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The Ingmar Bergman Trilogy (Through a Glass Darkly / Winter Light / The Silence) (The Criterion Collection)

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While "The Seventh Seal," "Wild Strawberries," and "Cries and Whispers," are better known, Ingmar Bergman's "Trilogy," variously known as the "Faith Trilogy" or the "Chamber Film" trilogy, is for my money Ingmar Bergman's supreme achievement, approachable only by "Persona" and "Shame" later that decade. Casting a penetrating eye on the zeitgeist of the mid-Twentieth century and the concurrent loss of faith in traditional notions of authority and truth, Bergman created some of the most spellbinding works world cinema and the twentieth century ever produced.

It may be more fashionable now for film followers to say they prefer Bresson, Fassbinder, or von Trier--Bergman was so highly praised in the 1960s that it's almost chic to deride him these days--but "The Trilogy," particularly the second and third film in the set, remain unparalleled achievements. "Winter Light" and "The Silence" are breathtakingly dramatic, and, despite what you might have heard, not at all contingent upon an interest in Christian theology.

One of my close friends is a Muslim-raised atheist from Iran, and when I brought up "Winter Light" to him a month or so ago he said: "My God! That's one of the most intense films I've ever seen! You can't breath while you're watching it, it's so powerful!" He's right. And despite initial fears that this DVD edition would just reissue the previously released censored versions of these films, Criterion has happily gone back to Sweden and re-mastered the director's own, original cuts of each for this boxed set.

If you decide that you can only be bothered to own only the twenty best movies ever produced on DVDs, this set should count as one of the twenty. Von Trier, Kubrick, Dryer, Bresson, Kiarostami, Kurosawa, Ozu, Fassbinder, Renoir... None of them ever hit the heights Bergman achieved with "The Trilogy."

I consider Bergman's work from this period (early 60s) to be among his finest, so I pre-ordered this set and have now watched all four (not three) DVDs. And I find that The Silence as presented here restores two of the Gunnel Lindblom-Birger Malmsten scenes, parts of which are absent from the Home Vision Cinema video, in case you were wondering.

For the uninitiated, the trilogy is heavy stuff. If you haven't seen any Bergman, you might want to start with the Criterion DVD of Wild Strawberries and go on from there. As for myself, I'm always amazed at the consistency of Bergman's vision, the depth of the performances here, the beauty of the writing and complete mastery of light and sound. The cinematographic compositions, especially in Through a Glass Darkly and The Silence, are frequently awe-inspiring.

The fourth DVD is entitled Ingmar Bergman Makes a Movie. It is a five-part documentary filmed by Vilgot Sjöman for Swedish television and it details the making of Winter Light, from beginning to end. Roughly 50% is made up of interviews with Bergman where he discusses the themes of the film, the challenges of bringing a completed script to the screen, his relationship and working methods with his cast and crew, and his reaction to critics (presumably Swedish) upon the film's premiere. The other 50% of the documentary shows Bergman and crew at work scouting locations, building the sets, selecting costumes for Ingrid Thulin and Gunnar Björnstrand, blocking, rehearsing and shooting an early scene in the film, later editing another scene, mixing the sound, then screening the finished product. It is an invaluable document for Bergman lovers and film students and I'm happy to have it in my collection.

But I'm scratching my head over the lack of extras for the three feature films. If Wild Strawberries deserves one commentary, The Silence alone deserves THREE: one for background and critical exegesis, another for lighting and composition, and a third for camera movement, editing and sound. Peter Cowie gives us 10-minute overviews of the films, and they are helpful, but not really satisfying. There are American theatrical trailers and a mish-mash gallery of posters for the films from several countries (not Sweden or the Nordic countries, however).

And if you're looking for comic relief, there are English-dubbed soundtracks for the films. No serious Bergman admirer will use them, but if your Pee-Wee's Big Adventure DVD is not readily at hand, try switching the soundtrack to the dubbed version, especially during some of the big emotional scenes. It's almost a sacrilege, but their crudeness and ineptitude will provoke laughter.

The three films in this box set represent some of the best of Ingmar Bergman's work in the 'chamber drama' format. As the director's interest in classical music grew, the art house scene saw more and more films from Bergman with just a few characters interacting within one location, like the instruments in a string quartet. In __Through a Glass Darkly__, __Winterlight (aka __The Communicants__), and __The Silence__, Bergman exorcises the spiritual demons of his childhood within a very modern, every-day context. The themes that he deals with are the same ones which drove such classics as __The Seventh Seal__ and __Wild Strawberries__; however, while such movies were theatrical and featured archetypical characters, the films in the trilogy (and most of Bergman's subsequent works) are realistic and feature psychologically nuanced and complex characters.

In __Through a Glass Darkly__, a vacationing family is forced to deal with its own disintegration. The daughter, Karin, played masterfully by Harriet Anderson, battles schizophrenia and attempts in vein to stay in touch with consensual reality, while her father David, played by the stoic Gunner Bjornstrand finds himself unable to resist the urge to use her illness as a means to drive his artistic and intellectual work as a novelist. Max von Sydow plays Karin's loving and simple husband, while her brother, Minus, played by Lars Pasgard, comes to represent the anxieties and insecurities of the family's next generation. This is a difficult film to watch. Emotionally, it is overwhelming (though Bergman never strays too far from his characteristic subtlety).

The next offering in the trilogy is __Winterlight__. Here Gunner Bjorstrand plays Tomas, a mid-aged priest, whose own crisis of fate fails to save a parishioner in his church from committing suicide at the thought of nuclear holocaust. Meanwhile, in a superb performance, Ingrid Thulin plays Tomas's mistress, an atheist who attempts to save him from his own spiritual and personal failings.

Finally, __The Silence__ is the controversial third move in the trilogy. While traveling through a mysterious foreign country, two sisters, the intellectual Ester (Ingrid Thulin) and the sensual Anna (Gunnel Lindblom), and Anna's 10-year-old son, are forced to stay in an almost abandoned hotel. Sexual tension rises as Ester and Anna (presumably intimate) cannot come to terms with their own diverging desires. Anna's son Johan, played by Jorgen Lindstrom, must discover the hotel, while attempting to understand the uncertainty of the world around him.

I will not go into the deeper symbolic structures of each film and allow viewers to discover for themselves. __The Silence__, the most bleak AND most optimistic film in the trilogy, is my favorite, though __Winterlight__ will probably compel more viewers.

The era of Bergman's auteurism is gone. Just as Antonioni, Dreyer, and other masters of high modernist cinema have lost their once immense popularity in the American and European art house scene, so have Bergman and the 'Bergmanesque' been long in decline. However, it is definitely a good idea to view these films. Even if the singular existential angst portrayed by Bergman is no longer the anxiety of the postmodern era, Bergman's technical abilities and his skills in drawing incredible perfomances from his troupe of actors are a wonder to behold.

Each DVD contains a short discussion with film scholar Peter Cowie. Also included is __Ingmar Bergman Makes a Movie__ on a separate disk. Bergman fans will enjoy more than two hours of interviews and behind-the-scenes footage from the making of __Winterlight__. The box set contains just the right amount of extras. It is packaged elegantly and is a great buy.

Just received word from Jon Mulvaney at Criterion that the upcoming release of The Silence will be Bergman's unedited version of the film and not the compromised American edit. The same goes for the other films included in the box. This will be an astounding DVD set and I encourage all of you world cinema fans to pre-order it.

These three films from the early sixties have often been characterized as Bergman's religious trilogy. In a somewhat enigmatic introduction to the published screenplays, Bergman stated that the films deal with reduction. "Through a Glass Darkly - conquered certainty, Winter Light - penetrated certainty. The Silence - God's silence - the negative imprint. Therefore, they constitute a trilogy."

Well, maybe. While there are some unifying elements, such as the music of Bach, Christian religious imagery, and the reuse of certain actors, these films explore many issues other than man's search for a God who has disappeared. In fact, even though Bergman felt that he had to clear away the underbrush of his religious upbringing to see human nature more clearly, it's not his connection to the harsh Lutheran god that oppresses him, but his relationship with a harsh Lutheran pastor father. His spiritual doubts are about the possibility of true human connection. The attempts to make this connection, and the failure to do so, constitute the true thematic thread here.

In Through a Glass Darkly, we watch Karin (Harriet Andersson) sink into schizophrenia while her husband Martin (Max Von Sydow), brother Minus and father David (Gunnar Bjornstrand) look on helplessly. We find out that David, a writer, has been secretly observing his daughter's madness in order to use it in his next novel. Harriet discovers this and tells Martin, who verbally flays his father-in-law. In a great line, Martin says to David, "Your faith and doubt carry no weight. All that's apparent is your ingenuity." This seems to be Bergman dismissing his own attempts to grapple with the religious dimension of life through his movies. Religion is actually not a big part of this movie's plot. Karin is the only person who sees and wants to get close to God, and she's literally mad. Her psychologist husband Martin represents a bloodless humanism, Minus a kind of callow intellectualism. At the end of the movie, Minus asks his father about God and David says that God is love of other people - this delivered by the most self-absorbed, emotionally isolated character in the movie. Bergman has thought himself into a corner here, and, despite the strong performances by Andersson and Bjorkstrand, what results is a facile display of spiritual nihilism played out in a summer cottage by the edge of the Baltic.

Winter Light explores religious faith more directly. Gunnar Bjornstrand is Tomas, a pastor who has lost his connection to God: he literally can't "hear" him any more. Over the course of three hours (12 to 3) on a gray Sunday afternoon, Tomas fails to save the soul of a despondent fisherman who needs answers to stave off his mushrooming despair, and confronts the anger and frustration of his former mistress, Marta (played by Bergman regular Ingrid Thulin). Tomas both needs her and is repulsed by his own need. Marta understands (and Bergman wants us to understand) that Tomas' inability to give over to human love is directly connected to his inability to experience divine love. At the end, Tomas is preaching to a church empty of any parishioners. Only Marta is there to hear him, but he insists on doing the service anyway. Here Bergman is on firmer and more optimistic intellectual ground. What's important is human striving, and it's only in the striving that we have a chance of discovering our true purpose in the world. Told with a masterful economy of words and images, and featuring a magnificent performance by Bjornstrand, Winter Light is one of Bergman's strongest films.

The Silence gained notoriety not for its bleak tale of two sisters trapped in a deserted hotel in an unnamed country, but for a couple of fairly gratuitous sex scenes that were lurid for 1963. Gunnel Lindblom is Anna, the younger sister. Anna is all physicality and carnal need; she sweats, paces, bathes, has sex with strange men. Her sister Ester (Ingrid Thulin) is her opposite, a sickly translator. Ester's illness has forced them to stop in this unsettling foreign country where tanks clank through streets whose names the sisters can't decipher. Ester smokes, reads, types, masturbates, takes to her bed with a mysterious respiratory malady. Anna's young son Johan is with them, and it's Johan's innocent perceptions that provide some warmth to the schematic struggle between the two women. God isn't mentioned here, and seems completely absent. What's left is the human need for connection and our inability to connect across the abyss of our separate natures. Ester's one spark of emotional warmth comes when she and the foreign hotel waiter both recognize that the music on the radio is Bach, and speak his name in their respective languages. Art, predatory and "weightless" in Through a Glass Darkly, is here the hope of communication across cultures.

Bergman's intellect took him to bleak, life-denying places that he had to feel his way out of. The visceral aspects of theater and film - sets, lighting, music, voices and especially faces - grounded his struggles to understand how humans can function is a world where God's silence is deafening and they can't fathom the promptings of their own beating hearts. His refusal to abandon the emotional path to truth even as his intellect was trying to undercut it puts tension and passion in his work, and keeps it fresh almost half a century later.

Criterion does an excellent job with the packaging and film transfer for these three films. Peter Cowie supplies an enlightening commentary. Another extra is a documentary by Vilgot Sjoman on the making of Winter Light.

Despite the comment of "a viewer", the disc of THE SILENCE in this set is completely uncut and full-length. Criterion's earlier laserdisc featured the shorter US theatrical version, but this new DVD edition is the complete, unedited, original version of THE SILENCE.

The two scenes reinstated for this DVD involve Anna's rendezvous with the waiter. In one scene, we see Anna's son Johan looking through the keyhole of a door behind which are his mother and the waiter. Cut to a full frontal, waist-up, nude shot of Anna who walks towards the camera and over to the bed. This shot, lasting a few seconds, was absent from the laserdisc, but is present on this DVD and has been fully restored.

Later in the film, we return to Anna and the waiter. This time, Anna's sister Ester enters their room to confront Anna. After Ester leaves, Anna now in tears wrestles with the waiter, struggles and eventually leans over the foot of the bed frame with the waiter behind her. The laserdisc also did not include the full length of this particular shot. In the new DVD, you can see the complete shot, lasting 23 seconds longer.

Despite rumors to the contrary, the version of "Winter Light" included in this boxed set will be uncut and uncensored. The Criterion Collection is renowned for seeking out the highest quality uncut print of every film they release. If they can't get their hands on an uncut version, they don't release it. The rumor has been officially quashed by the Criterion representative as of a few weeks ago, and curious parties should check out the Criterion Forum board, and look under the Ingmar Bergman Film Trilogy list. Just thought you should have a second opinion.

I had been looking for a copy of Winter Light in region 1 format for some time wihout much luck. I had rented it on VHS some years ago and since then it remained stuck somewhere in my conciousness after that one viewing. I was not real excited about investing in this box set just to get Winter Light. I had not viewed either of the other films in the trilogy. Even thought the other films had very good reviews, I was still hesitant. I gave this set to myself for a Christmas present this year and have not regretted the purchase. Winter Light remains my favorite, but the other films are excellent. The quality of transfer to DVD is spectacular. The fourth disc in the box set is loaded with extras. These films do belong in a class of their own and I feel like they are a valuable addition to anyone's film library. Enjoy them again and again.

These three films are not entirely a trilogy. They document the gradual move from Bergman's doubtful Christianity to his even more doubtful secular humanism. With these films, Bergman abandoned the heavy allegorical, morality play approach of films like Wild Strawberries and the Seventh Seal. By contrast, these films utilize a single, sometimes clausterphobic setting, small groups of characters, and sparse production. These are, after Strindberg's so-called chamber plays, chamber films.

Through a Glass Darkly is my favorite of the three. The beautiful photography in Sven Nykvist's opening shots set the scene for the three films -- a group of people arriving on a desert island (Faro), where they're vacationing. The whole film takes place on this island. Gunnar Bjornstrand plays the role of a despondent writer who finds himself morbidy curious with his own daughter's (Harriet Anderson) demise into madness. He notes her "progress" with criminal objectivity in his diary, perhaps for later use in a novel. Max Von Sydow plays Anderson's husband and doctor, who finds himself helpless in helping his wife, and is racked with guilt that, perhaps, he has already begun to lose his feelings for her. The climax of this film, Anderson's striking illusionary encounter with the thematic "Spider God" is one of the greatest moments any actor or actress has ever committed to screen. This bold and powerful film, perhaps Bergman's best, uses only the opening lines of Bach's Saraband from his 2nd cello concerto to pronounce the drama, creating an incredible dynamic. The camera is still, forcing the viewer to stomach the action with the same objectivity of the tortured Bjornstrand.

The ending of this that film, however, was dissatisfying. Bergman was forced to fall back on the notion that God is love and love is God as the salvation for man. He set about to tackle this issue in his next film, Winter Light (Tarkovsky once called this his second favorite film of all time, after Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest). Here a fatigued country priest, again Gunnar Bjornstrand, is confronted by a suicidal man, Max Von Sydow, who needs his help. The man is tortured by a practical issue, nuclear terror and man's hatred, and Bjornstrand finds his answer of God and love being neither convincing to the man or himself. His own inability to express love for his mistress, Ingrid Thulin, counterpoints the plot. Bjornstrand must contend with the spectre of God's silence, and the even more daunting problem of man's loneliness. Shot in almost all natural light, with gritty, sometimes deliberatley ugly shots by Nykvist, the film takes the approach of the first film to an even further extent. The camera hardly moves, and we are meant to see every small detail, like a priest slowly running his hands across a desk, with excrutiating detail.

The last film, The Silence, is a little different than the first two. If man's love, not God's, was the answer given in Winter Light, Bergman meant to take the question a little further: what if man is unable to communicate, unable to love at all? This brought him to his grand finale -- one of the boldest, most daring films ever made. The film is about two sisters (Ingrid Thulin and Gunnel Lindblom), who are also perhaps also lesbian lovers. They are travelling with Lindblom's young son to a strange wartorn country where none of them speak the language. Thulin, an austere, ascetic linguist, is dying, while her lover, the sensual, simple epicurean Lindblom, abandons her to find other sexual liasons. The little boy is caught in the middle of their incredible violence toward one another. The inability to communicate is the theme, and its not just "God's silence" here, but man's silence that causes this coarse and horrible social brutality. Unlike the other two films, Nykvist uses tracks and moving cameras to inject the viewer straight into the crammed hotel room, and the long, mysteriously empty hallways. This film features sexual scenes so daring, its hard to believe a film today would even be as bold. But the sex isn't at all erotic -- its hideous, ugly, and even physically repulsive.

The documentary that accompanies this set, Ingmar Bergman Makes a Movie, is by Vilgot Sjoman (I Am Curious), who was an understudy of Bergman's. It follows the making of Winter Light from the writing of the screenplay to the premiere and the critical reception. This incredible 5-part documentary makes this box set well worth the purchase. Other extras include short filmed essays by Peter Cowie which are pretty insightful. Transfer quality here is unassailable.

On another note, Ingrid Thulin, who acted in many of Bergman's films including two of this trilogy and the documentary, died this year (2004) on January 8th at the age of 74. A wonderful actress who Albert Camus once called "the perfect woman." She'll be sorely missed.

There are good summaries and critiques of this trilogy (and the fourth DVD documentary) that I won't simply repeat what other people have written. I agree with almost every review here. I saw these films many years ago and only recently have I viewed them again on DVD. To me this trilogy is the centerpiece of Bergman's films. I can see Bergman's artistic trajectory leading up to "Through a Glass Darkly" and where his films would go beyond "The Silence." The heart of this series, Winter Light, was actually the film I liked least until I saw it again last week...and finally understood it. My two cents is simply that Bergman was in search of much more than his issues with religion. I believe that this film trilogy does not separate the "religious" issues from "psychological/familial/secular" issues that many critics claim is so. This trilogy to me is not the point where Bergman went from religion to humanism. The Silence and Through a Glass Darkly are not different. They both both question sources of meaning and sources of inspiration. They both illustrate stuggles of individuals who seek meanings to their lives. They both deal consequences. Darkly concentrates on the horror of the woman who is the witness to the revelation of meaning and God, while Silence shows us the innocent boy who, quite unaware, embodies the love of God that the adult world around him has failed to embrace. Winter Light is the core, the film that I believe is not only the heart of the trilogy but also a film that one can use to translate any of Bergman's films and ideas. Where a priest is a failed craftsman/artist who cannot inspire with his art/preaching of God because he feels abandoned by what he stands for. The woman who loves him is a teacher who cannot teach. She fails to instruct him that she loves him and is painfully aware of her awkward and mute efforts. Even her letter to him is monologue, not conversation.
Secular and Spiritual aspects of people are side-by-side with Bergman. I feel it is one of his greatest frustrations that many have separated these issues in his films as being issues apart from each other. They are entwined seamlessly.
I too was convinced that Bergman's "religious" films and his "secular/psychological/familial" films were different paths of a great film maker and that they were related only in intensity. Let me correct myself now. They are the same. Bergman was thinking outside of the artistic cinematic and personal spiritual box by merging them as a grand understanding of what humanity is. In that sense, these films are not depressing or bleak. They are almost the opposite to me. I feel elated and intelligent when watching them because I do not feel lectured, dazzled, or talked down to. I simply am amazed that Bergman nailed the very human feelings of searching for what we want to love so perfectly.