Sweden drama
1963
bw 80 min.
Director: Ingmar Bergman
CLV: $49.95 - available
           1 disc, catalog # CC1406L
VHS: available from Home Vision Cinema
Like Quattrocento Italian
painting, Ming porcelain, or the late quartets of Beethoven, Bergman's
"chamber" films are an acquired taste. Winter Light represents the
Swedish director's most concentrated inquiry into the significance of religion,
and of Lutheranism in particular. Does it, can it, have any relevance in a world
where--at least in 1962--the nuclear threat hangs indiscriminately over mankind?
Or where one individual cannot show compassion to his lover? Immaculately shot
by Sven Nykvist, acted with extraordinary intensity by the entire cast, and by
Gunnar Björnstrand and Ingrid Thulin in particular, Winter Light
clasps us by the throat with numbed fingers and demands a response. Gone is the
baroque imagery, the grandiose dialogue of Bergman's 1950s classics like The
Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries. Bergman, much influenced at this
period by his Estonian wife, the pianist Käbi Laretei, whittles down his
style to a level at which every word resonates with significance, every shot is
unblinking, and every performance is so authentic as to make us shift
uncomfortably in our seats. Gunnar Björnstrand, playing the cowardly pastor,
himself fell sick during the shooting and managed to complete his role only under
doctor's orders, and beneath the relentless gaze of Bergman.
"In
1959," Bergman told Vilgot Sjöman during the production, "my wife and
I went to say hello to the pastor who had married us. On the way, in the village
shop, we saw his wife talking very seriously to a schoolgirl. When we reached the
vicarage, the pastor told us that this little girl's father had just committed
suicide. The pastor had had several conversations with him earlier, but to no
avail." From such a small incident Bergman weaves the texture of his tale, in
which one man's suicide induces a spiritual crisis for the local pastor and his
mistress.
While preparing Winter Light, Bergman visited several
churches in Uppland (just north of Stockholm) and sat for an hour or two in each
one, seeking inspiration for the close of the film. One Sunday, he asked his
father to accompany him. As they waited for a communion service to begin on a
chill spring morning in one particular small church, the pastor declared that he
was ill and could not preside over a full service. Bergman's father hurried out
to the vestry, and soon afterwards the communion began, with Pastor Erik Bergman
assisting his sick colleague. "Thus," recalls the director in his
autobiography, "I was given the end of Winter Light and the
codification of a rule I have always followed and was to follow from then on:
Irrespective of everything, you will hold your communion. It is important to the
churchgoer, but even more important to you."
Winter Light unfolds
in a rigorous time span of just a few hours, from Sunday morning communion in one
church to the start of an afternoon service at another close by. Its language and
metaphors may be those of the established church, but it explores human
relationships with a candor that goes way beyond Christianity. Tomas is a pitiful
figure because he cannot choose between a worldly love (offered him almost with
the forlorn, ailing Märta) and the unattainable ideal implied in the
religious dogma he intones before the altar.
When the anxious fisherman, Jonas
Persson (Max von Sydow) comes to him in the vestry for reassurance, Tomas can do
nothing but depress him still further. In baring his own misgivings, in lamenting
his own situation rather than comprehending the fisherman's, this doubting Tomas
propels the man toward suicide. The pastor even admits to Jonas that he does not
himself believe in God's existence, and, when his unfortunate parishioner has
left the church, he turns to Märta and says, with shocking complacency,
"Now I'm free."
Later, before the service at Frostnäs Church, it
becomes clear through a superb dialogue with his sideman, Algot Frövik, that
Tomas resembles the disciples who understood nothing during their three years in
the company of Jesus, and who deserted him in his hour of need.
Bergman takes
more risks in this film than in any other, with the possible exception of
Persona. Not only does he commit to it some of the most searing lines ever
written for the screen (for example, Tomas's rejection of Märta as they sit
together in the deserted schoolroom), but he shoots the picture with an
uncompromising severity that demands total concentration from the spectator. In
the opening sequence, the camera scrutinizes each churchgoer in close-up, and
then from afar as they shuffle up to the altar rail for Communion; they appear
frail, almost disjointed like puppets on a string, and in desperate need of
comfort.
Ingrid Thulin's reading of her letter to Tomas (Chapter 8) is an
extraordinary scene; her face seems to project every nuance of the words she is
reciting and to express her sentiments with a frankness beyond the reach of the
evasive, shifty-eyed Tomas. Not for nothing does the original title of the film
translate as "The Communicants." For Bergman here as so often elsewhere,
the irony of life is people's failure to communicate with one another. When Tomas
arrives at the riverside to attend the corpse of Jonas Persson, the incessant
boom of the nearby rapids drowns out the conversation between the police and the
pastor, as well as seeming to blur his emotional response.
There are other
subtleties, too. Tomas and his churchwardens address each other in the third
person, emphasizing the distance between them as well as the hierarchical
structure of orthodox religion. As the worshippers kneel before the altar for
Communion, they might as well be accepting medicine from a doctor as bread and
wine from the priest. (And later in the film, Märta offers Tomas aspirins and
cough mixture in much the same way . . .)
Film buffs who know Bergman's
earlier film, Through a Glass Darkly, will note the organist's scornful
dismissal of that work's conclusion: "God is love, love is God." Indeed
Winter Light stands as a bridge between Through a Glass Darkly and
The Silence, as well as Bergman's farewell to his own religious
upbringing. Some might call it an exorcism . . .
--Peter Cowie
CREDITS
Directed and written by: Ingmar
Bergman
Photography: Sven
Nykvist
Assistants: Rolf Holmqvist, Peter
Wester
Sound: Stig
Flodin
Assistant: Brian
Wikström
Music: extracts from
Swedish psalms
Art Direction: P.A.
Lundgren
Editing: Ulla Rhyge