Through a glass darkly (1961)
Private rumination and the stage we inhabit as we interact with others, the grand play of life, our roles to ourselves and our roles toward one another. Frequent themes for Bergman, as we gather together in unison to find God, what becomes of our private relationship with the concept? What we find in private, we struggle to bring forward, to place on the altar of public knowledge, electing much of the time toward keeping our private visions as ours alone, a secret we share only with ourselves when we're left alone to wonder. When the mind is free to wander it goes to a place we can barely describe, let alone rationalize. Has the mind slipped into malfunction which medicine will cure? Or has the hand of the divine reached from beyond the curtain of our stage to touch those chosen and show them a glimpse of eternity? A crack in the wallpaper of life, whispering to we who stand on the outside. What of our works? Our novels and plays? Are they a part of the wallpaper or are they within the wall, with the voices? As minus puts it, his works flow out of him, but where does it originate? As Bergman entered the 1960's, arguably the decade which bred his most intense and personal statements, the first installment of his 'silence' trilogy was Through a Glass Darkly. The film, centering on an artist, his two children and his daughter's husband on a family getaway finds its roots in the chamber isolation of its four and only players, each isolated in their own private despair. The three blood relatives each languish in forms of self-pity, while Von Sydow provides the foil. His pity belongs to his wife, his despair is her condition which he feels helpless to mitigate. Is insanity merely the delusion that others could comprehend our private, interior thoughts? Could anyone comprehend our divine relationship with our expressions, or our God?
Von Sydow’s character is one seemingly devoid of this interior world, one who clinically approaches life as function, ready to judge the artist who hides away in their fantastical portraiture. When confronted about his dissatisfaction in the relationship by Karin he doesn’t seem to muster the imagination that things could be anything but the way they are .. or does he? Unlike Minus, Karin and Papa, we are never shown Von Sydow’s private life in any way, only as he is in relation to the others. Bergman focuses on three states of being here, each with relative depth and shallowness based on the size of the group. There is our group of four, barely together for much of the film’s runtime, a world of small talk and polite, empty gestures. In this scenario, we are doing away with ourselves, committed to the happiness of the group, only when paired off in groupings of two do we begin to scratch the surface of reality. Each confesses things to the other, and begs that their secret not be revealed, “you’re the only one who would understand” Karin tells Minus. Only in these pairings is truth told, however slight, to another person. Then there is the private, personal world, that glass darkly through which we view life, the one where truths are untested, never needing to be founded in an objective reality, only felt. The personal world is one of feeling and inclination, of imagination, and soothing rationalizations, unchallenged by the outside world; where our inner poetry flows freely and our actions can be justified through our own means, where the significance of an instant is as life and death for us, and as trivial as a child’s fantasy to others who do not share it. Karin, writhing in ecstasy in the wallpapered room, waiting for God incarnate to enter and reveal himself, attaching cosmic importance to a moment that is the ravings of a lunatic for Von Sydow. Without witnesses and without those who pull us back from our own abyss, we float freely and readily off into the ether, into madness perhaps, or perhaps we leave this mortal coil and touch the divine, who is to say for sure? No one for an instant considers that Karin may be experiencing a miraculous vision, and even Karin herself eventually loses all faith as the God reveals itself as a spider, trying to force itself inside of her. In their moments of role playing on the lamp-lit stage after dinner, they can freely exist, not having to play the role of themselves with the baggage that comes with it, the seeds of doubt sewn into each of their interactions. We know Karin is ill, Papa is distant and absent, but when Karin becomes the specter of the princess on the stage none of it matters. In their pairings they jab at one another, Karin teases minus as she discovers him with pornography, yet some lust, which no longer exists for her husband, is ignited by the experience. The incestuous longing of a broken family filled with broken people as they drift away from life and reality. Papa discusses his suicide attempt, Minus his disgust with women, Karin her desire to be alone with her voices forever. It is the utter failure of the solitary person to connect with anything outside of their private, perverse world that draws them deeper and deeper into the void at the core of their own self. The characters here pantomime human behaviors which they cannot substantiate. The ever-present sunlight and the slowly pulsating fog horn drift through us, through our bones, as an endless waking dream unfolds.
The ornate wallpaper hides the rotting wood of the wall, the wallpaper gives way as foliage and we are in another world entirely. Bergman, here only several years prior to his ultimate commentary on the cinema itself, Persona, is acutely aware of the parallels with the silver screen, Karin staring intently at a wall as dazzling images dance in her mind, in rapt attention waiting to see the conclusion to the saga of her voices and their God. Von Sydow, breaking down perhaps in pure pity for her, at the phantom images he cannot see. We, who sit in the darkened theater staring at what amounts to a brick wall with imagery and light passing over it, just as enraptured by her visions, in some way understand. Bergman dazzles us with the layers that make up a human life, the roles. Artist, too self-aware to love his creation fully. Father, too wrapped up in the artist he sees in the mirror to truly raise his children. Human being, too drawn by the darkness and perversions of life to be fully connected and honorable as an adult in the world. And then there is Karin, too much a believer to doubt, and all the time wanting something else to take responsibility for her own destructive perversions. “It was the voices”, she explains. With Through a Glass Darkly, Bergman touches the divine in his own way, finally leaving us on a note of connection rather than isolation, all of the existential pain and complicated angst suddenly alleviated by one simple gesture, ‘Papa spoke to me’.
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