Words Versus “the Word”: Language and Scripture in Ingmar Bergman’s Films and Writings

The Duality of Seeing “Darkly”:Analyzing Bergman’s Karin in Through a Glass Darkly Christina Boyles (bio) While many scholars praise Ingmar Bergman’s film trilogy—Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence—they tend to disregard the contradictory views on gender within these films. However, each of these films explores how men and women interact with one another. Though women play a prominent role in each part of the trilogy, Through a Glass Darkly is especially significant because its plot revolves around Karin, a woman who is treated as both powerless and powerful. In fact, the duality of Karin’s existence is the very essence of the film: in the eyes of the men in her family, she is an object used to satisfy male desire; but, in the narrative of the film, she is the autonomous catalyst of male redemption. In Through a Glass Darkly, Bergman intentionally highlights the duality of woman as both object and autonomous being, an idea which is outlined by Slavoj Zizek in his article “Woman as a Symptom of Man”; by emphasizing Karin’s duality, Bergman reveals how Karin’s ontology is both disregarded by the men in her family and embraced by the narrative of the film. While many scholars have written on Karin, their analyses have been oversimplified and reductive. Analyzing Karin’s duality, however, more clearly captures Bergman’s intent: to highlight the ways in which women function as both subject and object in patriarchal world of his films. For Bergman, the God’s Silence trilogy presents a male-dominated world in which women are silent, or forced into submission, who find their voices by subverting social norms. In Through a Glass Darkly, Karin’s subversive visions of God provide her with an escape from misuse at the hands of the men. Similarly, in Winter Light, Marta, who is symbolic of Martha, suffers and subverts Thomas’ world by still loving him when he pushes her away. In the Bible, Martha is the sister of Mary and Lazarus, and is the first to meet Jesus when he comes to raise Lazarus from the dead. In all later depictions of Martha, her servitude is emphasized. For example, in John 12:2 and Luke 10:40, Martha serves meals to her community. The most significant passage on Martha, however, is John 11:20–27 which states: [End Page 17] Then Martha, as soon as she heard that Jesus was coming, went and met him: but Mary sat still in the house. Then said Martha unto Jesus, Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died. But I know, that even now, whatsoever thou wilt ask of God, God will give it thee. Jesus saith unto her, Thy brother shall rise again. Martha saith unto him, I know that he shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day. Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this? She saith unto him, Yea, Lord: I believe that thou art the Christ, the Son of God, which should come into the world.1 Here, Martha’s devotion to God is underscored. Her role as the faithful servant is reflected in Winter Light’s Marta, who attempts to imbue her love interest Thomas, symbolic of doubting Thomas, with the faith he needs to grow in his relationship with God. At the end of the film, Thomas is about to preach a sermon to his congregation, but no one shows up to listen except Marta. Her presence, however, subverts of Thomas’ expectations and, as such, distinguishes her voice from those around her. As such, Marta becomes the center of the film and the character around whom hope flourishes. While there is also a subversive female character, Anna, in The Silence, she is not symbolic of hope, but rather of pain. Noticeably, Anna, her sister Ester, and her son Johan, are traveling home when they decide to stop in the fictional town of Timoka. While here, Ester isolates herself in her hotel room while Anna...

Born: July 14, 1918, Uppsala, Uppsala lan, Sweden Died: July 30, 2007, Faro, Gotlands lan, Sweden Ingmar Bergman was not only Sweden's but also one of the world's most important filmmakers of the twentieth century. He was an artist with extraordinary breadth, also an author, dramaturge, and director of theatre and opera. Music was the foremost inspiration throughout his life. In Sweden, Bergman's position, not least as a filmmaker, was undeniably paradoxical. On the one hand, he was hailed and canonized, whilst on the other, constantly questioned and regarded as being too complex, too private, and too theatrical. Following his death, his notability is fully recognized. From an international perspective, the picture of Bergman is uniform, synonymous with Swedish film. What made Bergman unique was, not least, the long span of his working career, which was framed by two periods of writing: the first as a screenwriter in the 1940s and then, toward the end of his career, writing deeply personal works which, having left filmmaking behind him, allowed others to direct. But perhaps the most striking fact is that his films, however headstrong, integrate fully with film history, from the silent era when Victor Sjostrom's films were an enormous influence, and through the following decades. Bergman was one of those directors who, with an insatiable voracity, fed off film, eagerly watching films over and over again, and allowing himself to be inspired by what he had seen to make his own. For Bergman, the 1940s was the most important decade for experimentation, when he learned his craft through testing, discarding, and trying anew. It could well be that none of the earlier films from Crisis to Prison or Thirst, are particularly distinguished in themselves, but in them he experiments with style, for example, flashbacks or themes and central narratives that deal with alienation, all of which recur in his later films. In reality the films of the 1940s present the key to Bergman's breakthrough. It takes years of apprenticeship to achieve mastery, a luxury very few filmmakers are granted in such a costly enterprise. International recognition came in the 1950s after some considerable difficulties, amongst which Bergman left Svensk Filmindustri for Sandrews in order to make Sawdust and Tinsel with its stark portrayal of the artist's suffering which lay close to his own heart. But after films such as The Seventh Seal, Smiles of a Summer Night, or Wild Strawberries, which reaffirmed Swedish film internationally, restraint was at last cast aside. Most strikingly, perhaps, is that Smiles of a Summer Night, a comedy, won the director's prize at Cannes. The difficult and introspective brooding had evidently added strings to his bow, as the classic lift scene in Waiting Women had shown three years earlier. The contrast between the light colors and the commanding lightness of tone with darker passages often dominated interpretations of the director's work which became evident in the 1950s. Another turning point came in 1960 when Bergman discovered Faro, the significance of which can only be measured in retrospect. It is as if the barren island landscape, which became the setting for a long series of films beginning with Through a Glass Darkly, revealed an expression that had lain dormant in scenes set by the sea in earlier films, such as Sawdust and Tinsel and The Seventh Seal, and had at last found a home. Bergman's narratives were finally anchored in their appropriate element. It was during this decade that it became clear that Bergman's films had started to challenge filmic conventions. In a period which produced a new international generation of filmmakers for whom documentary simplicity was the order of the day, Bergman continued to make such deeply personal films as Winter Light, The Silence, Persona, Hour of the Wolf, and The Shame as if the rest of the world ceased to exist. In certain respects these were extremely unfashionable films, and it was no coincidence that during these years Bergman's premieres gave rise to fierce media debates. …

The Virgin Spring and The Seventh Seal: A Girardian Reading William Mishler Of his more than forty films, Ingmar Bergman has set two in the Middle Ages—The Seventh Seal (Det sjunde inseglet, 1956) and The Virgin Spring (Jungfrukällan, 1959), the latter based on an early ballad and utilizing a screenplay that he co-authored with Ulla Isaksson—which together form an instructive pair. The former, of course, represents his breakthrough as a director of international reputation. Though heralded by the powerful Sawdust and Tinsel from 1953, The Seventh Seal was his first unquestionable masterpiece. It was a film that to Bergman's own amazement "swept like a forest fire across the world."1 Today it continues to maintain its preeminent position with both audiences and critics. The Virgin Spring, however, is a different matter. Compared to his best work as a director, it has been judged a relative failure, first and foremost by Bergman himself. Initially elated by the film,2 he later became sharply critical of it. In an interview from 1970, he stated: "Now I want to make it quite plain that The Virgin Spring must be regarded as an aberration. It's touristic, a lousy imitation of Kurosawa."3 And in his autobiography, The Magic Lantern, he neglects even to mention the film4 and thus tacitly removes it from among the works by which he evidently wishes to be recognized as a director. Bergman's condemnation of The Virgin Spring is in my view excessive. Taken simply on its own terms, it possesses an undeniable power and presents sequences of great visual interest. On the other hand, it is true, the film is a far less captivating work than The Seventh Seal, less surprising to watch and less challenging to think about afterwards. Bergman locates its flaw at the conceptual level, and in my opinion he is correct to do so. After all, there is nothing amiss with the film's actors or technical resources, which are nearly identical to The Seventh Seal's. Speci106 William Mishler107 fically, Bergman locates The Virgin Spring's problem in what he intriguingly calls its "totally unanalysed idea of God."5 In the present essay I would like to open up this "totally unanalysed idea" first of all because I believe that it will hand us an important key for understanding the disparity in artistic quality between the two films and also, I hope, provide some insight into the connecting logic of Bergman's work as a director and screenwriter. To carry out this inquiry I will draw on the work of the literary critic and anthropologist René Girard, whose theories concerning the function of religion in human society strike me as offering a powerfully articulated parallel to the psychological and anthropological insights implicitly present in many of Bergman's films. I It is important in regard to the matter of religion to distinguish the two senses in which the subject is particularly relevant to Bergman—i.e., the personal and the ethical. There is on the one hand the Christianity of his childhood which shadowed him well into adulthood. As the son of a strict Lutheran pastor, Bergman grew up in an atmosphere pervaded by Christian theology and Christian habits of thought from which, as an artist, he struggled mightily to free himself. This endeavor is particularly noticeable in the films of his middle period, extending from The Seventh Seal through the so-called trilogy of Through a Glass Darkly (Sâsom i en spegel, 1961), Winter Light (Nattvardsgästern, 1963), and The Silence (Tystnaden, 1963). These last three record the progressive stages in an examination and rejection of the notion of God as a sufficient response to the ills of the world. Bergman has called the trilogy a "reduction," thereby pointing to the tight interlinkage among the films, each taking the minimal optimism of its predecessor, its faint glimmer of theistic possibility, and subjecting it to destructive scrutiny. By the end of the trilogy, the notion of God even as resonant absence or significant silence has been expunged. In The Silence the trio of the film's principal characters are carried deeper and deeper into a gritty...