Through A Glass Darkly [VHS] [1961]: Harriet Andersson, Gunnar Björnstrand, Max von Sydow, Lars Passgård, Sven Nykvist, Ingmar Bergman, Ulla Ryghe, Allan Ekelund: Amazon.co.uk: Video

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Synopsis

A disturbing study of the doubts, uneasiness and creeping paranoia of contemporary life. Swedish dialogue with subtitles.

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28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars a haunting study of religious obsession, 29 Nov 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Through A Glass Darkly [DVD] [1961] (DVD)

In this film a schizophrenic girl of deep religious conviction sinks into madness while her father, brother and husband look helplessly on. One of the film's great qualities is its lack of sentimentality in dealing with such a difficult subject, and its arresting and provocative imagery. Although less accessible than some of Bergman's other films, it includes one of the best performances in any of his works - that of Harriet Anderson. She is haunting and luminescent in the lead and makes you forgive any narrative shortcomings. Austerely shot by Sven Nykvist, a regular Bergman-collaborator, its images and intelligence pack a powerful punch

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Stunning and powerful, 17 April 2006

By	David Welsh (Oslo, Norway) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Through A Glass Darkly [DVD] [1961] (DVD)

One of Bergman's darkest films, and the first of a thematic trilogy exploring the question of the existence of God, Through A Glass Darkly depicts a young woman's descent into madness. The film is set at an isolated house on the coast and focuses on four characters: David, a writer, his adult children Karin and Minus, and his friend Martin - who is married to Karin. The idyll of the opening is quickly shattered as the tensions in their relationships and the extent of Karin's mental illness become more and more apparent. Bergman was not entirely happy with this film, and it has its imperfections, but it is more than redeemed by the performance of Harriet Andersson as Karin, which is the most stunning and powerful piece of acting I have ever seen on film.

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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bergman's first step into peak modernism, 25 Oct 2001

By	hamishford@hotmail.com (Sydney, Australia) - See all my reviews

I think Bergman's very best period of work actually begins with 'Through a Glass Darkly'. Bergman is here honing his cinema to a point at which humanism starts to break down, and the spaces between people, and their view of themselves and reality, are undermined to an extent many people may not wish to persue in a film. Yet the work hits at difficults truths that are delivered in a form that can be described as difficultly beautiful.

Deep-focus images shot with a still camera offer endless shades of grey, with a light you can almost touch and smell. Dawn skies, rocky shorline, a pre-industrial house and four humans (who we first see like organisms emerging out of a primordial sea) is all that fills the screen. Here the 'chamber' quality of the setting allows Bergman to leave the expressionist mosaic style of direction he uses in 'The Seventh Seal' for a severe kind of image, rooted to the material world, yet open to invocations of metaphysical resonance.

Harriet Andersson plays a woman whose engagement with the world is beautiful in its heterogeneity. But her subjective focus is insufficient to master a cold world's requirements. She fails to sustain the neccessary control over her feelings, and attempts to stave off madness turn our badly (her religious hope turns to horror in the remarkable penultimate scene in the attic).

Meanwhile, this woman who might have been a microcosmic humanity's best hope, compares starkly to the well-meaning men, who seem to have adapted to a cold reality all too well. Her husband is as sterile as the needle he sticks in her arm to restore a 'normal' subjectivity (despite his verbal declarations of love), and her father has shown terrible signs of a very veritginous existential state. When his teenage son asks him what can be done to help his sister, the thesis offered comes across as an abject performance indeed, in the wake of all we have seen. Bergman regretted this coda to the film, yet the piety of the final words shall be truly worked through and subverted in the remaining films of Bergman's 'faith' trilogy. (The next installments are 'Winter Light' and 'The Silence'.)

One of Bergman's very best films, with 'Glass Darkly' You can see Bergman's remarkable ability to communicate almost universally resonant thematics, but with a growing formal austerity and percision. The film starts a decade of astonishing cinema (featuring the best film ever made in my opinion, 'Persona') of which there is no equal in the history of modernist filmmmaking. Absolutely essential viewing - and what's more, the DVD is coming soon.

Hamish Ford.