves his father. He is horrified that Martin believes Minus intended his play to be a means of ridiculing his father. He laments that his father has been so detached from his family -- and especially from Minus -- that the boy and his father have never really had a serious talk together.
Karin is not the happy young Swedish wife that she first appears. She has been hospitalized for schizophrenia, and is in remission under the watchful eye of her husband. David is intensely devoted to Karin, despite her occasional oddities and her recent lack of any apparent romantic interest in her husband.
Karin does show "romantic" interest in her brother, however, much to the shy boy's discomfort. Eventually, while the two adult men are out fishing, Karin's psychosis flares up again. She returns repeatedly to a wall in a vacant room of the house, a wall covered with an oddly patterned wallpaper. She hears voices behind the wall. She believes there is a secret room on the other side of the wall which she is able to enter on occasion. The room is full of joyous people, awaiting the arrival of God.
At one point, she reacts in terror to some hallucination. When Minus tries to comfort her, she seduces him.
Minus is deeply ashamed and afraid to face his father, when Karin reveals what has happened, although neither Martin nor David expresses anger toward him -- they are too busy being concerned for Karin, who is swiftly falling apart. She returns again to the wall, and asks her husband to join her in kneeling in front of it as they await the imminent arrival of God.
Karin either sees or hallucinates a spider emerge through a door, which she interprets as the appearance of God. Rather than being a loving deity, she claims, the spider was without emotion, and stared at her with implacable coldness as it attempted to force itself upon her.
Karin is left devastated and afraid, and is guilty about what she had done to "poor little Minus.". Help has been called, with Karin's consent. She says she can't balance life in both the "real" world and the world of her visions. She felt better while institutionalized, where the two worlds were not in constant conflict, and wants to return.
The helicopter departs, with Karin on-board. The island is silent again. Minus approaches his father. He confesses his shame about what he did with Karin, and tells his father that he himself feels like he is losing control over his own life. He needs something to hang on to. Martin tells him he has to hang on to God. But who and where is God, Minus asks? Martin says that, having belatedly learned to love his family, he is finally learning that God is love and love is God.
This revelation of Martin's faith seems to come out of nowhere, so far as the movie audience can tell, but Minus considers it seriously. After he leaves his father's presence, he glows with happiness -- not so much because of what his father told him, but because "Daddy talked to me!"
In the brief program notes we were given, Bergman is quoted as saying that, "The terrible thing about the film is that it offers a horrendously revealing portrait of its creator and the condition he was in at the start of the film." I suppose that's the "danger" of self-revelation that any writer -- as well as any director -- faces in producing a work of art.
Apparently Karin's disturbing image of God-as-spider is carried forth into the next two films that Bergman directed: Winter Light and The Silence. The Silence will be shown next week as the eighth film in SAM's series.
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