Through a Glass, Darkly

“I sat in the wreck, holding Karin, when reality cracked… reality…cracked, and I fell out. It’s like in dreams, anything can happen. Anything!”

Through as Glass Darkly is the first in a supposed Faith Trilogy (which also include Winter Light and The Silence), written and directed by Ingmar Bergman about God making contact. On an island called Faro a schizophrenic woman called Karin (Harriet Andersson) lives with her husband Martin (Max Von Sydow) and brother Minus (Lars Passgard). The father David (Gunnar Bjornstrand) is a novelist who visits his family on the island for the first time in a long while (possibly because of Karin’s recent release from an asylum), and it is his detachment from his children (Karin and Minus) that anchors the film’s emotional tension.

The core of the film revolves around Karin and the voices that speak to her, which one night lure her to an attic room in their chateaux, and to a door in the wall which Karin comes to believe is a gateway to heaven. She begins the film as a joyful, comforted girl who draws on the genuine love from her family to keep sane. However as things progress and her guilt for the burden she is to her husband becomes sharper, her mental state degenerates until she finally has an encounter with the God that she has been looking forward too. Unfortunately the God that greets her is an arachnid with a cold stone face.

Karin’s psychotic illness has not only afforded her the ability to subjectively tap into God’s line, but also to become more discerning and thus more sensitive to the repressed difficulties that exist in her family. Her fits/outbursts are like explosions of these difficulties that are trying to assimilate both the spiritual connection she believes she has and the anger towards her father’s abandonment. Throughout the film she is referred to as a child which suggests that like a child is said to be able to perceive preternatural things because of their open mind/gullibility (you choose), so can Karin because of her mental degeneration sense God around her, having the knowledge of his supposed existence to decode the messages He/She is sending her.

The two men of the film Martin and David speak of the weather conditions in such a familiar way, that they sort of personify them as though they were people who had a very important bearing on their lives. As though these conditions were parts of the character’s souls. The cinematography, as per usual in a Bergman film, is of high quality and enhances these conditions of the cold and the wind through grand shots of the ocean, sky and beach of pebbles as well as the crumbling chateaux and its annexed statues and pillars of rocks that all add to the usual feelings of isolation and clarity and create a remarkable sensation of rapture and vulnerability. The darkly grey clouds, thunderstorms and tumultuous waves circulate this. The sound of a passing ship’s foghorn becomes Karin’s “spidey-sense” as it intermittently pipes out with the squawking of seagulls; sounds that pierce the deadly quiet and take Karin away from the warmth of her shared bed with Martin and to a confused state where it is the wallpaper’s whispers and not love that promises her peace of mind. All these natural constructions are like traffic signals that aid in the characters’ movements and nature of conversation, whether it be the temperature or God.

Whether Karin’s connection to God is real or only in her imagination is left ambiguous as the viewer sees and hears what Karin does but Martin, David and Minus do not. Karin is caught between two worlds, reality and dream and because of her schizophrenic condition; her experiences are not taken seriously by her family. It is possible that Bergman is commenting on the hypocrisy of faith whereby Karin is diagnosed as insane because she has an actual connection with God when most believers follow blindly with no evidence. There seems to be a catch 22 situation when having faith, as nobody is actually seen as worthy enough to bask in God’s glow and so those that say they have are ridiculed or persecuted. Karin’s increasingly manic preoccupation with the wallpaper God is also the cause of the pressure that is being exerted on her relationship with Martin. This is not the first time that Bergman has linked faith to the failure of human relationships; neglecting the goodness or “Godness” in people for something that is unattainable.

A great scene is a trademark Bergman one, where two characters analyse one another’s virtues or lack there of. In this example we have Martin reproaching David for being a selfish and inconsiderate father who is a disgusting human being for wanting to exploit his daughter’s illness for novel material. It is these kinds of scenes that push the viewer to be self-reflective, although it is very hard to feel shame when you’re enjoying the sharp, assassinating dialogue that reveals Bergman’s misanthropism.

Max von Sydow gives a confident and reassuring performance as Karin’s stalwart husband who sticks by her side no matter how crazy or paranoid he believes she is becoming. Lars Passgard plays Minus well, showing his desperate need for affection and efforts in understanding the nature of mature relations, trying to make the transition from being a young man into an adult. Gunnar Bjornstrand is brilliant as David, a man who is self-assured but aware of his major character flaws, but who nevertheless dearly loves his children and has a long awaited but conclusive talk with his son in the final scene. Harriet Andersson is sweet, charming and in the depths of despair, playing Karin with a great affinity for her situation.

Through a Glass Darkly is about God communicating, albeit to a singular person, and how that person uses this contact in her relationships to people. Whilst this aspect is not really explored in an optimistic light (it never is with Bergman), this message is understood by David and Minus who come to realise that God is love and if Karin is in fact surrounded by God, it is because of their enveloping love for her. Karin’s disappointing and frightening encounter with the stony Spider-God of faith seems to symbolise the necessity to reject this type of faith as all it has done in this case is disturb an already disturbed young woman.

Fun Facts

Bergman originally planned to film on the Orkney Islands because of their stony landscapes but the film studio wanted to shoot somewhere closer to home and thankfully someone suggested Faro, which Bergman would also make his real-life home.

The title Through a Glass Darkly alludes to the biblical quotation, “for now we see through a glass darkly”. In an interview Bergman and Bjornstrand shed some more light on the title’s meaning when they said it referred to the fact that in Roman times, people didn’t have glass mirrors and so they used ones made of bronze metal which cast only a very dim/vague reflection.

Won an oscar for best foreign film.