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Winter Light
1962 Drama
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Credits
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Director: Ingmar Bergman
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Script: Ingmar Bergman
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Photo: Sven Nykvist
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Cast: Ingrid Thulin (Märta Lundberg,
Schoolteacher),
Gunnar Björnstrand (Tomas Ericsson,
Pastor),
Gunnel Lindblom (Karin Persson),
Max von Sydow (Jonas Persson),
Allan Edwall (Algot Frövik,
Sexton),
Kolbjörn Knudsen (Knut Aronsson,
Warden),
Olof Thunberg (Fredrik Blom,
Organist),
Elsa Ebbesen (Magdalena Ledfors,
Widow)
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Country: Sweden
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Language: Swedish
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Runtime: 81 min; B&W
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Aka: Nattvardsgästerna
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Summary
Tomas Ericsson is the pastor of a small rural church in a Swedish village. After
a sparsely attended service, one of his parishioners, Jonas, admits to having doubts about
the existence of God. This causes Tomas to examine his own beliefs and he suddenly
realises that everything he has dedicated his life to – God, Christ, the Church – is one
great lie. This emotional release drives him to open his heart to Märta, a
spinster who has hoped to take the place of his dead wife. Unable to withhold the
truth any longer, Tomas reveals his true feelings for the unfortunate woman…
Review
Winter Light is the second chapter in Ingmar
Bergman’s trilogy of "chamber films" which explore faith and Man’s relationship with God
in the twentieth century. Sandwiched between
Through a Glass Darkly and
The Silence, Winter Light
is a bleak, existentialist work which allowed Bergman to draw on his own personal
experiences and to express the spiritual conflict he had endured in the years which preceded
the making of this film.
Like the central figure in this film, Bergman (the son of a Lutheran minister) was
brought up a Christian without having first experienced the need for God in his own life.
His faith was essentially borrowed, foist upon him by others, not acquired through his
own spiritual yearning and intellectual examination of himself and the world around him.
As Bergman shows in this film, such a faith has no foundation and cannot endure – it will
crumble and decimate the soul, will cause the “believer” to live a life weighed down by
heavy doubts and an increasing certainty that his entire life is founded on a lie.
Such is the subject matter for Winter Light,
Bergman’s gloomiest, most introspective, most perfect film. Whereas Through
a Glass Darkly has a noticeably optimistic tone, with a group of unhappy characters
gradually realising there may after all be a God, Winter
Light is the antithesis, a work that implies the only way man can comprehend the
world is by denying the existence of God. The first film is a parable of instinctive
love, the second one of reasoned hate. When the scales finally fall from Tomas’s
eyes he not only discovers he has no God, he also realises that his own existence is a
meaningless absurdity, that all those around him are freaks who demand not his sympathy,
but his contempt.
Despite its austere presentation and grim subject, Winter
Light has to be regarded as one of the most beautiful and intelligent films ever
made, and certainly one of the most insightful and courageous explorations of the human
psyche. The film shows Bergman at his best – in both his writing and his direction.
There’s not a single shot in the film that is superfluous or in any way defective; there’s
an economy and precision which virtually no other filmmaker can match. Sven Nykvist’s
cinematography skilfully emphasises the existentialist crisis that lies at the heart of
the film – the bleak wintry landscape being a visual metaphor for the barren void in which
Tomas finds himself, yet it is also so stunningly beautiful that you can hardly fail to
glimpse the hand of a loving creator behind it.
Gunnar Björnstrand gives
an extraordinarily effective and poignant performance as the pastor Tomas, conveying myriad
inner feelings of disillusionment, anger and despair that visibly show a soul in torment.
As the pitiful spinster Ingrid Thulin is equally as impressive, as tragic a portrait of
unrequited love as you can imagine. Bleak and cruel it may be, but there's no denying
that Winter Light is a miraculous piece of cinema.
© James Travers 2007
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