Såsom i en Spegel (Through A Glass Darkly) poster & wallpaper

Harriet Andersson, Gunnar Bjornstrand, Max von Sydow

Living on a remote island a father, his son, and his married daughter find their interrelationships self-destructing.

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13 critics

Unrated, 1 hr. 29 min.

Directed by: Ingmar Bergman

Release Date: October 16, 1961

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DVD Release Date: June 29, 1994

Stats: 419 reviews

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Flixster Reviews (419)

  • emerson17
    February 5, 2009
    emerson17
    I do think Bergman's best works are black & whites; this one is just sparkling. "The god that came out was a terrible spider"... This is master work.
  • hypathio7
    January 8, 2009
    hypathio7
    Again the use of light and shadow and how the human face or scenery is viewed is wonderful. The story, the message, however just confused me. I didn't gather much meaning from watching this family of four. Karin (Andersson) and Minus (Passgard) are sister and brother. Their m...( read more)other died years ago and their father is always off traveling. Their father, David (Bjornstrand), is now back to visit. He is a writer and is almost done with his latest book. Karin is married to Martin (von Sydow) who takes care of her. Karin is losing her sanity and suffering from delusions. Supposedly her mother suffered from the same affliction, but for Karin it started around the time her mother died and her father started spending large amounts of time away from home. There are slight suggestions that some sexual trauma could be involved. Could incest be in this family's past? Maybe so, maybe not. Maybe I'm looking for similar themes (the rape in The Virgin Spring) that Bergman didn't intend. Andersson plays the role of Karin well, bouncing back and fourth between sanity and insanity, in her delusional moments writhing about in pleasure or fear. Her delusions involve God coming to visit her and a room full of good people. Her husband hopes all along that her problems can be managed and that she can live a normal life. Her father is more resigned to the fact that it will get worse before it gets better, if it gets better.

    I learned in a DVD special feature that the "artist" is a classic element of a Bergman film. Karin's father is the artist here. Martin takes moral issue with David using his daughter's problems as material for the book he is currently finishing. I really don't get why this is such a big issue and the driving force self-destructing the family in this film. I understand "using" someone for financial gain could be troublesome, but that is what artists do. Artists draw from their life experiences and people they know in creating art. In specific terms this issue could be worse, in abstract terms this isn't really an issue as presented here. Anyways, the father and son don't talk much, but at the end they have an abrupt conversation about God being all forms of love. This didn't leave me feeling complete or hopeful though, since the whole time God was part of Karin's delusions.

    I liked a couple of the lines of dialog though. If there was any meaning I got out of this it was here in these lines. David: "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." Karin: "Poor little daddy." David: "Yes, poor little daddy, forced to live in reality." I think the movie is more about delusion versus reality! And I think the movie is made in such a way as to make the general audience feel confused. Karin: "It's so horrible to see your own confusion and understand it." Ultimately, our confusion might help us connect or empathize with Karin.
  • EarthlyAlien
    October 25, 2008
    EarthlyAlien
    NOTE: This is a combined review of Ingmar Bergman's "Faith trilogy" (1961 - 1963).

    Bergman's intense, claustrophobic triptych is a challenge even to hardened cinephiles. At times almost unbearably bleak, the three films exhibit an uncanny psychological realism, som...( read more)e of Bergman's most darkly beautiful dialogue and astonishing, ground-breaking performances (particularly from Harriet Andersson and Ingrid Thulin). The director's skill in transmigrating heartbreak and internal suffering onto film has never been surpassed, and a viewer brave enough to watch these three devastating portraits of collapse will be rewarded with unforgettable insights into the fragility of happiness and the confusing, euphoric nightmare of the human condition.

    In Through a Glass Darkly a schizophrenic young woman, Karin, is holidaying with her father, brother and lover at an idyllic lakeside farmhouse. Though she believes herself to be cured, her psychiatrist and lover (Max von Sydow) confides in her father that her condition is in fact incurable, and a relapse is certain. It happens almost immediately, when the two older men go fishing and leave Karin with her younger brother. She believes she is in communion with God, but a final, harrowing psychotic break leaves her desolate and betrayed by her own hallucination, having looked at the face of the creator and seen Him morph from benign patriarch to arachnid monster.

    "It's so horrible to see your own confusion and understand it."

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    Harriet Andersson's portrayal of Karin is magnificent and subtle. At times she is carefree and chipper as a giddy child, comforting her brother and lover (to whom she is no longer sexually attracted) with maternal grace. But her transports of delirium and subsequent account of the nefarious "spider-god" (a theme carried through to Winter Light) are painfully believable. In the cold post-delusional light of day she is partly aware of what has actually transpired (roaming the house at night in a state of psychosexual intoxication, making incestuous advances toward her brother), and her attempts to reconcile this with the hellish illusions of her misfiring brain are heart-rending.

    Winter Light follows the metaphysical turmoil of a priest (Gunnar Björnstrand), his spurned lover (Ingrid Thulin) and a faithless fisherman (Max von Sydow). Each is so trapped in their own inescapably selfish anguish that they amplify the suffering of the others.

    "The passion of Christ, his suffering... wouldn't you say the focus on his suffering is all wrong?"

    The pastor's disgust at his own hypocrisy - preaching fatuous platitudes he has long since ceased to believe in - moves him to reject his lover with a misplaced ferocity that borders on psychological torture. The troubled fisherman comes to the pastor for spiritual help, but finds no comfort from the self-absorbed cleric and kills himself, leaving behind a wife and two children. So solipsistically preoccupied are the pastor and his unfulfilled suppliant that they react to news of the tragedy with indifference.

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    Björnstrand's and Thulin's performances are stunning. We should hate the pastor for the sadistic relish with which he humiliates his partner, likening her to a "junkyard of circumstance." Yet he is himself so clearly in pain that we cannot but feel some sympathy for him. Thulin, for her part, turns in one of cinema's most moving portrayals of unrequited love as the heartsick schoolmistress. In its way her mind is as unsound as Karin's in the earlier film: the object of her unconditional, disproportionate, non-reciprocal affection is a cold, self-hating husk of a man who feels nothing for her but distaste.

    What Bergman suggests in Winter Light is that suffering is, at bottom, a lone activity. Or worse, a virus which begets more of itself in others. Yet there is hope, of a sort. After Thulin's brutal dressing-down by Björnstrand?s priest, she does not break down in the traditional sense. Instead she acquires a grim, metallic resolve. She will not stop loving him, as it is out of her control to do so. But now that she knows he does not love her, she will at least stop wasting time petitioning him. She will abide, see life through to the end. Who knows but that some eleventh-hour happiness awaits her.

    Though the first two films have more in common with each other than with The Silence, the third film continues the themes of spiritual desolation and that special kind of hurt that only the beloved can inflict. Two sisters, Anna (Gunnel Lindblom) and Ester (Ingrid Thulin again) are holidaying in an unnamed Eastern European country with Anna's son Johan. Their hotel appears to be empty except for them, a kindly old concierge and a troupe of Spanish dwarf acrobats.

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    It is revealed, ambiguously and without a hint of exposition, that there is a seething resentment between the sisters, based on perceived intellectual snobbery (the elder, ailing Ester is better educated), a dark past event involving their father, and Ester's unrequited incestuous love for Anna. Anna feels suffocated by Ester's illness and her and Johan's need for attention, and flees to a club where she picks up and sleeps with a local man. In one of the film's most potent scenes, Anna 'confesses' her hatred for Ester to the man, with whom she does not share a language.

    She proceeds to stage another tryst, cruelly inviting Ester to watch. Reprising her character in Winter Light, Thulin's Ester reacts with stoic, static despair, having earlier exhausted her stores of anger and indignation in dealing (mainly through alcohol) with her terminal illness. Johan, too young to feel the animosity of the sisters as anything more than vague disquiet, tries in vain to console both.

    The Silence introduces a surrealist tone which attenuates the stifling theatrical atmosphere of the earlier films. The hotel backdrop, the dwarf acrobats and the invented language of the signage and the concierge give the first half-hour an almost Buñuel/Cocteau feel. There is more variety in settings, more motion of Sven Nykvist's camera and of what it's shooting. Whether this benefits the film is debatable - all the baroque scaffolding falls away anyhow as the sisters' mutual hostility escalates.

    The film was a censorship landmark because of scenes of nudity and disturbingly graphic sexual dialogue. Even by today's limitlessly permissive standards, it has the power to shock and upset. But once again, there is a hidden moral kernel. In concealing most of the sisters' backstory, Bergman cautions us against judging even the most callous acts. Anna's behaviour seems cruel, but as with the pastor we cannot label her as unconditionally bad because we do not know what happened between her and Ester in the past. We know only that it must have been dreadful enough to kill Ester literally and Anna, delinquent mother and emotional sadist, figuratively.

    "I didn't want to accept my wretched role. But now it's too damn lonely. We try out attitudes and find them all worthless. The forces are all too strong. I mean the forces... the horrible forces. You need to watch your step among all the ghosts and memories. All this talk... there's no need to discuss loneliness. It's a waste of time."

    In Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, Patricia quotes William Faulkner: "Between grief and nothing I will take grief." This paradoxically positivist clamping onto life, however painful, pervades Bergman's masterful trilogy. If you would take grief and pain over nothing, and can see beauty in ugliness beautifully portrayed, these films will leave you reeling with truth.
  • IfeellikeGregorSamsa
    September 13, 2008
    IfeellikeGregorSamsa
    "Through A Glass Darkly", first installment of "Silence of God" trilogy is also the first picture in which Bergman seems to see the way out of our daily misfortunes and suffering. Even though it may seem like a line of light when it's raining for a month now.

    On the surface, "T...( read more)hrough A Glass Darkly" is a very presice, cold and bleak picture, dealing with one of the most difficult themes to put on the screen: mental illness. Bergman, as wise and brilliant as he really was, comes out of it splendidly, not focusing on mental pain, but more eagerly on people around the sufferer as he understands that it's impossible to show the pain of schizophrenia.

    As it is made in "chamber fashion", we have 24 hours and 4 people and it's really enough for all the drama. The script is perfectly written here and the world of the 4 family members as complex and as human as it always was in Bergman's cinematic world. We have Karin, latent schizophrenic and her responsible, straight-thinking, loving husband, Martin. Then her father, egoistic second-rate writer, David and his son, shy and fragile Minus. Karin is in the center, determining the drama of others. The worst situation would be Martin's, who, because of his love can't make himself believe that Karin' condition is uncurable, which makes him suffer a great deal. Then David, who repressed all of his emotions toward Karin, having the memory of her mother, who also suffered from the condition. He now lives in the state of quiet despair. And finally, son, Minus, desperate for attention of his father, spending his time with Karin, not understanding her mental state, becomes more and more confused and lonely.

    The inevitable mental breakdown of Karin makes her father change perspective about himself and his family. It's tough, but maybe that's exactly how it is: maybe the only thing we really have here are our emotions. Maybe we only have ourselves, and, finally, maybe love and God are the same thing after all, and therefore we should care for it and embrace it. When you have young confused son, hungry for contact and affection, this is the most beautiful thing you can say to him, i.e. give him hope, comfort. The look of his eyes and the smile are priceless then.

    While Bergman impressed me more in few occasions, such as in masterful "Persona", he clearly is in a top form as filmmaker here. I hate when cinema gives me hope, if only because very rarely the art make a real difference in our endurance to stay sane and sober or simply have a damn common sense, but when someone like Bergman give me a hand, it's hard not to take it, not to trust him. It simply makes you breathe a little better.
  • kenstachnik
    December 16, 2007
    kenstachnik
    BLah Blah Blah Beautiful Photography Blah Blah Blah God is Silent Blah Blah Blah I just can't get excited about solemn Swedish social situations
  • sleepykiss
    December 5, 2009
    sleepykiss
    Finally found a copy. Great performances, especially from HAndersson. Mental illness & parental abuse always makes good film subjects.
  • CloudIsAMonkey
    July 21, 2009
    CloudIsAMonkey
    Funny. Usually I just use sunglasses but a "glass darkly" probably works just as well...
  • notspam555
    May 30, 2009
    notspam555
    I don't understand why this and Winter Light make the list but not the superior, The Silence, from 1963. Oh well.
  • jimbotender
    April 27, 2009
    jimbotender
    Magnifico Bergman,a splendid anatomy of the human remorse and parental arrogance.God isn't a disbeliever rather the entity on our heroine's interior expedition.The Oscars awarded it foreign language film.So what?The best should have been the ultimate prize,but you see,it's a joke...( read more),language restrictions I suppose...
  • wkt
    February 20, 2009
    wkt
    Very good movie about a young girl's descent into madness, starkly filmed in black and white.

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