Today I take full responsibility for the religious problem I set up in The Seventh Seal. A genuine romantic piety rendered the special luster there.
But with The Virgin Spring my motivation was extremely mixed. The God concept had long ago begun to crack, and it remained more as a decoration than as anything else. What really interested me was the actual, horrible story of the girl and her rapists, and the subsequent revenge. My own conflict with religion was well on its way out.
In Vilgot Sjoman’s book about Winter Light, entitled Diary with Ingmar Bergman, there is a discussion that hints at a connection between The Virgin Spring and Through a Glass Darkly. He wrote that I had planned Winter Light as the last part of a trilogy that began with The Virgin Spring and Through a Glass Darkly.
Today I see this view as a rationalization created after the fact. I tend to look skeptically at the whole trilogy concept. It was born during my conversations with Sjöman and was fortified when the screenplays for Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence were published together in a book. With Vilgot’s help I wrote an introductory note that explained:
Through a Glass Darkly: ’Tour human beings come out of a roaring sea.”
These three films deal with reduction, THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY — conquered certainty, WINTER LIGHT— penetrated certainty, THE SILENCE — God’s silence — the negative imprint. Therefore, they constitute a trilogy.
This note was written in May 1963. Today I feel that the “trilogy” has neither rhyme nor reason. It was a Schnaps-Idee, as the Bavarians say, meaning that it’s an idea found at the bottom of a glass of alcohol, not always holding up when examined in the sober light of day.
Through a Glass Darkly is mainly connected to my marriage to Kabi Laretei and our life together.
Between the two of us, we had, as I wrote in The Magic Lantern, developed a complicated, staged relationship. We were confused and at the same time exceptionally successful. We were also enormously fond of each other. Moreover, we spoke about everything and anything that occurred to us. But in reality we had no common language. We couldn’t communicate.
Our acquaintance began by correspondence. We exchanged letters for almost a year before we even met. For me, it was an exalting experience to have an emotionally and intellectually charged, richly endowed correspondence partner. I have not reread our letters, but I believe that before long I was using a vocabulary that I would not have dared to employ earlier in my life.
The reason was that Käbi was very expressive in a literary sense. She possessed an extraordinary keenness for the Swedish language, which may stem from the fact that she had been forced to learn and conquer it.
I see in my diary from that time that I used words I would not dream of using today. I note a dangerous tendency toward a flowery literary language.
The more Käbi and I watched the erosion of the collaboration into which we put so much effort, the more we tried to improve it superficially with verbal cosmetics.
I used this personal experience later, in Autumn Sonata. Viktor, the minister, tells his wife, Eva: “Furthermore, I have nourished unrealistic hopes and dreams. And some kind of longing, too, for that matter.” Then Eva says:
Those are very beautiful words, aren’t they? I mean they are words that don’t mean anything. I was raised on beautiful words. The word “pain,” for instance. Mother is never mad or disappointed or unhappy, she “feels pain.” You, too, have a lot of words like that. Since you are a preacher, it’s probably a kind of occupational disease. If you say that you long for me when I’m standing right here in front of you, I am suspicious.
Viktor: You know very well what I mean.
Eva: No. If I knew, you would never think of saying that you long for me.
Making Through a Glass Darkly was like taking inventory before a sale. I was anxious about the enormous changes both my wife and I had made when we broke away from our earlier lives and came together in a totally new life-style. I feared it would turn out to be what it was: a perilous gamble. Out of my fear grew the slightly too beautiful words, the slightly too grandiose formulations, and the slightly too pretty shape of Through a Glass Darkly.
The Virgin Spring: “The actual, horrible story of the girl and her rapists, and the subsequent revenge” (Max von Sydow, Birgitta Pettersson, and Birgitta Valberg).
All this is clearly seen in a diary notation Vilgot Sjöman made in the beginning of his book about Winter Light:
Dinner at the home of Ulla Isaksson. Ingmar and Käbi come over for coffee. Differences over artistic interpretation. Käbi speaks about Hindemith; Ingmar about direction and interpretation — then he tells wild and outrageous stories about animals he has filmed: the snakes in Thirst, the squirrel in The Seventh Seal, the cat in The Devil’s Eye. Suddenly the conversation takes a turn and is now about suffering.
When I first read these words in Vilgot’s book, I thought that Vilgot, goddamn him, had seen right through us. He had identified the game between Käbi and me.
Today I know that Vilgot didn’t have the faintest suspicion. But the scene speaks its own uncomfortable language.
Through a Glass Darkly was a desperate attempt to present a simple philosophy: God is love and love is God. A person surrounded by Love is also surrounded by God. That is what I, with the assistance of Vilgot Sjöman, named “conquered certainty.” The terrible thing about the film is that it offers a horrendously revealing portrait of the creator and the condition he was in at the start of the film, both as a man and as an artist. A book would have been much less revealing in this case, since words can be more nebulous than pictures.
So here we started with a falsehood, largely unconscious, but a falsehood nevertheless. In a weird way, the film floats a couple of inches above the ground. But falsehood is one thing, the weaving of illusions another. The illusion maker is conscious of what he is doing, as is Albert Emanuel Vogler in The Face. Therefore The Face is an honest film, whereas Through a Glass Darkly is a conjurer’s trick.
The best thing about Through a Glass Darkly also emanated from Käbi’s and my relationship. Through Käbi I learned much about music. She helped me find the form of the “chamber play.” The borderline between the chamber play and chamber music is nonexistent, as it is between cinematic expression and musical expression.
When the film was in its planning stages, it was called The Wallpaper. I wrote in my workbook: “It’s going to have a story that moves vertically, not horizontally. How the hell do you do that?” The note is from New Year’s Day 1960, and even if it was strangely expressed, I understood exactly what I meant: a film that went into an untested dimension of depth.
My workbook (middle of March):
A god speaks to her. She is humble and submissive toward this god whom she worships. God is both dark and light. Sometimes he gives her incomprehensible instructions, to drink saltwater, kill animals, and so on. But sometimes he is full of love and gives her vital experiences, even on the sexual plane. He descends and disguises himself as Minus, her younger brother. At the same time the god forces her to swear off marriage. She is the bride awaiting her groom; she must not let herself be defiled. She pulls Minus into her world. He follows her willingly and eagerly since he exists on the border of puberty. The god throws suspicion on Martin and David and creates the wrong impression of them in order to warn her. On the other hand he endows Minus with the strangest qualities.
Harriet Andersson as Karin: ’The borderline that she crosses is the bizarre pattern on the wallpaper.”
What I wanted, most deeply, was to depict a case of religious hysteria or, if you will, a schizophrenic individual with heavily religious tendencies.
Martin, the husband, struggles with this god in order to win Karin back to his world. But since he is the type of person who needs that which is tangible, his efforts are in vain.
Then I find this in my workbook:
A god descends into a human being and settles in her. First he is just an inner voice, a certain kn
owledge, or a commandment. Threatening or pleading. Repulsive yet stimulating. Then he lets himself be more and more known to her, and the human being gets to test the strength of the god, learns to love him, sacrifices for him, and finds herself forced into the utmost devotion and then into complete emptiness. When this emptiness has been accomplished, the god takes possession of this human being and accomplishes his work through her hands. Then he leaves her empty and burned out, without any possibility of continuing to live in this world. That is what happens to Karin. And the borderline that she crosses is the bizarre pattern on the wallpaper.
Parallel with the carefully chosen words exists a contrasting harsh concept of how the god I have created actually looks.
In my workbook at the time there is even a small reckoning with Bergman himself:
The strange experience of Frank Martin’s Petite symphonie concertante. It began extremely pleasantly, and I found it both beautiful and moving. Then it hit me all of a sudden that this music was like my films. At some point I said that I wanted to make films the way [Béla] Bartók writes music. But the truth is that I make films the way Frank Martin has composed his Symphonie concertante, and that is not fun at all. I can’t say that it’s bad music, rather the opposite. It is irreproachable, both fine and moving, and also utterly refined, so far as the musical effects go. But I have a strong suspicion that this music is superficial, that he employs ideas that are not completely thought through, that the music deploys more effect than it can defend. Käbi says that this is not so. But I wonder about it anyhow and am rather sad.
This was written around the end of March 1960 before Through a Glass Darkly had taken on a definite shape. I was still on my way toward a different film:
Karin wants Martin, her husband, to worship the god; otherwise the god might turn dangerous. She tries to force Martin to do so. He finally gets David to help him give her an injection. Then she disappears directly into her world behind the wallpaper.
April 12, I write in my workbook:
Don’t sentimentalize Karin’s illness. Show it in all its ghastly glory. Don’t try to effect a lot of subtle ties from her experience with the god.
Good Friday, 1960:
Feel desire for work and concentration. Possibly also for various deviltry and mischief though it remains to be seen what will come out of it. I have been pondering over the film and think: If we force ourselves to imagine a god, if we try to materialize him, he immediately becomes a rather repulsive figure with many faces.
I was touching on a divine concept that is real, but then I smeared a diffuse veneer of love all over it. I was really defending myself against what was threatening me in my own life.
The character of David, Karin’s father and a successful author, became a problem. In him, two forms of unconscious lying came together: my own and actor Gunnar Björnstrand’s. Our combined efforts created a dreadful stew.
Gunnar had converted to Catholicism, certainly with deep honesty and a passion for truth. Under this circumstance, I handed him a text that is totally impossible because of its superficiality. Today I realize that I didn’t let him say one true word.
He portrays a best-selling author: here I wrote of my own situation — that of being successful yet not being recognized or respected. I let David explore my aborted suicide in Switzerland during the time before Smiles of a Summer Night. The text is hopelessly cynical. I let David draw an extraordinarily dubious conclusion from his suicidal attempt: in seeking his own death he finds renewed love for his children.
Out of my own obviously horrible situation in Switzerland came absolutely nothing. It was a dead end. But Gunnar experienced the monologue’s gospel of conversion as if it were his own. He thought it was splendid.
It was poorly done and poorly played.
For the part of Minus, I chose an actor who had just finished drama school and was not mature enough for the complications of the role: the crossing over of borders, the debauchery, the contempt for his father yet the longing for contact with him, the bond with his sister, the need for productivity. Lars Passgård was a moving, fine human being, and he slaved like a dog. But it should have been a young version of the actor Bengt Ekerot.
The old shipwreck by the seashore. Minus and Karen (Lars Passgdrd and Harriet Andersson).
Over the years I have developed more skill in choosing the right actors for the right parts. Passgård and I did the best we could. He is totally without blame for our failure.
So I had my string quartet. But one instrument, Björnstrand, played false notes all the time, and the other instrument, Passgård, certainly followed the written music but had no interpretation.
The third instrument, Max von Sydow, played with purity and authority, but I had not given him the elbowroom he needed.
The miraculous thing is that Harriet Andersson played Karin’s part with sonorous musicality. She needed no coercion and went without visible steps in and out of her prescribed reality. She portrayed Karin with a clear tone and a touch of genius. Through her presence the product becomes bearable.
She also portrayed fragments of another film that I was going to write but never did.
IT IS SATISFYING to see Winter Light after a quarter of a century. I believe that nothing in it has eroded or broken down.
My first notes on the film are from March 26, 1961. Under the heading “Conversations with God,” it says in my workbook: “Sunday morning. Symphony of psalms. Work with The Rake’s Progress.” I was struggling with Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress at the Stockholm Opera, and it was like rock blasting. I had to learn the music by heart, and I don’t have a knack for remembering music easily. “One has to do what is necessary. When nothing is necessary, one can do nothing.”
I go into an abandoned church in order to converse with God; I want to get some answers. To finally give up either my resistance to God or my unceasing conflict. Either to bond to the stronger, to the father, to the need for security or to reveal his being as a jeering voice from centuries gone by.
The drama takes place at the demolished high altar in this deserted church. Individuals appear and disappear. But always there is this Self in the center who threatens, rages, prays, and tries to find some clarity in his perplexity. To make a day scene and a night scene at the high altar, the latter being the climactic ending: “I won’t let go of your hand until you bless me.” The Self enters the church, locks the door, and remains there in a fever. The despairing silence of the night, the graves, the dead, the organ pipes soughing, the rats, the smell of decay, the hourglass, and the pervading panic that particular night. This is Gethsemane, the judgment, the crucifixion. “God, my God, why have you deserted me?”
Hesitatingly, the Self leaves its old skin, that gray nothing, behind.
Christ, he is the good shepherd and he whom the Self cannot love. The Self must hate him. The Self digs up the grave, walks down into it, and awakens the Dead One.
As I began to imagine this drama, it took shape in my mind as a medieval play. All scenes occurred in front of the altar. The only aspect to change was the lighting, showing the dawn, twilight, and so on.
I’d rather carry my heavy inheritance of universal terror than submit to God’s demands for surrender and worship. This marks the end of the first movement. The conversation with the churchwarden’s wife, on the other hand, is totally real. She has come to close up because nobody is expected to come during the week. She busies herself inside. Then the church doors close with a bang, and the Self is left alone.
Christ, most beloved. Suffering is not difficult if you know your mission. True suffering comes from knowing the commandment of love and seeing how human beings betray themselves and each other when it comes to love. How they defile love. Christ’s clear-sightedness must have caused his greatest suffering.
I was at this point alternating between my own self and a fictitious self in an uninhibited yet confusing way:
I must get inside Through a Glass Darkly. I must grab hold of a d
oor that is absolutely not a door to secrets. It’s imperative that I defend myself against all false doors, all tricks. I have had power and am prepared to relinquish it. Now nothing is simple, and neither is anything certain. Nothing happens through the dramatic action. It is always a question of erosion, of moving away. The moment the movement stops, I am dead. An acceleration to greater speed, on the other hand, blurs the vision, and I become uncertain about where I am going.
When the wife enters the church, the scene develops into an obvious story. The drama begin to take shape:
The morning of the second day, the minister is awakened by someone knocking loudly on the church door. It is his wife, trying to get in. She is creating such an uproar that he simply does not dare let her remain standing outside. She enters with her hands and feet wrapped in bandages and wounds on her forehead. Her eczema is acting up. She is restless, afraid, and at the same time resigned. These two people love each other and give each other definite proof of their love and solidarity. But her denial is complete — there is no God. Therefore, to her, his waiting in the church is absurd, something that makes no sense. Her suffering is physically evident, and her decision to stay there with him unshakable.
He then turns his hatred toward her. In the evening she leaves him, in bitterness. The sun turns blood-red. All around, everything lies in a disturbing twilight. Completely still and without a tremor in his voice, he delivers his hatred for God and his hatred for Christ. The day draws to a close; the silence roars. He lies down to sleep at the foot of the altar. This is the darkest night, the night of annihilation. This is the empty and chilling harbinger of death, a spiritual death, a putrefying death.
Time moved on. Toward midsummer I wrote:
An endless row of mindless jobs lie as obstacles to making this film in my way. It weighs heavily on me, leaving me with a bad conscience and feeling rather dejected. My film is collecting dust, turning to sludge. It’s no good.
Image My Life in Film Page 14