Through a Glass Darkly
by Ingmar Bergman
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Actor: Gunnar Bj?rnstrand, Harriet Andersson, Lars Passg?rd, Max von SydowDirector: Ingmar Bergman
Edition: VHS Tape
Audio: English (Subtitled); Swedish (Original Language), Analog
Format: Black & White, NTSC
Running Time: 91 minutes
Release Date: 2000-06-16
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Publisher: Homevision
Studio: Homevision
VHS Movie Reviews of Through a Glass Darkly
Movie Review: A powerful film, but get it as part of the Criterion Collection "chamber trilogy" box.
Summary: 4 Stars
Ingmar Bergman's 1961 film SASOM I EN SPEGEL (Through a Glass Darkly) was the first of his "chamber films" of the early '60s. These form a trilogy, all of intimate plots involving a minimum of characters and concerned with the "silence of God", Man's burden of surviving in life on his own with no clear direction from above. They intensify even further the existential angst of the late '50s films (DET SJUNDE INSEGLET, JUNGFRUKALLAN) but introduce the interpersonal themes that were to preoccupy Bergman for the rest of his career.
As the film opens, we see four people coming in from a swim in the cold Baltic Sea. The novelist David (Gunnar Bjornstrand) has returned home after a sabbatical in a distant country, reuniting at their summer home with his son Minus (Lars Passgard), daughter Karin (Harriet Andersson) and her husband Martin (Max von Sydow). Karin has suffered from some time from schizophrenia, though she had regained lucidity to a degree. Four characters is all it takes. The plot is driven through Karin's illness, Minus' awkward budding manhood, and David's self-centeredness and uninterest in his family's plight. Though wracked by delusions, Karin ultimately provides a key insight about Man's place in the world.
The superb quality of Andersson's acting can be judged by how uncomfortably close to home it hits this viewer, who had a loved one suffering from schizophrenia. This was the first Bergman film where Sven Nykvist was principal cinematographer, and there's a certain purity to the shots, as if they were sculpted from marble, compared to his later work. All in all, this is a powerful effort, though my favourite of the chamber trilogy is NATTVARDSGASTERNA (Winter Light).
This Amazon listing describes a standalone DVD of the film. However, I'd recommend getting SASOM I EN SPEGEL as part of the Criterion Collection box of Bergman's chamber trilogy.
Movie Review: Good
Summary: 3 Stars
Ingmar Bergman's 1961 film, Through A Glass Darkly (S?som i en spegel), is not one of his best films, although it is one of his most lauded, winning an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. That said, it's quite a good film that simply has not held up that well over the years as a de facto Chekhovian drama- partly due to the melodramatic acting of its lead character, Karin (Harriet Andersson), but more importantly because its handling of psychology and religion seems quite dated, in light of what we now know about mental illnesses and the structure of the brain.
The film follows Karin, her doctor husband Martin (Max Von Sydow), father David (Gunnar Bj?rnstrand), and seventeen year old brother Minus (Lars Passg?rd) at a vacation home on F?r? island. She suffers from an unnamed mental illness, although it is likely schizophrenia, and hears voices where there are none. Through the course of the film we get revelations about the family, such as a blatantly incestuous relationship between Karin and Minus, which has reduced the brother, a budding playwright, to a sexual cipher, enthralled by his sister's beauty, and mere thrall to her sexual advances and seductions. She constantly cockteases him with her sexuality, reducing him to a sniveling masturbatory voyeur of pornographic magazines. Later, when she has one of her breakdowns in a wrecked boat on the shore, she seduces her brother into full blown sex that both of them later do not speak of, yet which her father and husband cannot not be aware of, on some level. Interestingly, in researching the criticism of this film, I found almost no references to what has to be one of the most blatant depictions of incest ever filmed, or at least certainly to that time. How this could have been missed, or ignored on purpose, and a critical opinion of the film still formed, is beyond me.
That said, while Bergmaniacs may declare this film, and its trilogy mates, as being sine qua non Bergman, and it may be, that does not deny the fact that this film is also middle of the road Bergman, not as bad as some of his lesser screenplays (Cries And Whispers, The Serpent's Egg), but nowhere near his greatest works (Wild Strawberries, Shame). The title, which comes from the Bible, 1 Corinthians 13:12: `For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known,' bespeaks the melodrama that drenches this film. But, what is most truly known about Through A Glass Darkly is that it represents a phase in an artist's career and the culture of psychology far better than reality. Yet, given that truth, how many ever choose such realities anyway?
Movie Review: A god steps down from the mountain
Summary: 4 Stars
Although Bergman considers "Through a Glass Darkly" to be a failure (and, to a certain extent, I agree), it was an important step (he says) in liberating himself from the gloomy Lutheran theology of his childhood. Ostensibly, the story is about the relapse of Karin (Harriet Andersson) into mental illness--a relapse, one suspects, which is incurable. Karin is convinced that a god lives on the other side of a strangely papered wall (in fact, Bergman's original title for the film was "The Wallpaper"). It's a god of darkness and sensuality (at one point, Karin orgasms in solitude with her god; at another, she fancies that the god has entered her younger brother Musin [Lars Passgard] and she seduces him), but ultimately it's a god that reveals itself as a horrible, devouring spider.
Bergman's point seems to be that the gods which attract us ultimately reveal themselves to be monstrous destroyers--or, perhaps, that humanity can't survive in the presence of the absolute it so craves. While Karin's godlust drives her into madness, her novelist father (Gunnar Bjornstrand) discovers toward the film's end that the only real god is love, the only safeguard against madness is companionship, and the only chance of fulfillment in this life is learning to love and be loved.
The ending, as Bergman himself notes, is overly didactic (although Musin's "Papa spoke to me!", the final line in the film, gestures at the ending of the later and better "The Silence"). Moreover, as Bergson notes, the father character never quite seems authentic, and even a fine actor like Bjornstrand can't breathe life into him. But flawed as the film is, it's still a thoughtful (and perhaps Jungian-inspired?) exploration of the human yearning for gods and what happens when the gods honor our yearning and step down from their mountains. And Harriet Andersson's performance throughout is absolutely breathtaking.
Movie Review: "For now we see through a glass, darkly"- Bible, 1 Corinthians xiii. 12.,
Summary: 4 Stars
Well, we don't see darkly through a glass, and Bergman explains in his "Introductions" that during the ancient times, there were no glass, the mirrors were made of metal, bronze, for instance and while looking through the metal mirror, the face and the background appear darker than in reality. Does it mean that when we look inside ourselves like in the mirror, we appear darker and more sinister than we are? Or the other way around?
"Through a Glass Darkly" is a typically great Bergman's film - four people arrive to an isolated island to spend a few days together, a young woman, her husband, father, and brother. They seem to love one another and are perfectly happy and comfortable in the beginning. It does not last long - not in the Bergman's world. Harriet Anderson was amazing as Karin, a mentally sick young woman, who was just released from the hospital but I believe three other actors playing Father (Gunnar Bjornstrand), Husband (Max von Sydow), and Brother (Lars Passg?rd) were as good as she was. The Father was especially interesting - he was a reason Karin became ill on the first place and his diary sent her to the total mental breakdown. As with "Persona" and "Autumn Sonata", Bergman is asking again how far is an Artist willing to go for his Art? Here, Father, the writer wants to be a cool and remote observer of his daughter's mental tragedy as a study for his future work. There is a hope, though, in the end. Not for Karin - it is too late for her - but for her confused young brother who is also fighting for his sanity and desperately needs his father's love and understanding. His last words - "Daddy talked to me" - give this bleak and tragic story the hope that his life could be different. Or maybe not...
Movie Review: Perfect
Summary: 5 Stars
I was a little bored with what seemed the extraneous events of the beginning, but it turned out they were important (I always feel you should watch a Bergman film backwards, that way the beginning won't seem pointless). I loved this movie, not that I'm such a fan of mental illness. I thought it was perfectly written, directed, acted and crowded with "meaning." I won't go into the plot (all the other reviews have pretty well divulged that to a fare thee well), but I highly recommend it, even if you don't like Bergman. This one isn't slow (once it gets started). Sydow had a tendancy to play with his glasses toward the end which was distracting, and to take them on and off, breaking the illusion that he needed glasses. Was this deliberate? A subtlety that was lost on me. In this flick, lots of things happen. I watched "The Silence" last night. Now THAT was a boring movie! I'm waiting for the 3rd one from Netflix.
Summary of Through a Glass Darkly
The Oscar?-winning first film of Bergman's religious trilogy poetically studies one family's search for God in a time of crisis. Harriet Andersson is remarkable as Karin, a young woman who finds little respite from her schizophrenia when she vacations with her husband, father, and adolescent brother.Ingmar Bergman's gloomy but incisive 1961 classic about a woman's descent into madness--and the inability of her family to mitigate her pain with love--is still a stunning work. Harriet Andersson plays Karin, a psychiatric patient newly released from a hospital and staying in the island home where she found some measure of security in childhood. Instead of getting on her feet, however, Karin begins disintegrating after realizing she no longer loves her physician husband (Max von Sydow) and is being rather coldly observed by her writer father (Gunnar Bjornstrand), whose distant fascination with her plight is recorded in his daily journal. Hearing voices, believing God to be a spider, and pursuing an incestuous relationship with her brother, Karin slips into an inexorable decline, objectively witnessed by those too emotionally frozen to help. The first of Bergman's trilogy on themes of faith and isolation (the other entries being Winter Light and The Silence), Through a Glass Darkly finds the legendary Swedish filmmaker at an artistic and philosophical peak. --Tom Keogh
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