In a time when Sweden, like the UK was abandoning religion, embarrassing modernity and becoming increasingly secular, Bergman remain adamantly attached to his favoured theme of faith and God. The next natural step was to make a film about priesthood, what it means to lead your flock, and what happens when the priest’s beliefs and dedication to the church, begins to flounder as the numbers of those who attend mass dwindle and divide. Bergman was the son of a preacher, from this life defining factor, he took much of his inspiration. Not that the lead character of the Pastor Tomas Ericsson is in anyway based on Bergman’s father but some of the events of the film are taken from events which his father took part in. The story follows Tomas for a single day, starting with a ten minute sequence as he gives holly communion to the few members of his congregation who’ve turned up. It is a fascinating prologue to the film because far from being boring we see the reactions of those trying to sing or pray, they cough, look at their watches, yawn – for them church isn’t something attend because the want to, they attend because they feel obliged to - the numbers of those who feel obliged are reducing rapidly. The community Tomas serves is religiously damaged and uninterested in matters of faith. Afterwards Tomas is visited by Jonas (played by Max Von Sydow) and his wife, Jonas is afraid that the Chinese will use nuclear weapons and destroy the world. His irrational fear has a basis in the truth and because of this Jonas doesn’t know how to continue and he looks to Tomas for comfort. Tomas unfortunately is of little use to Jonas, since the death of his Tomas’ wife he can not reconcile himself with a God that does nothing, that sits back and watches the horrors unfold around them, who allows his wife to be taken from him at this time, from him of all people, a faithful servant of the lord. Jesse Kalin comments on the similarities between Jonas and Tomas in the book: The Films of Ingmar Bergman: “’Destruction of the trancendental’. The phrase is particularly appropriate to Bergman’s meditations on the eclipse and death of God, where meaning seemed grounded in something beyond this world. But in all cases, it is that beyond oneself that collapses, whether it is God, lover, or parent, or even the world itself (as has happened to Jonas in Winter Light). Beyond the self there is no longer anything reliable, and meaning in life, our sense of value and purpose, even our delight in being alive, are lost to grief, anger, disappointment, loneliness, hurt. Before, meaning was simply there; now, what we had seems forever irretrievable, we are thrown into despair, and our spirit dies.” (P6) Both men are inwardly centred, the fear of God, is replaced by indifference. Indifference towards God, indifference to the world - leads to self. Jonas isn’t worried about the world, he’s worried about himself, because without a stable world to fall back on he has only himself to rely on, self-resilience is insufficient for Jonas - it is not enough for him to survive believing only in himself. Tomas by comparison is not indifferent to those around him, but is indifferent to God, to whom all his notions of the world have been built up around. Kalin continues to state: “Even abandonment by God and the concomitant experiences of religious doubt and loss of faith are analysed by Bergman as the failure of a person. Tomas in Winter Light cannot understand how God could allow the death of his wife. How can this be love by a God who is love, he asks? Such a person can only be a ‘spider God – a monster’ who can neither be loved nor forgiven and hence cannot be believed in. Because he does not care, such a God ‘does not exist anymore’.” (P7) After Jonas leaves, Tomas is confronted by a school teacher, Marta played by Ingrid Thulin, a spinster who is running out of marital options she has placed all of her efforts into marrying the widower Tomas. At this point Tomas has an epiphany, in a moment of directorial genius, he sees the light, but rather than it warmly revealing God to him, it is a cold merciless light that penetrates and exposes the fractured truth of everything Tomas has devoted himself to. Tomas realises that there is no God. In a brilliant performance moment from Gunnar Bjornstrand, Bergman holds a close-up of Tomas’ face and the revelation is there to see before us. Bergman once commented on the power of the close-up: “The close-up, the correctly illuminated, directed and acted close-up of an actor is and remains the height of cinematography. There is nothing better. That incredibly strange and mysterious contact you can suddenly experience with another soul through an actor’s gaze. A sudden thought, blood that drains away or blood that pumps into the face, the trembling nostrils, the suddenly shiny complexion or mute silence, that is to me some of the most incredible and fascinating moments you will ever experience.” (P286) A short time later and he discovers that Jonas has shot himself in despair, Tomas didn’t help him – in fact he exacerbated the situation. The pastor’s role in the community is to help his congregation in matters of spirituality, to bring them the word of God and to reassure them about their troubles and the world, Tomas has done the opposite and the result is the death of this man. Tomas and Marta discuss and bicker about their relationship as Tomas goes to tell Jonas’ wife about her husband’s death. Tomas brutally deconstructs Marta’s intensions and her manner in a painfully honest and beautifully written sequence he rips through all of her defences and admits to her “when my wife died, I died”, Tomas asks her to leave before it can get any worse to which she plainly replies “Can it get any worse?” We know it can, and so does she. In the end Tomas prepares to hold an evening service with almost no-one attending.
Winter Light is makes no apologies for being aesthetically and thematically bleak, the complete lack of musical score assists it no end in this regard, leaving us with the cold sound of winter winds and the emptiness of a clocks constant tick and tock. Bergman often set his films in summer, longer day light hours usually making it a purely practical concern, but Winter Light, as the title suggests is of that the colder remorseless season when the grounds are covered in snow and the trees stand bare, the film feels physically cold. Bergman, often a very modest film maker who is overly critical of his own output, uncharacteristically took great pride in Winter Light, it was the film he felt had dated the least of all his works; it wasn’t broken down by time as he put it. Russian auteur Andrei Tarkovsky considered this his second favourite film after Robert Bresson’s similarly themed Diary of a Country Priest. Bergman also spoke of the profound effect the film had on his spirituality, the process of making the film forced and revolution within himself as Kalin describes: “The sense of sin and guilt as transgression (and the accompanying requirement of a kind of perfection) attached itself to all aspects of his life, independently of his disbelief in their supporting background system (persisting as a kind of residual guilt). Only with the making of Winter Light, he says, was he able to free himself psychologically (emotionally) from this oppression, and then God – alive or dead – disappeared. Though he articulates this finally won freedom as the conclusion that ‘we are the makers of our own meaning’, this was not a new truth just discovered but something known or even believed for a long time that was then at last really felt and accepted – accepted as a result of some process of struggle largely occurring unawares… but not as a form of ‘existential’ choice.” (P193-4) I to consider is my second favourite film of all time and the greatest of all of Bergman’s films, never again would he match the majesty of Winter Light. It is perfect, in length, performance, direction, cinematography, and story, there isn’t a false note in the entire film, not one frame of picture that you couldn’t hang on your wall as a still photograph, at no point does it seem overly long and it retains an emotional power that is difficult to define but undoubtedly there. During the films final scenes, Tomas has can not abide God’s silence any more, just as he’s ready to give up his assistant, a disabled man who helps the church during service tells Tomas of a revelation he’s had about faith and suffering, he states: “This emphasis on physical pain. It couldn't have been all that bad. It may sound presumptuous of me - but in my humble way, I've suffered as much physical pain as Jesus. And his torments were rather brief. Lasting some four hours, I gather? I feel that he was tormented far worse on an other level. Maybe I've got it all wrong. But just think of Gethsemane, Vicar. Christ's disciples fell asleep. They hadn't understood the meaning of the last supper, or anything. And when the servants of the law appeared, they ran away. And Peter denied him. Christ had known his disciples for three years. They'd lived together day in and day out - but they never grasped what he meant. They abandoned him, to the last man. And he was left alone. That must have been painful. Realising that no one understands. To be abandoned when you need someone to rely on - that must be excruciatingly painful. But the worse was yet to come. When Jesus was nailed to the cross - and hung there in torment - he cried out - "God, my God!" "Why hast thou forsaken me?" He cried out as loud as he could. He thought that his heavenly father had abandoned him. He believed everything he'd ever preached was a lie. The moments before he died, Christ was seized by doubt. Surely that must have been his greatest hardship? God's silence.” Kalin again considers the point that perhaps through hardship God inflicts, he is far from silent as is assumed by many: “Disease and its physical and spiritual deformities become central images for this fear in the films of the 1960’s and 1970s. Time and again characters speak of their humiliation at its hands and how their bodies have betrayed them. And along with disease, Bergman adds a groing number of references to a mad and uncontrollable political situation, which becomes the focus of Shame and The Serpent’s Egg. Now God appears not silent but monstrous and malicious, no different than the cancer or nuclear weapons He Allows.” (P20) This consideration subjects the views of Tomas to new scrutiny, is the cancer his wife suffered not because God was absent but because God was saying something to Tomas. God’s silence is actually a statement in its own right. This is the hint of hope at the end of the film; Winter Light is about perseverance, continuing no matter what. Life is what it is, God and Faith are what they are, but you must never give in to doubt, you must embrace it as part of our time on earth we will always travel through moments of personal despair and the temptation to end it or give in, as Jonas did, can be overwhelming, however you must never give in, you must never despair. For Tomas, God may not be silent after all. M.Dawson |
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The second part of the trilogy, the literal translation of the title which in Swedish means Holly Communion (perhaps Winter Light is easer to market internationally and the title is appropriate in its own way). The plot line for Winter Light is simple, the concepts and the ideas at play within the film are contrastingly huge, but the plot and its execution remain remarkably singular. Winter Light takes most of its strength from this rarest of rare virtues. The film consolidates most of Bergman’s re-occurring themes into one film, the nature of existence, God’s silence, and the meaning of love.
I’ll now allow this review to become more subjective than normal: I personally, spiritually, am and always have been a devout atheist. I believe in science, I believe in nature. I do not believe in God, and most certainly do not subscribe to any religion and I never have, I was never christened, and most of my church going experiences have been limited to Weddings and Funerals. I can’t even claim to be agnostic; I simply do no believe a word of it. So it came as a great surprise to me that I found Winter Light deeply, emotionally effecting. The power of the film is staggering to me, considering that I can not relate to main conflict personally on any level. However I can relate through proxy to some of what Tomas is going through and if I can then nearly everyone can. The film is about the loss of faith, but as the protagonist is a pastor, it is also about a loss of identity. That moment when you realise that all of the energies you’ve been devoting to a particular cause have been in vain, be something as simple as a career ambition, a sporting achievement, a lover or a partner. We’ve all experienced a loss of this kind, a personal loss, a part of ourselves, how we define ourselves. When that definition is proved false the consequences can be devastating. We’ve all gone from knowing something to be true (like the love of a partner for example) to doubting its truth, to realising that it isn’t true and it may never have been true at all. If that presumed truth is the basis of your own believe in yourself or your life, then how do you cope if said truth one day evaporates? The shelving of your life falls away from underneath you - how do you cope with the trauma? Conveying this transition on film without resorting to mawkish, insipid, and transparent dialogue is an extremely difficult task, but both Bergman and Bjornstrand succeed where others would have failed. Bergman’s writing and directing has never been better, Winter Light, like the others in the Faith trilogy, is brisk - at just eighty minutes, and although the scenes are long, the film itself never feels long, nor short, it is perfectly measured in every facet, from opening prologue to the final scenes, it never bloats its content beyond its means. Utilising his past and his father’s profession, Bergman presents us with cold and restrained characters, who do have the briefest of emotional outbursts but for the most part remain cautious and quiet. Bjornstrand as Tomas, provides an acting masterclass, one of Bergman’s finest performers and he was never better than in Winter Light, Tomas is an unpleasant, self-involved character who is cruelly malicious toward Marta in some scenes and neglects his pastoral duties because of his own internal conflicts, and yet despite this we engage with him and sympathise with him and his final decision will make your heart burst. This is a colossal performance or restraint and emotion from one of the world’s finest performers.
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