Deriving Meaning from Suffering: Ingmar Bergman's Faith(less) Trilogy
God is love. God is silent. God is absent.
**Content Warning: sexual assault, suicide, child abuse.**
Karin barricades herself away in the attic for days listening to the voices coming from behind the wall. They whisper to her that someone is going to come into the room through the closet door–that God is going to come into the room through the closet door. In her mystical communion with these voices she waits, impatiently, obsessively, for God to reveal himself to her, and finally the closet door creaks open.
Long spindly legs unnaturally shuffle into the room, as a hideous shadow spider attacks her. She screams and struggles as the monster tries to penetrate her and open up her head to crawl inside. Karin’s family, listening to the screaming from downstairs, bursts into the attic, only to see Karin in an empty room panicking and writhing in pain–completely alone.
Before she is lifted up and carried away to the hospital she says, “I have seen God”.
Thus begins Swedish director, Ingmar Bergman’s first film in his Faith Trilogy: Through a Glass Darkly
Karin’s disturbing vision of God as a predator spider has her family questioning the existence of God altogether. Karin’s brother, Minus speaks to his father after Karin has left for the hospital and he revisits a different moment of Karin’s breakdown where he found her curled up in the hull of an abandoned ship,
“When I was hugging Karin in the boat, reality was revealed. Do you know what I mean?[…] Reality was revealed, and I collapsed. It's like a dream. Anything can happen. Anything. […]I can't live in this new world”.
His father says that he can live in this world as long as he has support, but Minus claims that without any proof of God, this support can’t be found. They continue their conversation and eventually discover that because love is tangible and exists in the real world, it is the only proof of the existence of God they have. His father says, “I don’t know if love is the proof of God's existence or if it's God itself”. This sentiment in in congruity with how director, Ingmar Bergman rationalized God in his own life.
Peter Cowie, a Bergman historian claims that Through a Glass Darkly (as well as the other films in the trilogy) was a method of unpacking all of the “baggage” Bergman experienced in his own strict Christian upbringing. Bergman was brought up in a conservative religious family whose parents had a strict parenting style. Frequently, Bergman would have been locked in a dark closet for small common mistakes like wetting the bed.
His father was a Lutheran minister, and thus religious imagery and discussions were frequent in his household–dissent was not allowed. In Bergman’s autobiography he claims it took him many years to finally come to terms with his loss of faith, and he only really came to terms with his disbelief in God while filming the second film in the trilogy, Winter Light.
In Through a Glass Darkly, Bergman’s compromise to himself comes in the form of an idea that God may not be an all-powerful being, but rather a positive feeling that flows through every human: Love. I know Kierkegaard is smiling down upon him at this moment.
Winter Light, the second film in the trilogy, is a story about a sick catholic pastor, Thomas, who presides over a dwindling congregation. One Sunday at his sermon there are a few people in the audience a young pregnant couple, a disabled man, and Marta, a young woman, who Thomas shyly crushes on.
The young pregnant woman brings her stoic husband into the Pastor’s office. She explains that her husband has been plagued by dread ever since the development of the atomic bomb. The husband reveals that he does not believe God can exist in a world that faces atomic annihilation, and even further more, he does not wish to live in a world without God.
The pastor, having lost his beloved wife a few years ago, sympathizes with the husband’s doubt, but he is incapable of comforting the man. His emotional stuntedness likely manifesting because he deeply understands this man’s doubt in God, and perhaps shares it.
The pastor, clearly struggling with how to respond, waffles and rants, explaining his own suffering and doubt in God. It’s clear the pastor has nothing else to offer to the man to comfort him and reaffirm his belief in God. The troubled husband quickly rushes out, embarrassed by visiting the pastor.
Later, the pastor learns that the man committed suicide shortly after visiting the church. He becomes plagued by guilt and confronted by the suffering his struggle with his faith imparts on his congregation.
The plot for the movie comes directly from an experience Ingmar Bergman had in 1959, he writes in an essay for Critereon,
“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.”
Not only does Bergman comment on the silence of God in his critique of Christianity, but he also deals with the silence of man. In Winter Light, every character that remains silent in the face of suffering, such as the pastor, or the pregnant wife upon learning of her husbands’ death, is forced to carry on their “performance despite being miserable” whether it be for their congregation, or their children (Berret).
The characters that speak up about their suffering, only find the cold indifference of the silent people, unable to comfort and help them cope with their problems. It’s as if the conversation from Through A Glass Darkly between the father and the son, discovering that God is love is no longer enough to stop the tide of suffering.
Peter Cowie, again, draws parallels to Bergman’s early life. He claims that “Bergman, the son of a strict Lutheran who listened to his father's sanctimonious sermons in church and then came home to cruel punishments” felt as though he always needed to accept his father’s teachings, but could never reconcile them with his own harsh treatment (Ebert).
The last film of the trilogy is aptly named, The Silence. Film critic, Roger Ebert, compartmentalizes the three movies in the trilogy, he says,
“If Winter Light directly referred to God’s silence, and Through a Glass Darkly did so by implication, there is no theology in The Silence—only a world bereft of it”
The story mainly follows three characters: Ester, the deathly ill translator, her sister, Anna, the young impatient seductress, and Johan, a thoughtful and angelic child of Anna who is caught in between the vices of the two sisters.
The trio arrive at a strange hotel where no one, not even the translator Ester can understand the language of the hall porter. Johan is left meandering the halls, torn in his sympathy for both his mother, and his dying aunt Ester.
Johan is a child victim of the horrors of dysfunctional family life, and he is left confused by his mother’s promiscuity and carelessness and his aunt’s needless suffering. Part of what makes The Silence so horrifying is the contrast between the sexually explicit and grave adult scenes seen through the eyes of an innocent child. With this juxtaposition, Bergman questions whether it is possible for a child to remain hopeful in the face of such chaos, dysfunction, and abuse.
The presence of religion is almost completely absent in The Silence, compared to the prior two films in the trilogy, and the focus is much more on the hopelessness of a child trying to navigate the rough waters of his disturbed reality, quietly and by himself.
By this point in the trilogy, Bergman has finally come to terms with the chaos of reality and the subsequent silence of God. In his autobiography Bergman gives this account of not only how religion harmed his mental well being, but also how the stripping of religion from his life has brought him security and serenity. He says,
“I have struggled all my life with a tormented and joyless relationship with God […] My prayers stand of anguish, entreaty, trust, loathing, and despair. God spoke, God said nothing. […] The lost hours of that operation provided me with a calming message. You were born without purpose. You live without meaning. Living is its own meaning” (Bergman, 1988).
In this quote Bergman perfectly encapsulates the ethos of existentialism, and illuminates a confusion that I often notice people have between absurdism and existentialism.
Existentialism demands that we create our own meaning in life, that can be through a self-aware belief in God, or love, or an embrace of chaos that we ourselves infuse meaning into. Absurdism rejects the notion that meaning is required for life at all. It’s an optimistic embrace of a world bereft of meaning or purpose, revealing an ultimate freedom from expectation, pressure, and karma.
If Through a Glass Darkly and Winter Light is Bergman’s reticent acceptance and exploration of an existentialist framework, The Silence is his critique and rejection of absurdism.
Suffering must mean something–must come from somewhere. If not God, than the power of the individual mind to conjure meaning from the ether– even if that meaning has terrifying implications.
Works Cited
Bergman, I. (1988). The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography. New York, NY: Viking.
Berrett, T. (2014). Ingmar Bergman: Winter Light. Retrieved December 15, 2016, from http://mookseandgripes.com/reviews/2014/03/01/ingmar-bergman-winter-light/
Collection, C. (n.d.). Through a Glass Darkly (1961) - #209. Retrieved December 15, 2016, from http://criterionreflections.blogspot.com/2012/04/through-glass-darkly-1961-209.html
Collection, C. (n.d.). Winter Light. Retrieved December 15, 2016, from https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/612-winter-light
Ebert, R. (2007). Winter Light Movie Review & Film Summary (1962) | Roger Ebert. Retrieved December 15, 2016, from http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-winter-light-1962
Ebert, R. (2008). Through a Glass Darkly Movie Review (1961) | Roger Ebert. Retrieved December 15, 2016, from http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-through-a-glass-darkly-1961
Ebert, R. (2008). The Silence Movie Review & Film Summary (1963) | Roger Ebert. Retrieved December 15, 2016, from http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-silence-1963
F. (n.d.). "Through a Glass Darkly" - Ingmar Bergman (1961). Retrieved December 15, 2016, from http://www.filmsufi.com/2013/08/through-glass-darkly-ingmar-bergman-1961.html
Kalin, Jesse (2003). The Films of Ingmar Bergman. p. 193.
Young, Barbara, The Persona of Ingmar Bergman: Conquering Demons through Film, Rowman and Littlefield, 2015, p. 96.