Rating: 4/5
Criterion Challenge 2024 | 45/52 | 1960s
A pond of water catches a single ripple. Karin, her husband, Martin, her father, David, and her younger brother, Minus, leave the water and wade to the jetty. They climb the rocky beach to the vacation cottage where they are staying.
Martin and David talk of putting out the nets, pretending the cold that coats them isn’t so bad. David is almost finished with his book—he’s been in Switzerland writing it for some time now. Martin realizes that David did not get a letter regarding Karin. Once they’ve rowed out, they discuss Karin’s recent stint in a mental hospital. Karin’s psychologist suggested that she may never recover. Still, Martin loves her and will stay by her side.
Karin and Minus grab the milk can. She hears a cuckoo, but Minus doesn’t hear it. Karin blames her illness, or perhaps the electroshock therapy, as the cause of her acute hearing. Minus earnestly talks about his father’s writing, causing Karin to laugh and grab his cheeks. Minus pulls away abruptly, upset by Karin’s physical touch. He chastises her for hugging and kissing him and for sunbathing half-naked. Karin pities Minus’s frustration with women, which only angers him further.
Over dinner that evening, David announces that he will be leaving on yet another trip to write despite promising otherwise. He retreats to the cottage to cry. When he returns, the others blindfold him and take him to a makeshift stage, on which the other three perform a small play for David called The Artistic Haunting or The Tomb of Illusions. The play focuses on an artist who does not create and would die for a ghost. Although he praises the others for their work, David takes offense, assuming the artist is him.
Oblivion shall own me, and death alone shall love me.
Karin and Martin, when alone, talk of the sounds that only Karin hears and Martin’s assurance that these sounds are all in her head. She doesn’t believe him, though. Martin tries to initiate sex, but Karin pulls away and says goodnight. Later that night, Karin believes she hears a foghorn in the attic, so she investigates. While there, she puts her ears against the wallpaper, hearing people whisper behind it.
The film follows these threads over 24 hours and watches the consequences unfold.
The sets have a set-like minimalism, and Bergman blocks certain scenes like a stage play. The film’s three distinct acts also mirror a play.
Harriet Andersson is so brilliant in this. Of course, Björnstrand and von Sydow are great but pale in comparison. Lars Passgård is fine, but there’s a reason he isn’t in any other Bergman films.
The title of the film comes from 1 Corinthians 13—a subsection Christian weddings often use: <blockquote>Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy; it does not boast; it is not proud.</blockquote>
And so on. Later in the section that this film derives its name from:
For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child. But, when I became a man, I put away childish things. We see now through a glass, darkly, but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also am known.
This passage suggests a partial insight into the way of the world that we will know in full once we are in heaven. These concepts play out in the movie themes in several ways. In some ways, Minus is the child who has not yet put down childish things. He experiences the separation from his father that the author of 1 Corinthians felt from God. Minus wishes his father would talk to him just once. Then Minus might know how much of his father he sees.
Karin’s illness (perhaps schizophrenia, though it isn’t stated explicitly in the movie) allows her to hear voices that no one else does. Has she been granted a divine right to the word of God? Is she experiencing the maddening words of the devil? Or are these merely aspects of her illness? Her relationship with Minus distorts the notion of “brotherly love.” As she comes to distrust Martin and David, this leaves Minus, to whom she confides her unusual thoughts.
Martin wishes to embody the patient and kind love that 1 Corinthians 13 suggests. Though, like many believers, part of him seems only to want to do so because he fears the world without her. When Karin learns of the incurable nature of her condition, she pushes Martin to find love elsewhere, though perhaps unintentionally. David is more overt in his push for Martin to avoid what David considers to be “unnecessary suffering.”
David builds a theory that God is love, and love is God. In this way, he wishes to give meaning to his life and counter his son’s message from the play that “death alone shall love him.” Though the film ends on this idea, Bergman returns to it in an almost mocking way in Winter Light—he said in interviews that he regretted how he ended Through a Glass Darkly, suggesting that he had created “a diffuse veneer of love all over it.”
However, these sentiments also reflect Bergman’s self-concept as an exploitative filmmaker who cannot create art without drawing from his own life. As David sees the artist as himself in Minus’ play, Bergman sees himself as David, too. This remorseless self-regard informs the cold, inhuman touch of so many of his movies. This austere reflection on mortality and meaning may feel humorless, even quaint. But the humanity that pours through these characters still feels alive today.