Through a Glass Darkly (1961) - film review

Four family members arrive on a remote island to spend a few days in each other’s company.  They consist of David, a renowned author who is working on the final draft of a novel, his daughter Karin, his son Minus and Karin’s husband, Martin.  Karin suffers from mental illness and has only just been released from a psychiatric establishment.  Although she appears normal, she is already showing signs of decline – she flirts with Minus, has a habit of disappearing and begins to have strange hallucinations.  Martin is concerned not just by Karin’s behaviour but by his father-in-law’s emotional detachment...

With its stark minimalist composition and austere yet strangely alluring presentation, Through a Glass Darkly is a quintessentially Bergman-esque study in those essential components of human experience – love, faith and hope.  It is the first in a remarkable series of three films (the others being Winter Light and The Silence) in which director Ingmar Bergman explores Man’s relationship with God with great depth, sincerity and compassion.

The film involves just four characters – a young woman, Karin, who is a victim of recurring bouts of mental illness, and the three men who are linked to her by an undying, unspoken bond of love – her father, her husband and her brother.  Karin’s illness is the mechanism by which the three men grow to realise the awesome power of love and come to see this as proof for the existence of God.

Whilst the film is not flawless (the plot feels contrived, the acting performances not entirely convincing), Through a Glass Darkly is nonetheless a profoundly moving piece of cinema and was well-received on its first release (it won the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 1961).  It was shot on the island of Faro in the Baltic Sea, a location whose raw natural beauty (captured marvellously by cinematographer Sven Nykvist) serves the film perfectly.  (Bergman so loved the island that he later made it his permanent home.)   The bleak tranquility of the setting and the strange, unreal quality of its summer light exposes the unease in the minds of the protagonists as they look inwards and read the truth painted on their soul’s dark mirror.

The most interesting and believable characters are Minus and his father, David.   The relationship between the two men is evidently strained as a result of the latter’s preoccupation with his work – David has effectively sacrificed family love in his pursuit of a successful literary career.  The author finds it much easier to write about love than to actually experience love for himself.  His interest in his mentally ill daughter Karin is one of professional detachment – she is not much more than subject material for another novel.

Minus, by contrast, has a great yearning for love. Despite his obvious youth and apparent clownish naivety, he is far more perceptive in human relationships than his father (as the "play within the play" cleverly reveals).  When he cannot win love from his father, he focuses his attentions on his sister, and the result is inevitable – an incestuous relationship which only makes matters worse for everyone.  Karin and Martin are pretty well minor players (perhaps merely cyphers) in the drama, the main thrust of which is a father waking up to the presence of his own son, and in so doing realising what it means to love another human being.

© James Travers 2007


This first part of Bergman’s religious trilogy is dedicated to the hypothetical moment in the history of human existential sensitivity when, as a result of disappointment in their own psychological condition, human beings develop the need for relationships with God.  The geographically and historically universal setting of rural Sweden became a place where Bergman analyzes the specific constellation of human intimate relationships that gives birth to God.

Karin, daughter of a fiction writer, wife of a physician and elder sister of a teenage brother, is looking for existentially spiritual relationships and is frustrated by the father’s inability to understand her, by the husband’s inability to love her and by the incestuous encounter with her brother (vitality is not enough for the human soul).

By the incredible power of her character and by her rare gift to expect spirituality to be present inside the very living, Karin constructs the God of her needs and voluntarily accepts the psychiatric label for her condition.  She is a personification of human genius that disagrees with the absence in life of that which is fully present in God.  The characters of this film, including Karin herself, are all extraordinary in their own ordinariness, in their very weakness of being irreparably human.

Read the article The Passion for Spirituality of Living at: www.actingoutpolitics.com

© Victor (Seattle, USA) 2010

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