Nigel P Karin (Harriet Andersson) has recently been released from an asylum having undergone electroconvulsive therapy. She returns to her isolated family home and rejoins her father, writer David (Gunnar Björnstrand), teenage brother Minus (Lars Passgård) and husband Martin (Max von Sydow), with whom she has an awkward sexual relationship. In fact, she seems more flirtatious with Minus, who is confused by his feelings for her. Unable to sleep one night, she finds and reads David's notes about her 'incurable' condition, and his desire to record her 'disintegration.'This is a Swedish film directed by Ingmar Bergman in bitingly bleak black and white. The only cast are the four characters, and the only setting is their remote island home, which Bergman manages to make both idyllic and claustrophobic at the same time. Karin's decline is slow, and she is lucid enough to be tortured by it.Also tortured of course, are those around her. There is an impotence about Karin's family, as quite clearly they do not know how to handle the prospect of her instability - but in the case of David, has his detachment contributed to Karin's inability to relate to her own husband? Or has she always been unreachable? We never know, despite the very talky nature of the production (and the English subtitles). The fact that Karin's condition seems to be the reason Minus and his father finally grow close is scant reason for celebration.People are flawed.A very intense, open-ended study in human behaviour.

Marguerite LeDragon In this haunting film, a mentally ill young woman and three of her family members - younger brother, older husband, and aging father - vacation on an idyllic island. While at first her schizophrenia seems to be in remission, family pressures trigger a rapid decline. To the grief of the rest of the family, her future prospects are dim and she, as the person they knew, may be leaving their lives forever. In the end, we are only left with a small glimmer of hope, that even though life seems cruel and unfair, the ability of people to care about each other provides an intimation that somehow things are not hopeless.Rather than a realistic picture of clinical schizophrenia, the film primarily uses her condition to explore how people struggle with the contrast between the "magic circle" of living an outwardly normal, successful life, with the realities and forces operating apparently from the outside that threaten to destroy their tranquility. The illness of the sister represents one possibility in a life where existentially people find themselves continually in deep water, where their constructs of life are constantly threatened. Each of the family members seems poised between their social construct as a happy, nice family member, and their interior and exterior threats.The father is an aging isolated man who poses as a serious writer tackling serious questions such as the existence of God, but who is suicidally depressed by the knowledge that his writing is pop fluff of no real significance, and that his real preoccupation is not universal issues but his personal failure as father and a husband. The son is young and naive, still living the regulated life of a student, but deeply frustrated in his desires for intimacy with women and recognition from his father. Karin, the daughter, is doll-like and cheerful on the surface, but haunted by the depressing undersurface of life, which is expressed by trenchant observations at first but then increasingly by nightmare hallucinations of wolves, owls, spiders, and voices in her head. She is sexually repelled by and emotionally distant from her older husband and prefers the company of her impressionable younger brother.Max von Sydow, playing the husband, is the most sympathetic and normal member of the quartet, as the supportive husband. He is a stolid, kind, somewhat pompous physician who stays easily on keel with positive and normal thoughts and actions, unlike Karin and the rest of her hyper-sensitive family. However, it is implied that this feat is accomplished through lack of imagination and stubborn refusal to notice whatever isn't "fit to be noticed". The harder he tries to pull Karin back from her visionary fantasies, the more she is repulsed by what she sees as his stupidity.Marring the film are some heavy-handed and overly theatrical moments. For example, where the father, played by Gunnar Bjornstrand, pontificates heavily to the point where suspension of disbelief is stretched, or where the Bach soundtrack comes in to underscore somewhat tediously that a moment is "profound". Related to this, the father plays a self-loathing artist who it is not hard to see as Bergman engaging in self-critique that is overly egocentric, not of general interest.Flaws aside, this is a beautiful movie, that manages to make the most miserable family vacation ever a fascinating experience.

tieman64 The first film in director Ingmar Bergman's "faith trilogy" - to be completed several years later with "Winter Light" (1962) and "Silence" (1963) - "Through A Glass Darkly" (1961) stars Harriet Andersson as Karin, a young woman who suffers from a mental illness. This illness resembles schizophrenia, but Bergman cruelly calls it "the disease of faith", a symptom of Karin's theism.Karin habitually sees visions of God, but her visions are warped to the point of parody. Her God takes the form of a salacious spider, and later a helicopter which ferries her sputtering body to a mental hospital. Supporting the increasingly deranged Karin are three men: Karin's brother, husband and father. These men embody three very different approaches to "spirituality" or "love", each of which is contrasted with Karin's more Christian outlook. The father, for example, is a cynic, depressive and writer, and is increasingly detached from a family he loves only insofar as they provide material for his increasingly morbid novels. The husband, in contrast, is a man of science, but his rationality proves unable to cure his wife. Meanwhile, Karin's brother is a naive, budding play-write, who develops an incestuous, sexual attraction toward her. As with Bergman's other "faith" films, Karin's beliefs are mocked for being hollow and borne of delusions, but shown to be far less horrific than those of the apathetic, post faith characters who surround her.The film ends with a macabre parody of romantic, spiritual and familial love. Here, Karin's embrace by God is ushered in by incestuous sex with her brother. An angelic helicopter then lifts her, not up into heaven, but toward a psychiatric ward. Afterwards, Karin's father tells his son that the family's love for one another is proof enough of the existence of God. His words are a self defence mechanism, designed to assuage the pain of watching his family disintegrate. The son, so starved of affection and attention, then accepts the father's drivel. By the film's end, Bergman has shown not only how a love of God is often the displacement of the love we should show for one another, but how even the staunchest unbelievers summon "Gods" to bolster their fragility.Like "Through A Glass Darkly, "Winter Light", the second film in Bergman's trilogy, takes place in a cold, remote part of Sweden. Bergman's tone is austere and chilling throughout, all skies, oceans, rivers, buildings and vistas seemingly bleached and robbed of all depth. Attuned to this suffocating "nothingness" is Tomas Ericsson, a village pastor (named after Bergman's own father, a priest called Erik) who has lost his faith but continues to tend to his dwindling congregation. If Bergman's "faith trilogy" traces a movement away from shaky belief to profound existential abandonment, then "Winter Light" represents the mid-point of this journey: shaky disbelief, God's light wintry, wispy and uncertain.And so Bergman paints Tomas as a man of, not only uncertainty, but contradictions. Tomas uses his position of "divine authority" to absolve himself of blame when one member of his congregation commits suicide, whilst using his certainty that God doesn't exist, and therefore also absolute morality, as an excuse for his treatment of several woman. But the problem, the film goes on to show, isn't that God does or does not exist, but that he has always been summoned and shunted aside whenever it best suits man."Winter Light" ended with two atheists in a church, waiting for God to speak. The silence that greets them becomes the basis of Bergman's "The Silence", arguably the greatest film in his trilogy (and the precursor to his traumatising "Cries and Whispers"). Making heavy use of sound effects and little use of dialogue, the film centres on Anna, Ester and Johan, a young boy. Whether these characters are related (Lovers? Family? Friends?) is never clarified.It isn't long before Bergman is alluding to off-screen wars (expressionistic shots of tanks and war machines) and the on-screen mortality of his characters (Ester coughs blood; she's dying from Tuberculosis), all forms of human suffering which for centuries have cast doubt on the existence of God. The rest of the film then largely takes place in a hotel, which Johan explores whilst Ester remains ill and bed bound. During his explorations he will stumble across various mundane yet disturbing sights and sounds. Think the fan which is placed at Ester's bedside, ostensibly for her comfort, but with each blade spin being a reminder of helplessness. Meanwhile, the click of Johan's toy pistol echoes shadowy military vehicles, whilst typewriters and clocks sing songs of death, each tick-tock bring one closer to oblivion. There's a certain, sickening "finality" to "The Silence's" "noise".Most horrific, though, is the disguised contempt these characters have for one another, despite their seemingly unwavering love. Ester despises Anna for her good health, for the carnal pleasures she indulges in, whilst Anna apathetically views Ester as a constant inconvenience. It's a love-hate tug of war which little Johan is being indoctrinated in.And so more horrific than God's silence is our own silence, our inability to both truly connect with another human being, and to know completely what the other is thinking. Despite Ester and Anna's rituals of human connection, they remain forever apart and forever alone. Ester herself represents the "Mind", a figure of intellect and rationality (linked to Bach, is multilingual etc), while Anna represents the "Body", Bergman stressing her bodily routines (bathes, eats, sex, is facile etc). What the film shows is that Pure Reason eventually withers the body, whilst carnality, unennboled by reason, ultimately leads to similar self destruction. Bergman's cure is the film's final word: "spirit". He closes on a powerful shot of Johan, the boy's future, and dilemma, ours.8/10 – Worth one viewing. The trilogy's cinematography, by Sven Nykvist, suffocates.

vinnervinesh No doubt Bergman finest work from my point of view till date. "We draw a magic circle and shut out everything that doesn't agree with our secret games. Each time life breaks the circle, the games turn gray and ridiculous. Then we draw a new circle and build a new defense. "how his creativity come from.ONLY GOD KNOWS IF EXIST Or HE IS . Fredrik: Father, I'm scared. When I was hugging Karin in the boat, reality was revealed. Do you know what I mean? David: I do. Fredrik: Reality was revealed, and I collapsed. It's like a dream. Anything can happen. Anything. David: I know. Fredrik: I can't live in this new world. David: Yes, you can. But you must have a support. Fredrik: What kind of support? You mean a God? Give me a proof of his existence. You can't. David: I can. But you gotta pay attention to what I say. Fredrik: Yes. I need to listen. David: I can only tell you a thought of my own hopes. It is to know that love exists for real in the human world. Fredrik: A sort of special love, I suppose? David: All kinds of it. The bigger and the smaller, the most absurd one and the most sublime one. All kinds of love. Fredrik: What about the desire for love? David: Desire and denying. Trust and distrust. Fredrik: Then love is the proof? David: I don't know if love is the proof of God's existence or if it's God itself. Fredrik: To you, love and God are the same thing. David: That thought makes me feel less empty; Makes my desperation less worse. Fredrik: Go on, dad. David: All of a sudden, emptiness turns into abundance, and desperation turns into life. It's like a temporary death's sentence strike. Fredrik: Dad... if it's like how you say it is, then God is all over Karin. We love her so much. David: Yes. Fredrik: Can't that help her? David: I think so.