Two truths are told ...
Finished watching the first Ingmar Bergman trilogy which starts with Through a Glass Darkly today. The next two installments are Winter Light and The Silence. It's not a trilogy in the same way that we think of Star Wars as a trilogy or the Terminator movies being related to each other sequentially. It doesn't even make the loose connections that Kevin Smith's "New Jersey" films make, with their strange "interconnectedness" and with, of course, Jay and Silent Bob ... But it's a trilogy at that deep level of existential questioning, on the level of "where is God in all this"? And perhaps that is where ALL connections, if we believe in connections, find some basis, in some kind of movement toward or away Presence and Being.
The second film in the trilogy, Winter Light, is the most overtly "christian" or religious of the three. It centers on a pastor of a small village being himself unable to work out any firm belief in his God. He has a strained relationship with his mistress (or maybe we should call her his girlfriend since his wife IS dead ... but do pastors have mistresses or girlfriends ?) and is unable to provide counsel to a parishoner in distress. All this in the bleak northern Swedish winter. All this in the cramped confines of a tiny parish church with it's oppressive low ceilings and uncomfortable wooden pews.
But the open landscape provides no relief either. In one of the most powerful scenes of the film, when the pastor has to attend to a death, the setting is without respite. The roaring river muffling out any sounds of human interaction and activity; relations are reduced to a mimed sequence of polite gesturing. But it isn't because these characters have nothing to say. No, instead, WE are just never positioned to hear it. Like a distant God, who sees moving mumbling lips in prayer, trembling tired knees, strained necks and bowed heads, but never hearing humanity.
The Silence was, in my opinion, the most artistically complex of the three. A consistent choice in staging these films -- the pared down cast with only about four characters interacting with each other. The Slience takes this further by putting a young boy, his mother and his aunt in hotel, surrounded by complete strangers, who don't speak the same language as they do. In fact, Bergman was playing a strange game with this one. I don't think it's even a REAL language that the rest of the people in the film speak -- even the shots of the newspaper isn't in any recognizable European language. So a little boy wandering about the ornate interiors, playing make believe games to entertain himself, while his mother has affairs and his aunt wastes away. A strained silence, engulfs the film because there is so little dialogue.
The Silence was beautifully shot, with amazing lighting effects and camera angles. With mirrors playing off each other, smoke filled sillouettes, lone figures starkly placed against thick rich interiors, impossible closeups, partial objects -- fingers, glass, table top, water -- mingling. Atmosphere, creating a terrible nauseating implosion. Very much like Last Year at Marienbad but looser.
All this was heavy stuff. Maybe I'll take a break from Bergman tommorrow and watch something else.
Finished watching the first Ingmar Bergman trilogy which starts with Through a Glass Darkly today. The next two installments are Winter Light and The Silence. It's not a trilogy in the same way that we think of Star Wars as a trilogy or the Terminator movies being related to each other sequentially. It doesn't even make the loose connections that Kevin Smith's "New Jersey" films make, with their strange "interconnectedness" and with, of course, Jay and Silent Bob ... But it's a trilogy at that deep level of existential questioning, on the level of "where is God in all this"? And perhaps that is where ALL connections, if we believe in connections, find some basis, in some kind of movement toward or away Presence and Being.
The second film in the trilogy, Winter Light, is the most overtly "christian" or religious of the three. It centers on a pastor of a small village being himself unable to work out any firm belief in his God. He has a strained relationship with his mistress (or maybe we should call her his girlfriend since his wife IS dead ... but do pastors have mistresses or girlfriends ?) and is unable to provide counsel to a parishoner in distress. All this in the bleak northern Swedish winter. All this in the cramped confines of a tiny parish church with it's oppressive low ceilings and uncomfortable wooden pews.
But the open landscape provides no relief either. In one of the most powerful scenes of the film, when the pastor has to attend to a death, the setting is without respite. The roaring river muffling out any sounds of human interaction and activity; relations are reduced to a mimed sequence of polite gesturing. But it isn't because these characters have nothing to say. No, instead, WE are just never positioned to hear it. Like a distant God, who sees moving mumbling lips in prayer, trembling tired knees, strained necks and bowed heads, but never hearing humanity.
The Silence was, in my opinion, the most artistically complex of the three. A consistent choice in staging these films -- the pared down cast with only about four characters interacting with each other. The Slience takes this further by putting a young boy, his mother and his aunt in hotel, surrounded by complete strangers, who don't speak the same language as they do. In fact, Bergman was playing a strange game with this one. I don't think it's even a REAL language that the rest of the people in the film speak -- even the shots of the newspaper isn't in any recognizable European language. So a little boy wandering about the ornate interiors, playing make believe games to entertain himself, while his mother has affairs and his aunt wastes away. A strained silence, engulfs the film because there is so little dialogue.
The Silence was beautifully shot, with amazing lighting effects and camera angles. With mirrors playing off each other, smoke filled sillouettes, lone figures starkly placed against thick rich interiors, impossible closeups, partial objects -- fingers, glass, table top, water -- mingling. Atmosphere, creating a terrible nauseating implosion. Very much like Last Year at Marienbad but looser.
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All this was heavy stuff. Maybe I'll take a break from Bergman tommorrow and watch something else.
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