xii What's past's Prelude

I'll admit that the viewing I've been doing the past couple of days has been leading up to my proposed project-- to get acquainted with Ingmar Bergman's films.

Till today, the only Bergman film that I've watched (and owned, this being my second DVD purchase, Farewell to my Concubine being the first) was The Seventh Seal. I've always liked it. It's harsh cinematography -- stylized symbolic moments -- against other relatively naturalistic episodes. A true mingling of high and low in the dance of death.

So I began today, to explore Bergman, to know him better. And I thought I'd look at something from around the same time as The Seventh Seal.

What strikes a dweller of the tropics is the strange eternal daylight of Through a Glass Darkly. It's supposed to be night but these are the Northernmost lattitudes, where it is almost always sun in the summer. The austere setting -- a scenic rocky coast where a lone rural holiday retreat -- evokes that realm of the outside. Outside what? An exteriority, sky and sea reflecting clouds, that cannot be placed within. In this "outside" of surfaces, Bergman delves into the heart of existential angst -- Where is God?

It might seem silly for a film to so overtly deal with an agnostic nightmare. Afterall, it was/is post-45 and God is Dead. But IS God Dead? The question must be asked both ways. We often think of the consequences of a Dead God. But what if God is not Dead, what if he is alive and well, and waiting to judge, waiting, like a spider (and this is the protagonist's conclusion) to enter one's body but then to not enter. To see the Face of God and then to realize one's God is not the God you grew up struggling with. A summer retreat. A writer, his two children, his son-in-law. One of his children, afflicted with a mental illness. The hypocrisy that emerges from the best of intentions. Yet all drawn together wondering Where IS God? A writer who WILL use the degeneration of his daughter's mind as fodder for his next novel. A husband unable to penetrate the decaying mind of his wife.

A younger brother -- and this isn't clear but I think it happens -- who finds himself incestuously involved with his sister, in the moment of her mania. Where is God in this?

To the cannibalized daughter, the impenetrable wife, the desiring sister, God is in the slit behind the wallpaper in the mildewed room on the top floor of the house. The voices draw her there and there she sees the face of God. God is a spider.

And this is a beginning. It's part of a trilogy that Bergman put out in which he thinks about God. And it's supposed to be the affirmative beginning ...