Ingmar Bergman

The Trilogy: Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, The Silence

133 The Trilogy Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, The Silence At the start of Through a Glass Darkly appear the words “To Käbi, My Wife”: as far as I know, this is the only example of a dedication in Bergman’s work. Diffident as the critic may be about prying into private matters and resolute to talk about the art, not the artist, with films as personal and often introverted as Bergman’s, it becomes difficult to keep the distinction absolute. Here, it seems to me, we have an open invitation to look for personal implications. Immediately before making the film Bergman married Käbi Laretei, a well-known pianist. In making the dedication public, he clearly wished to mark the beginning of a new phase in his development, and, dedications apart, Through a Glass Darkly certainly marks one. The opening images, of four people emerging from the sea, have an arresting freshness that also seems to promise a new beginning. The whole film, with its clumsiness and uncertainty, and its evident genius, has something of the quality of a first work. The leading theme of The Face was a bitter-ironic defense of the artist’s deceptions and trickery: it can be taken as Bergman’s somewhat equivocal acknowledgment (in a film abounding in 134 robin wood the picturesque) of the spuriousness of the “spectacular” elements in his films: all those striking visual effects with which he had achieved his greatest public and critical successes in The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries. One thinks of Yeats’s very similar self-realization and rejection of all he had come to feel as external to the essentials of his art, when one arrives at Through a Glass Darkly: I made my song a coat Covered with embroideries Out of old mythologies From heel to throat.5 Bergman, like Yeats, had come to see that “there’s more enterprise /In walking naked,” and from Through a Glass Darkly on his art does so, despite continuing intermittent temptations to varieties of fancy dress (Now About These Women; Hour of the Wolf). Not only is the spurious coat cast off; The Face’s specious defense is rejected with it. The most obvious distinguishing characteristic of the Trilogy is bareness: a bareness that, in Through a Glass Darkly, leaves every flaw exposed, and that is the outward manifestation of a magnificent self-discipline and self-critical intelligence. The coat that Bergman cast off was not worn merely to impress his audiences, and it is not only the baroque ornamentation and structural complexity that are stripped away. One notices at a glance through Bergman’s recent work that (with the usual exception, Now About These Women) the positive values centered in the Bibi Andersson characters of The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, and The Face have gone for good. One always The Trilogy 135 sensed a willed quality in Bergman’s belief in them; the characters one feels him naturally drawn to are the Squire (who stands out as the most rounded and created character in The Seventh Seal) and Marianne in Wild Strawberries, both of whom have a clear prophetic importance in relation to the films of the Trilogy . Bergman dressed his art in a coat partly to protect himself from its secrets. Perhaps every human being needs a coat, even a Bergman; but to dare to live without one is, one might say, the duty of the major artist and the sacrifice he makes. T. S. Eliot’s “Human kind cannot bear much reality”6 is a simple truism (from one who wove his own particular Anglo-Catholic vestment). Bergman ’s progress through the Trilogy to Persona and Shame has been quite simply a movement toward complete exposure of himself to reality. He is a great modern hero. Any criticism of his films, from Through a Glass Darkly onward, that loses touch with the fact of his heroism is mere impertinence. In Through a Glass Darkly the exposure is not absolute. It is an extremely important and extremely unsatisfactory film. To demonstrate its unsatisfactoriness one has only to point to what is beyond question the worst ending in mature Bergman. But it cannot be isolated there: abrupt and arbitrary as the ending seems, it relates quite interestingly to Bergman’s treatment of characters and themes throughout the film—for instance, to his use of Bach. The distance...