The Seventh Seal (1957) A Film by Ingmar Bergman

The Seventh Seal is an unusual film in Ingmar Bergman's oeuvre; baroque, emphatic, and devilishly witty, it's everything his work strayed from as he veered progressively into what many would call more "mature" territory. It's intoxicated with a kind of grandiose, almost Shakespearean dramatism that is often associated with a particular breed of Bergman, evidenced mainly in films like Smiles of a Summer Night, The Virgin Spring, or The Magic Flute. Yet it also possesses a relentless experimentation, an idiosyncratic sense of artistic soul-searching that sets it apart from simply being a solid piece of drama. Taking death as his subject with alarming frankness, Bergman crafted a cleverly interweaving narrative that was both a means through which to grapple with his own immense fear of death and an attempt to discover the fruits of life that could put a damper on such anxiety. Evidence of Bergman's forthrightness comes early and often, initiated only five minutes into the film when after a boisterous shot of waves crashing against the shore under a setting sun, a tall cloaked figure appears on a silent beach. "I am Death," he says in an uninflected tone to a Knight who is taking a momentary rest on the shore.

This eerily straightforward reveal was instantly radical at the time, for no other quasi-mainstream picture, regardless of cultural background, had made such a direct stab at personifying man's mortality. Bergman presents Death (Bengt Ekerot, whose naturally morbid appearance perfectly fits the part) as an amorphous black frame with a white face nestled inside, part clown, part skull, who speaks plainly and has no answers to the lofty inquisitions fired at him occasionally by Max Von Sydow's weathered, penetrating knight Antonius Block. Instead, he confronts him and tells him his time is up, to which Antonius impulsively offer s up a game of chess that acts as the metaphorical platform for the rest of the film as he and his squire Jöns (Gunnar Björnstrand) - and soon a hodgepodge of theater performers they collect along the way - traverse through a hysterical, plague-ridden Swedish countryside. Aided by Death's unpredictable appearances, Bergman injects the proceedings with a sustained atmosphere of anxiety, which gives way to a variety of responses in the Swedish populous from distrust and paranoia to mania and anarchy. One of the most memorable scenes in the film involves a parade of flagellants - presumably once believers who have since cast their hopefulness aside in the face of the widespread plague, preferring to believe God a malicious, traitorous omnipresence - interrupting a traveling theater performance in a small village. The deathly shrill of lashes, chants, and, in one instance, the screech of an apocalyptic preacher drowns out the playful entertainment nearby.

But The Seventh Seal is far from being a relentless exercise in doom and gloom. Though it is largely what the film's lasting reputation has rested on, it's also perhaps Bergman's most darkly funny work, rich with a philosophical sarcasm that cuts from Jöns' plentiful one-liners right through to Bergman's presentation of some of the more fearful characters, who come across as half-witted, rabid, and physically awkward, the proverbial village idiots. One such character, an oafish actor messing around with the wife of the corpulent blacksmith Plog (Åke Fridell), reaches his end when Death cuts down the tree he's sitting in promptly after he gets in a silly argument with Plog. After the tree falls, a squirrel steps up to the remaining stump. The suggestion is, perhaps, that the brash and unwieldy actor was reincarnated as a lesser, more simplistic life-form, one immune to the insanity caused by the plague. These figures are also incessantly mocked by the sly, quick-witted Jöns, a man who possesses a hopelessly earthbound worldview partly in common with what Bergman himself would come to sympathize with as his life went on, and antithetical to Antonius' restlessly searching spirit, trying as it is to find any potential indicator of God's existence. One can sense Bergman slowly approaching the skepticism of Jöns, especially when he courageously takes such lengths to make impish and foolish those who allow death to become such an all-encompassing fear, a veiled crack at alleviating his own condition.



If these elements gain their subtle richness from a preliminary understanding of Bergman as an artist and an individual, much of The Seventh Seal pulls heartily from elsewhere. Amazingly, nearly every image in the film contains some degree of symbolic resonance, a poetic mining of the collective unconscious triggered from centuries of religious artwork. Consider the fact that three of the film's major scenes - the chess match between Death and the Knight, the death of Plog, and the culminating "Dance of Death" - are pulled directly from a majestic fresco painting in the church of Bergman's youth. Also, a very early scene that introduces the saintly traveling theater family - comprised of Jof (Nils Poppe), his wife Mia (an extraordinarily beautiful Bibi Andersson), and their little son - involves Jof receiving a pastoral vision of the Virgin Mary in the field next to him (the second instance of the film directly materializing an iconic religious figure), which portends his later ability to be the only other character in the film to see the form of Death without dying subsequently. But the majority of the film's references are trickier, more subliminal: the strawberries and milk served to the Knights by Jof and Mia as symbols of nourishment and rejuvenation, the self-referential nod to the painter that paints life as he sees it and thus stands as a surrogate to Bergman, who claimed to try to make The Seventh Seal like a church painter might make one of his frescos, and the quintessential Bergman scene of humiliation in the tavern when Jof is made to act as a bear to the perverse joy of a horde of miserly, faithless drunks, which feels uncannily like a reprise of some Biblical scene that nevertheless escapes me. The film's dense iconography has an elemental purity to it that might go unnoticed on a cursory viewing.

Contrary to the film's grim, self-serious reputation, The Seventh Seal is actually one of Bergman's most tightly plotted works, which runs counter to the idea of the director being at his dreariest when he's at his most meandering. The film propels forward with headlong determination, while Bergman's own piercing curiosities about the elusive nature of God, faith, death, and human connection constantly refract in various shapes and sizes through the terrific ensemble cast, each character a shard of their maker's persona. Antonius the probing believer, Jöns the skeptic, Jof the naive visionary, Mia the endless purveyor of love, and the mysterious silent woman who Jöns saves from danger earlier in the film the desperate, introspective enigma. When these figures finally spare a moment free from the morbid clamor pervading their native land in a quiet, sublime scene of mealtime at dusk, it amounts to a vital dismissal of death, an affirmation of the importance of human ties, and a unity of Bergman's doubt, fear, and unexpected optimism.

Sawdust and Tinsel (Gycklarnas afton) A Film by Ingmar Bergman (1953)

Ingmar Bergman's career prior to his international arthouse landmark The Seventh Seal is shrouded in mist and routinely neglected as inferior to later successes, a director merely refining his chops before fully realizing his capabilities. But Sawdust and Tinsel has actually been referred to by Bergman as his first good film, one with which he was finally able to express something personal. It's a ragged effort without the lofty aspirations that typify Bergman's finest films, and never quite reaches the kind of complex psychological tension that is his trademark, but it uncannily anticipates many of the technical and dramatic features that would show up consecutively throughout his sixty-year career. Released a year before La Strada, Bergman, like Fellini, centers his film around a group of traveling circus entertainers, many of which are reduced by the public to their fundamental shortcomings: there is the "idiot", Frost (Anders Ek), the "whore", Alma (Gudrun Brost), and The Dwarf (Kiki). This is lowbrow art, or "artifice" as it's defined at one point by the local theater director (Gunnar Björnstrand), in the truest sense, garish displays of physical buffoonery and odd feats that delight the lowest of townies, but Bergman is never condemning the group. Instead, Sawdust and Tinsel unveils the humanity in these people with an ever-watchful eye towards the unfairness they face, and, as in much of Bergman's work, attempts to blur the line between art and life.

It's of course necessary to acknowledge that for Bergman, to create a humane film is not to make something deeply compassionate and light; it's to be attentive to the humility that reveals these aspects, and it's bound to be a rather bleak outing. Work is not coming too easily for these carnies. The ringmaster, Albert Johansson (Åke Grönberg), is having regrets about abandoning his wife Agda (Annika Tretow) and his children for life on the road, for he is finding it difficult to make ends meet. At the same time, he is conflicted because of the fact that he cannot handle stasis. He considers his wife's life on a quiet street to be trifling and inactive, but when the troupe returns to Albert's hometown in need of new costumes from the town theater, he feels a desire to be in her company once again. Meanwhile, Albert's voluptuous mistress Anne, played by Bergman's wife of the time, Harriet Andersson, drifts towards infidelity herself, flirting temperamentally with the theater's androgynous Shakespearean actor, Frans (Hasse Ekman). When Frans essentially has sex with her against her will, an indecent act which is only suggested by Frans' bogus offer of a precious amulet after locking the doors, it triggers a threatening power play between Albert, Anne, and Frans, one that Albert is most passionately involved in.

Sawdust and Tinsel is one of the first times Bergman embraced the themes of shame and humiliation in a sexual context. Fear of disloyalty pervades the film, only augmented by Andersson's frank, domineering beauty, which is evident in the way she commands the ring during performances and the way she criticizes the theater's actresses for their flat chests. There is almost a masculine bravado to Anne's presence, even if most of her expressions tend towards inertia or anxiety, and it's as if the glimpse of underarm hair during her seductive talk with Frans is a conscious visual signifier of this. One can understand Albert's brute possessiveness towards her, and the fact that he is so enraged when after relentless questioning he discovers her informal tryst with Frans. Yet this scene also begins as a remorseless display of power, with Albert threatening Anne with violence, and ends as a pitiful showcase as he moans about the futility of life while perspiring profusely. After nearly taking the life of Frost, who spontaneously shows up in the trailer during Albert's most heated moment, he turns the gun haphazardly on himself, lamenting the "pity that people must live on this Earth", but quickly pulls it away in subservience.



This startling act of near suicide seems to prefigure Albert's later decision to commit what amounts to a figurative suicide, a self-punishment of sorts. In a fit of histrionic emotion, he retreats to the cage of a grotesquely treated bear owned by Alma and shoots it, with Alma following behind him in tears. Murdering the bear means destroying something beastly and impotent, which is what Albert proves to be in the scene directly prior. At a circus performance, he is taunted by Frans who is seated in the front row of the ring while Anne circles on a horse. Frans shouts derogatory remarks that clearly reference the sexual encounter he had with her the previous evening, which riles up the crowd more than anything in the actual show. Bergman builds up an enticing editing rhythm that echoes the crescendo towards a shoot-out in a Western, alternating between increasingly tight close-ups of Albert's infuriated mug and Frans' jeering expression. Eventually there is a succession of shots focusing on one of Frans' eyes, all mascaraed up to emphasize one finishing touch of effeminacy. Albert finally reaches his boiling point and a duel is declared, in which Frans makes an absolute fool of him in front of his own audience, kicking him in the dirt until he is swinging in the air wildly, a defenseless bull that Frans simply laughs at. At this point, in order to redeem himself, Albert has nowhere to go but down, and Anne feels racked with guilt.

The film does not only build to a climactic moment of mortification though, for Bergman announces shame right from one of the earliest scenes of the film, the only overtly dreamy and expressionistic sequence in Sawdust and Tinsel. While the troupe rides their horse-drawn trailers through what appears to be murky late afternoon, the woman sitting in the front of the caravan recounts a story from the past to Albert about Frost experiencing his wife Alma bathing in the sea naked in front of an Army regiment. Shown in flashback, the scene is luridly overexposed, presaging a later dream sequence Bergman would shoot for Hour of the Wolf, and boasts an oddly unreal use of sound. Amplifying the soldiers' raucous laughter one moment and falling into complete silence the next, it acutely represents Frost's sudden humiliation in the face of his wife's lewdness. Aside from this one artful interjection, the film's visual style is primarily sedate, with a sprinkling of unique tracking shots that obscure space in the backstage of the theater. The most notable visual feature however is Bergman's frequent employment of a bifurcated frame with two floating heads, one in the foreground facing the camera and one in the background, something that he would later use to stunning effect in Persona. This technique manages to separate the two figures spatially and emotionally, and Sawdust and Tinsel is rife with emotional distance. Yet the final shot of the movie is not so hopeless, suggesting that the show, and by extension life, must go on regardless of the troubles that are faced.

World of Glory (Härlig är jorden) A Short Film by Roy Andersson (1991)

During an aggressively confrontational scene of mass genocide that inaugurates Roy Andersson's essential short film World of Glory, a lanky man, the figure who becomes the center of interest for the rest of the film, turns around in his fixed position to look directly into the lens. He does so amongst a larger group of stiffly dressed men and women who inactively loiter around a horrific scene: a truck full of naked people is taken on a trip around a parking lot while the diesel exhaust fumes of the truck empty into their space. He also does so vacuously, either unaware of the immorality of it or unwilling to express any feelings that would contradict those of his peers. It's safe to say that the man looks at us, the provoked viewers, but it is perhaps more accurate to declare that he turns to gaze at humanity, the cumulative force that positions itself in close proximity to such horrors but only impassively looks on. The camera also assumes the weight of history and the unfortunate tendency for deplorable events to repeat themselves in different forms and for different reasons over a large span of time. It is Andersson's prerogative to lament the fact that, much to our ignorance, these acts have become progressively less visible to society as a whole.

This stance is decidedly more precise and polemical than those taken in Andersson's other films, ones that usually lean towards the existential, the unknown, and the unsolvable. Songs from the Second Floor was a somber and at times absurd riff on the meaning of life, and the more levelheaded You, the Living focused on the trials and tribulations of quotidian existence. World of Glory, an accomplished precursor to these two films, adopts the same histrionic, punctilious static-take style but fixes its attention on one character rather than shifting extemporaneously between vaguely related stories. The lanky man, camouflaged within his grayish surroundings by a thick coat of white makeup, stands in the middle of a series of perfectly composed frames to take us on a tour of his day-to-day life. He shows us his unremarkable possessions, like a small car, a bed, and a plain kitchen, and his similarly struggling family, with a mother on her deathbed, a dead father in a graveyard, a silent brother stuck in the throes of a mechanical job, and a young son getting the word Volvo carved into his forehead. The line between morbidity and black comedy is always played with in Andersson's films, but here it most closely leans towards the former. There is a frequent tension between whether it is right or wrong to laugh, but at times Andersson can't help but stage scenes with such caustic wit that his comedic side comes to the fore, such as when the man guzzles from a wine glass at mass for several seconds too long as a way to drink away his repressed sins.

The dire life of the central character, and the presumably miserable lives of the static figures that surround him, hint at the collective guilt of humanity. Andersson physically manifests this notion in the exaggerated mise-en-scene, one where characters hardly move an inch or crack a smile and stand with their shoulders hunched like zombies in foggy graveyards. World of Glory also introduces Andersson's concern for the force of consumerism, emphasizing the way materials dominate the lives of his characters, specifically in the shot of his little boy with the forehead imprint. The film's eerie classical soundtrack - which periodically rises in volume over the entirety of the film - weaves in and out of the scenes and the long black leader that separates them, creating a persistent mystery. It's a film that is absolutely brilliant in its deadpan simplicity, and positions itself as one of the medium's finest short works.

Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in) A Film by Tomas Alfredson (2008)

Vampire films of merit come few and far between, which is why Tomas Alfredson's Let the Right One In - a work that fuses horror and social realism to engrossing extent - comes as such a surprise. Moreover, in an age where horror cinema has dwindled into empty, gratuitous offerings of torture porn and shock-for-shock's sake ghost stories (no less, the lame cult phenomenon of Twilight), its intelligence should rightfully be highly praised. The film is not a vehicle to explore the spectacle of vampirism; instead, the inclusion of vampire elements helps to add a morally complex dimension to the young relationship between the film's two main characters: Oskar, an inferior, fantasizing 12-year old outcast, and Eli, the mysterious vampire Oskar falls for, unknowing - at least at first - of her bizarre background.

Eli is an enigmatic character throughout, both due to the fact that she is constantly verging on uncontrollable violence and because Alfredson implicitly hints towards her androgynous nature. She repeatedly tells Oskar she is not a girl, which at once can be taken in light of her inhumanity, but following the brief insertion of a shot of her castrated genital region, a gender context is implanted in her statement as well. As displayed in the opening scene, Oskar is a boy who channels the anger he feels from being bullied into vicarious acts - a Travis Bickle of sorts. "Squeal like a pig," he proclaims over a black screen in the beginning before we see him thrusting a knife through the air maliciously. In this light, Eli is the mirror of Oskar: violent, brave, and intimidating. She stirs up courage in Oskar, encouraging him to be proactive when dealing with the bullies at school and henceforth brings about his maturation, which is as much of a negative one as it is positive. The film culminates with Oskar traveling to freedom with Eli; in his mind he is a victim of love but is just as much a product of the seduction of a vampire, destined to become the kind of ruthless supplier of blood that Eli's father was in the film.

Let the Right One In's "love story" however, is by turns complex (as illustrated above) and banal. The two forge their first emotional connection through the ultimate outcast staple: the Rubik's cube. Oskar plays with the device in his free time but cannot solve it, but when he offers it to Eli, she has a curious ability to finish it overnight. This exchange felt familiar and somewhat grounded in the romance and coming-of-age genres, detracting from the relationship that otherwise felt like it was evolving supernaturally. Interestingly, Alfredson keeps most of the violence offscreen or at a distance so that when Eli does make an attack or her father collects the blood of a victim, it is genuinely terrifying. He refuses to romanticize the violence, reflecting how it is a necessary burden for Eli rather than a footloose pleasure.

For the most part, CGI is used tastefully, a method of adding a subtly alien quality to Eli's movements. The film is most frustrating when it is not, such as during a scene when a newly cursed survivor victim of Eli's attack is bombarded by digitized cats and subsequently engulfed in flames as a response to daylight. One of the finest achievements of the film is its pacing and visual focus. The art direction is stellar, an exacting milieu of snow and blood, whereas the camerawork reflects the slow pace of life in the Swedish village the film is set in. Rarely does a vampire film extract so much fear out of calculated ambiance instead of viscera, and it is one of the best films of 2008 as a result.

Through a Glass Darkly (Såsom i en spegel) A Film by Ingmar Bergman (1961)

Almost unfathomably, Ingmar Bergman managed to extract a different atmosphere out of his beloved Fårö Island for each film he shot there. His exterior shots of gentle waves hitting the scattered rocks or the shoreline punctuated by a miniature summer house are usually composed in extremely similar ways, however, the context of each film brings unique dimensions to the environments. In Persona, Fårö nearly seems sunny and enjoyable to contrast from the competitive tension mounting in its characters. Hour of the Wolf's Fårö is utterly frightening, a brooding bearer of bad memories and mysterious people. In Through a Glass Darkly, the first installment in his Silence of God trilogy, the island seems like it exists at the end of the world. The four characters have little immediate connection to what exists outside their remote summer retreat (besides the novelist father David's (Gunnar Björnstrand) discussions of book signings and the helicopter which arrives remedially at the end), so the island takes on an empty, drifting remoteness that works perfectly as a vehicle for the characters to console in each other or, as it frequently and detrimentally works out, themselves.

When placed aside the two films that followed, Winter Light (1962) and The Silence (1963), Through a Glass Darkly may be the lesser effort. However, when Bergman reminisced about the "trilogy" decades later, he believed the tagging of the films as a trilogy was something that came about in the primitive stages of development, and upon completion, that the films had less thematic parallels than they were described as having. Granted, most of Bergman's films are about faith and isolation to some extent, but perhaps Through a Glass Darkly is best viewed, at least thematically, through a different lens than that of its successors. Otherwise, the film is similar in its small ensemble character study foundations and its ascetic visual approach.

In Through a Glass Darkly, Bergman places a dysfunctional family in a spiritual freeze; there is Karin (a scintillating performance by Bergman regular Harriet Andersson), a gleaming schizophrenic recently released from a mental hospital, Martin (Max Von Sydow), her endlessly loving husband with a lack of faith, David, the writer exploiting Karin's sickness for the sake of his art, and Minus (Lars Passgård), Karin's hopeful, neglected brother who shares an almost incestuous relationship with her. Nearly everyone holds a secret about another. Minus has bitterness towards his father, Martin scorns David for his insensitive attempts at artistic truth, and David deprecates himself when confronted about his falseness. These inner family battles only send Karin into retrograde motion, propounded by her discovery of David's journal. Like a psychic gripped by a celestial insight, she convulses in the spare upstairs bedroom, her eyes clinging to the door behind which she claims she has seen God. Her movements and gestures are utterly disturbing; Andersson truly plumbs the soul of a schizophrenic with her disconnected squirming and illogical, shape-shifting actions. At one point, Minus finds her lying blankly beneath the deck of a small boat toppled beside the shore (a visually compelling scene with dripping water and rays of light). He embraces her limp body remorsefully, partly out of brotherly affection but also out of an insistence upon proving his love for her to his father as a way of attempting to receive love in return.

In what Bergman describes as the "epilogue" - but which is really just the ending - David does offer guidance to his son, explaining rather banally and explicitly his take on the nature of God. Minus responds prosaically: "Daddy spoke to me." This is unevenly didactic in relation to the subtlety of the rest of the film, but fortunately it does not completely damage the power of the finale. Bergman asserts that the return of Karin's disease was possibly caused by a lack of love, and therefore an intangibility of God. Sven Nykvist's cinematography is absolutely remarkable in Through a Glass Darkly as well; his extremely perceptive use of contrast and shadow on the faces of the characters beautifully counterbalances the weight of the familial crisis.

You, The Living (Du Levande) A Film by Roy Andersson (2007)

A bottomless optimism repeatedly crawls out of the mouths of several of You, The Living's sleepwalking characters, giving Roy Andersson's follow-up to Songs from the Second Floor a slightly different ring: "Tomorrow is a new day," they say. Not surprisingly though, given the Swedish director's wry cynicism, the next day always finds little by way of improvement. But if there's one means of solace in life for Andersson and his deadpan models, it's alcohol. "With all the misery in the world, how can we not get drunk?" barks a horrendously obese woman towards her old mother, standing before the hot stove in their kitchen. You, The Living shares the same sentiments as the stunning Songs from the Second Floor, and in its unmistakable style - a carbon copy of its grim predecessor - the film works as a more celebratory companion piece.

Songs explores the roots of the existential conundrum of humanity, whereas You, The Living rarely penetrates the surface, gently probing us with one thought: "yes, life is indeed tough, but why can't we enjoy something here and there?" Andersson rarely gives his characters much to write home about, but as a lovesick girl who wanders somberly through the film displays, happiness (as distinguished from the impermanent satisfaction of alcohol) can only truly exist inside people's dreams, not concrete reality, especially when that reality is one where husbands call their wives hags, dying woman are physically incapable of reflecting on the warm memories of early life, hairdressers ruin their clients' coiffures on account of personal problems, and men open their apartment doors to allow their German Shepherds to verbally destroy hallway dwellers.

The Sweden that is populated in Andersson's work is like nothing in cinema; his world is constructed entirely from sets with cardboard-like backdrops, in which walls are painted with the same deathly lack of vibrancy that permeates the sullen faces arranged meticulously on screen. He works largely with interiors, accentuating the drab, claustrophobic perspectives while also finding moments to jumble the frame in an extremely pedantic manner. Often times, one can watch three or more scenes evolving in one static camera take; for example, after an annoyed man bangs the ceiling of his living room to the discordance of a tuba player practicing on the floor above, the shot cuts across the street to another apartment building where a blank husband stares at the two lit-up rooms from his balcony. We gaze closely, as if viewing a Peter Bruegel painting, and Andersson's blackly comic staging always manages to enhance the experience. The opening twenty minutes had me laughing uncontrollably, much like the other buffoons around me, as I watched one uproarious vignette after another.

While the film does not completely maintain the same attack and energy of this brilliant succession of sight gags, it is thoroughly engrossing throughout. Also, when the camera escapes from its usual stasis towards the end, Andersson supplies a breathtaking, uncharacteristically uplifting dream sequence involving a moving house carrying newlyweds which is greeted by a supportive crowd. You, The Living almost touches the borders of Fellini in scenes like this; Andersson shows similar - albeit still imbued with his distinguishable gloom - enthusiasm for waltzing celebration as the Italian maestro. This brief interjection of emotions not in the vein of despair is undeniably a welcome one for the director. Although tomorrow carries no promise of betterment for Andersson, at least it's perpetually hysterical.

Winter Light (1962) A Film by Ingmar Bergman

Last night after viewing Ingmar Bergman's second entry in a loss of faith trilogy, Winter Light, I pondered with my good friend about the wealth of Bergman's cinematic output. Our speculation was that no other prolific director in film history has delivered as many masterpieces as the rigorous Swedish artist. We also agreed that Winter Light was yet another to add to the extended list of greatness. Although I still find The Silence to be the most exquisite work of the trilogy, Winter Light stands as the one of the richest chamber dramas ever devised for the screen. Rivaling Dreyer's Ordet, which was released seven years earlier, Bergman's film is less interested in the ways in which God can interact with the living than the ways that His absence can cause abysmal psychological distress.

Tomas Ericsson, a sickened, droll pastor with an increasingly evident spiritual crisis, acts as the cowardly religious figure of a bleak, wintry Swedish town outlined by rapids. His communions are poorly attended and executed in a lackluster manner (the organist checks his watch periodically while playing, introducing an element of pitch-black comedy to an otherwise serious drama), and the ritualistic murmurs that Tomas recites are telegraphed with a noticeable decline in passion. After the conclusion of the mass that opens Winter Light (which is shot with a tenseness that could easily be absent from such a mundane scene), Tomas retreats indifferently to his vestry where he is confronted by the Persson's, the fisherman husband of whom is experiencing his own spiritual dilemma: a fear of a potential nuclear holocaust as a result of China's dawning of atom bombs. His pregnant wife Karin urges Tomas to speak privately with him to offer consolation. However, Tomas can only muster up a fearful soliloquy of his own accounts of God's silence. His attempt at easement fails miserably and results in Jonas' ensuing suicide, a catalyst for the hushed quandary between Tomas and his past schoolteacher mistress, Marta. Their relationship is not hushed in the sense that they do not speak to each other, but rather in that Tomas continuously swats away Marta's honest attempts at embrace. She, embodied perfectly by Bergman regular Ingrid Thulin, is a non-believer who suffers from masochism and Tomas' coldness. Gunnar Björnstrand, who plays the pastor, was actually very sick during his performance, adding a stark realism to his character.

This grittiness is apparent everywhere in the film, from Sven Nykvist's ascetic camerawork to the brisk weather that shields the communication between Tomas and the policemen after Jonas' (Max Von Sydow) suicide. Bergman's views are extremely pessimistic in comparison to Dreyer's; Tomas persistently questions God's presence and in the end, when it is suggested by the organist that God exists in love, Thulin's character stoops her melancholic head down to declare that she and Tomas cannot ever express true tenderness to one another. Bergman's lamenting of people's incapacity to communicate on a soul-to-soul level runs amok here, just as it does in all of his films. The denouement, however, is perhaps one of optimism: it is a necessity to continue communion no matter what state we are in, for it is always possible to reach out to a lone soul.