For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face.
Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
II Corinthians

So begins Ingmar Bergman’s superlative psychodrama Through the Glass Darkly (Sâsom i en Spegel (1961)). Immediately, we understand that this will be another Bergman investigation of essential questions of human existence. What does that passage from Corinthians mean? It is a biblical expression of the idea of existential isolation. Now – in our lives as individual beings – we experience one another and the totality of the universe (i.e., God, for theists) only through the dark glass of perception; after death and reunion with the universal consciousness (entrance into Heaven for Christians), we will experience the great oneness directly. Now – in my existential isolation – I know only my own subjective experience directly; in the afterlife, I shall know fully and be known fully as part of the universal whole. So is the promise of religion. Is it truly so? This is just one of the profound questions posed by Through a Glass Darkly.

Historical Background: Through a Glass Darkly was the first installment of a trilogy of films through which Bergman took up the problem of God existence, gradually providing his own personal perspective. The films that following in this triad were Winter Light and The Silence.

The Story: Four people splash and laugh as they emerge from a dip in the sea toward the shore of the desolate island of Fårö in the midst of the Baltic Sea. Soon, we discover that they are a small family consisting of David (Gunnar Björstrand), a successful writer of novels, his daughter Karin (Harriet Andersson) and her physican husband Martin (Max von Sydow), and David’s seventeen-year-old son Minus (Lars Passgård). Karin, the focal point of the story, has just been released from a mental institution where she received shock treatments for schizophrenia. She is in temporary remission but, as Martin explains to David, her condition is likely incurable and she will probably waffle between periods of lucidity and relapse.

Each of the characters tries desperately to deal with Karin’s descent into mental illness as well as their own individual issues. For her own part, Karin hears voices that control her in part. She hears voices especially emanating from the wall of an attic room. They seem to be inviting her to join them in waiting for Him. She is convinced that God will appear to her from a hole in the wall. In her more lucid moments, Karin yearns for fatherly comfort and protection from David, seeks to share confidences with her brother Minus, and dearly appreciates (but also somewhat resents) the selfless care-giving offered by her husband Martin.

David is something of a workaholic, though one senses that it has partly to do with escaping from the pain of family relationships. He is obsessed with completing the draft of his next book. Though already widely read, he dreams of becoming a truly great writer. His skill as a wordsmith is evident, but his ability to communicate real depth of emotion to his son and daughter is suspect. He suffers from the observational detachment that is prevalent among artists. We learn that he has just returned from overseas and is already planning to leave for Yugoslavia. Later, we learn that he had recently attempted suicide while in Switzerland and only survived by the providence of his car’s engine stalling out at the edge of a cliff. Having thereby cast aside all previous ideas of the meaning of existence, he professes to have found renewed thirst for the love of his children.

Martin is the embodiment of a caring husband, always attentive to his wife’s condition and needs, always saying the “right” thing. He even stoically bears the frustration of her rejecting him sexually. Neither we nor the other characters, even his wife, are ever certain of knowing Martin because he expresses only what is proper to be expressed.

Minus is a burgeoning writer in his own right. By way of welcoming their father home, he and Karin perform a play called “The Artistic Haunting” that Minus has written – a play that perhaps strikes a little too close to the truth for David, suggesting subordination of the reality of love at hand to the ideal of creating the perfect work of art. Karin later says to Martin that “Daddy took Minus’ play as a personal affront though he tried to hide it. And that upset Minus.” This is a family that feels things deeply but hides most such feelings in the interest of harmony. Minus is also a suddenly tall lad in the throws of puberty, preoccupied with sexual desires but unable to give expression to them. Long the object of affectionate cuddling and kissing by his sister, he now finds difficulty in reconciling those attentions with the urges that they engender. When Karin laughs at him, even though good-naturedly, he feels hurt, no longer being able to tolerate being a laughable boy to females. He feels further humiliated when Karin discovers him “studying” a porno magazine disguised within his Latin book. When Karin’s psychosis reasserts itself while the older men are out fishing, it is Minus who must try to deal with what he can scarcely comprehend. He finds Karin wrapped in a fetal position in the hull of ship long ago wrecked on the island. There, Karin seduces him, though the carnal extent of the incestuous relationship that ensues is left unclear. There is no evidence provided of clothing either removed or replaced.

Themes: At the core of this film is an examination of the two kinds of loneliness – existential isolation and interpersonal loneliness, and the interrelatedness of the two. Bergman was tormented by the conflict between his Lutheran upbringing and his rational rejection of theology, but, as he matured, he found his answer to existential loneliness in human love – the communication of feelings and expressions of care between family members and others. Through a Glass Darkly is about communication and escaping communication. David has escaped overseas so as to avoid the pain of observing his daughter’s emerging illness. He has difficulty communicating openly with his son. Martin communicates continuously with his wife, but always from the motivation of saying what’s right to be said, rather than revealing inner feelings. Only Karin and Minus, as siblings and titular equals, talk easily and honestly with one another.

Despite what some critics say about this film, this is not an especially dysfunctional family. They, at least, laugh and play together, communicate feelings as best they are able, do thoughtful things for one another (David’s presents; the kid’s performance for their father), and care about one another. They are simply complex people dealing with difficult emotions under highly strained circumstances. David is at least working out his difficulties in communicating with his children. The moving ending of the film signifies how important that development is to Minus.

Another important theme of this film is the nature of mental illness and how a person deals with the descent into mental imbalance. This movie and A Beautiful Mind represent the two most excellent portrayals of the nature of schizophrenia I have encountered in film. A psychotic person does not experience their hallucinations and delusions as “unreal.” The voices, for example, that a psychotic person hears are every bit as real to that person as are the voices of real people in their environment. Neurological studies verify this, demonstrating that the same parts of the brain are active when a psychotic person hears “imaginary” voices and when they hear real voices. In fact, the phrase “imaginary voices” is misleading because it suggests to non-psychotic people a similarity between psychotic hallucinations and our experience of imagination. Psychotic hallucinations and delusions are indistinguishable from reality for the mentally ill person, both of which are dissimilar to imagination. There comes a time in the life of a person descending into mental illness where it becomes too difficult to fight the new reality of their inner experiences with what the rest of us experience as reality. Karin says, “I can’t live in two worlds going from one to the other. I must choose.” She dons dark glasses as she leaves for the hospital on the helicopter, symbolically dimming her contact with our reality.

Another point worth noting is that the content of hallucinations and delusions for a particular person (and this applies also to those caused by use of psychedelic drugs) is dictated by his or her own mind – beliefs, past experiences, psychological issues, hopes, and past traumas. If Karin sees God if the cupboard of a room in the attic, that in no way reflects on the philosophical problem of whether God does or does not exist. It only reflects on Karin’s (and by extension, Ingmar Bergman’s) interior wrestlings with the issue. Bergman does later address the issue of whether there is or is not a God in Through a Glass Darkly, but not through Karin’s delusional expectation of God’s appearance or the dashing of that expectation when a frightening spider appears instead. Karin’s views in relation to God are only the psychology of God, not the philosophy. Instead, Bergman makes his philosophical statement through David, at the close of the film, when David offers his best judgment to the disconsolate Minus: “You must have something to hold onto. It’s the knowledge that love exists. Suddenly emptiness changes to wealth; despair to life.” This is Bergman’s essentially humanistic view of the meaning of life that he had earlier hinted at in The Seventh Seal and further amplified in Wild Strawberries. When Minus then asks if love proves the existence of God, David (and Bergman) hedge a bit, saying, “I don’t know if the existence of love proves the existence of God or if love is God.” Whether or not there is a God, love of your fellow humans is all that you have to latch onto.

Through a Glass Darkly is also about how those who love a person deal with their descent into mental illness. I personally had the experience when I was about the same age as Minus, though it was my mother rather than a sister who was sinking into mental oblivion. I can vouch for the fact that it is very difficult to come to grips with the loss of a loved one in that way. What family members love is the person that they knew when that person was mentally healthy. Gradually that person becomes less and less the individual that we knew and loved and more and more an aberration, as if possessed by a strange, abnormal being. The mentally ill person tries as long as possible to hide the aberrant elements of their mental life, realizing that this newly emerging aspect of their mind is not loved and not even very reminiscent of the person that existed before and was loved. The family is fighting against the part of the loved one’s personality that is newly emerging and disturbed. In the touching scene near the end of Through the Glass Darkly when Karin asks Martin to knell with her before her delusional God, even though he does not believe in it, she is, in effect, asking him to love the psychotic element of her person as he has loved her healthy mind in the past. He is not, however, able to do so. Early in the film, Martin describes himself to David as Karin’s anchor to reality. Toward the end, Karin tells Minus that she is turning away from Martin, meaning that the psychotic aspect of her mind is gaining control over what’s left of her contact with reality.

Viewers who are hard on David for not having given more to Karin or for his self-protective detachment from her problem should remember that David’s wife (we are told) also became schizophrenic (schizophrenia has some propensity to run in family). David likely exhausted his psychic resources and suffered much pain dealing with his wife’s mental illness and has developed an understandable (though un-admirable) aversion to suffering through that process again. Hence his flight overseas.

Another issue addressed in this multifaceted film is the the morality of inner thoughts and feelings. Karin steals a peak at her father’s diary, presumably as a way of learning the truth of his inner thoughts that he is unwilling or unable to divulge to her. She is hurt by what she encounters: “Her illness is incurable with bright patches. I have suspected it but the certainty is nevertheless almost more than I can bear. To my horror, I find I’m curious. The desire to note its course and the details of her gradual disintegration. To use her.” Later, when confronted about this diary entry by Martin, David asks, “Are you able to control your inner thoughts?” It is the pertinent question. Even if you were able to do so, is it desirable? I am strongly of the mind that morality does not apply to inner thoughts and feelings, but only to behavior. Any person who attaches moral judgments to internal thoughts and feelings is doomed to never know themselves. Questions of right and wrong only apply to actions – to behavior. There is nothing immoral about feeling that you’d like to kill someone. Actually killing a person, however, is almost always highly immoral.

As an extension of this issue, Bergman in this film is raising the issue of an artist’s use of personal experience for artistic purposes. David, as a writer, suffers from the dilemma of the artist – how to manage the relationship between one’s real, personal life and one’s artistic life. It is natural and probably artistically necessary for writers and other artists to draw on their own life experiences and the “characters” that they encounter in daily life for artistic inspiration. In my opinion, it is really a non-issue. There is absolutely nothing wrong with David “studying” his daughter's struggle with mental illness. If, however, his feelings about Karin’s mental illness are limited to detached interest, then he is certainly a very uncaring parent. The issue is not whatever strange, aberrant feelings a person has but whether there is an inability to feel also wholesome concern and compassion. As it happens, David’s diary entry did indicate that he was experiencing pain that was almost more than he could bear. So what if that genuine fatherly pain is also accompanied by the concerns of an author?

Production Values: For Through the Glass Darkly, Bergman greatly reduced the size of the cast to an ensemble of just four. This film and some others are sometimes said to belong to Bergman’s “chamber period”, suggesting a narrative technique styled on the idea of chamber music – a small number of performers to ensure focus and intensity. This minimalist approach to casting was further augmented by choosing as a setting an environment that was sparse and stark, providing little distraction from the psychological complexities. This entire compact film takes place between one sunset and another.

The photography for this film is high-contrast black-and-white provided by longtime Bergman colleague Sven Nykvist. The cinematography is as fine as you’ll ever encounter. One shot that stands out in my mind shows Martin and Karin asleep side by side and intertwined. There is a solitary triangle of light directly centered over Karin’s left eye, suggesting that which only she sees with one side of her mind. We see her one eye open and hear the voices stirring in her head. She silently arises and meanders up to the room in the attic from which the voices seem to her to be emanating. Another distinctive and complementary quality is the extensive use of pans from one character to another, which emphasizes the communication process and the distance that separates one mind from another.

The performances by the entire ensemble are superlative but one stands out above the others – the amazing performance by Harriet Andersson. In a very difficult role, she is utterly compelling and heartbreaking. Mental illness is a particularly difficult aspect of life for actors to portray and this is as fine a rendition as you’re ever likely to encounter. Harriet Andersson can also be seen in Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), The Deadly Affair (1966), Cries and Whispers (1972), and Fanny and Alexander (1982).

Bottom-Line: Through a Glass Darkly won the 1961 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. It successfully explores philosophical issues of profoundest importance in the context of a very human drama. With great performances and cinematography, this is a film that should not be missed by any with an interest in psychodrama. Those who find this film depressing are missing its point. One viewer, for example, states that Bergman is revealing “the utter void at the center of false human beliefs.” Bergman has filled that void, both for himself and his viewers, with the exaltation of love – one human for another. That, according to Bergman, is the core meaning of human existence. I agree.

Through a Glass Darkly is in Swedish with English subtitles and has a running time of ninety-one minutes.


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You might want to check out these other excellent films from Sweden:

The Best Intentions
Cries and Whispers
The Magician
Miss Julie
Persona
Scenes from a Marriage
The Seventh Seal
The Shame
Smiles of a Summer Night
Torment
The Virgin Spring
Wild Strawberries

Recommended:
Yes

Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older