Product Details

• Actors: Ingrid Thulin, Gunnar Björnstrand, Gunnel Lindblom, Max von Sydow, Allan Edwall
• Directors: Ingmar Bergman
• Format: Black & White, NTSC
• Subtitles: English
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Homevision
• VHS Release Date: June 13, 2000
• Run Time: 80 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 6303107354
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #160,928 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Between 1961 and 1963, Ingmar Bergman released a remarkable trilogy of so-called chamber dramas, each one concerned with the futility of sustaining faith in God, family, love, or much else. The series proved transitional for the internationally renowned Swedish filmmaker, securing his crucial collaboration with cinematographer Sven Nykvist (with whom Bergman would go on to make his many masterpieces--including Persona and Cries and Whispers--of the '60s, '70s, and early '80s), and underscoring a new preference for intimate, relationship-driven stories, austere settings, and haunting tones of emotional isolation and despair.

Following Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light reunites Gunnar Björnstrand, this time playing a pastor suffering a crisis of faith while ministering to a shrinking congregation, and Max Von Sydow as a parishioner lost to acute anxiety over the possibility of a nuclear holocaust. Neither man can help or heal the other, or even inspire renewed confidence in practiced rituals and older, more certain views of the world. Set on a chilly, Sunday afternoon, Winter Light's heavy stillness, lack of music, preference for intense close-ups and distancing long shots, and barren setting all lead us inescapably into the core of a profound silence, an echo chamber in which love can't grow and religion rings hollow. The trilogy concludes with The Silence. --Tom Keogh

Product Description

From the grayness of a short winter's day, Bergman masterfully extracts the joylessness of life for a Protestant minister who has lost his faith. We accompany the pastor in his darkest hour, as he tries to console a suicidal parishioner and struggles to summon a long-dead passion for his desperate mistress. This central film of Bergman's religious trilogy speaks volumes about the struggle to hear God's voice in the modern world.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Deserves to be better-known, September 1, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Winter Light [VHS] (VHS Tape)

This, the second in Bergman's "Faith" trilogy, is a dark, brooding tale of a clergyman who has lost his faith in God. Indeed, it is doubtful at all if he ever had it, for his vision of God is quite selfish. The action takes place on a single Sunday in November, where the town pastor (Gunnar Bjornstrand in an excellent performance) is finishing a service in front of a tiny congregation. During this day, the pastor will be forced to examine himself and to try to reach out for some human contact to replace the spiritual depletion within him. Also starring Max von Sydow, Gunnel Lindblom, and Ingrid Thulin as the schoolteacher who unselfishly offers herself to the pastor but is rejected in favor of the memory of his dead wife. This film has a subtle, deeply wrought poetry to it and should be seen by all lovers of intelligent cinema.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Moving Portrayal of Religious Conflict, February 2, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Winter Light [VHS] (VHS Tape)

Of Bergman's religious trilogy, this one stands out to me because it seems to focus on the nature of religious crisis, and not the how and why. Bergman said of the film that "The surgery had finally been completed" -- that is, the removal of God as the suspender of ethics and purpose, but not the removal of the holiness of man's cause. Taken in its most positive terms, the film is humanist and secular in its message.

The story is of a despondent small-town priest (Gunnar Bjornstrand). It opens with a gruelling church service: This is astonishing to me, because while revealing the routine monotony and empty ceremony of the service, Bergman does not lose the audiences's attention for one moment. There is something grim and beautiful in the film's opening: the telling quietness of the service, the sparse attendance, the disenguousness of the priest who has himself never reached God: every time I see this film, it never ceases to amaze me how such an inherently boring situation becomes so fascinating. It is some of the most brilliant cinematography in Bergman cinema, in my opinion; the camera hardly moves, making it natural and simplistic, but probing and intensifying. The way the camera follows every small, seemingly insignificant gesture (as the priest's moving his hands along a table's surface, for instance), are drained and exposed for all their telling beauty.

After the service, the priest tries to console a young father who is obviously contemplating suicide, ostensibly for the sole reason of Chinese nuclear power. The priest's obsessions with the man causes something of an emotional chain reaction, a mini-odyssey of a man tortured by ennui and indifference, unable to reach God, finding only instead the thematic "Spider God." Gunnar Bjornstrand gives his finest performance, the type of magic that occures so rarely (as Sjostrom in Wild Strawberries). A particular scene, when he visits the suicidal man's family, moves me to no ends: its not his emotion, but his genuine lack of emotion that is so interesting.

There is a scene, however, that I don't think particularly worked out; the letter-reading scene. I think this is the first time Bergman employed the trick (later used in films like Autumn Sonata and From the Life of the Marionettes, to better effect) of a single camera poised on an extreme close-up of the face of the author of the letter, as they read it as though they were speaking directly to the receiver. Its a somewhat extended scene in the film, and most others I've talked to find it intoxicating: I disagree. Its too long, and I think in this case it would have been better served to have showed Gunnar's reactions as he read the letter, rather than the uneventful reverse. This is a small quibble, though, and I think most would disagree with me.

This film will always occupy a special place in my heart, but it remains among the most unconventional works Bergman did, at least pre-70s. Take that for what you will, the film is inarguably a somber and sober masterpiece which still inpires me to great reflection: For the thinking person's collection.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A perfect film., November 15, 2000

By 

Richard Mills (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Winter Light [VHS] (VHS Tape)

Few people are familiar with this Bergman film--"Wild Strawberries," "The Seventh Seal," and "Persona" are better known--but this may very well be his best. The action takes place essentially in real time over just several hours on a winter afternoon, and every note is hit perfectly. Sven Nykvist's cinematography is superb, and the soundtrack (which, as I remember it, has no music at all) is devised to fit the atmosphere perfectly (in particular, the rushing stream in the suicide scene).

There really is no one better than Bergman in addressing serious metaphysical issues while maintaining a sense of the mystery and ambiguity of human existence (except for Kieslowski, whose "Decalogue" and "Red/White/Blue" trilogy make an interesting counterpoint to Bergman's trilogy of "Through a Glass Darkly," "Winter Light," and "The Silence"). The film leaves many questions unanswered but affects the viewer long after it has been seen. Immensely depressing on the surface, it somehow confirms the value of human experience while at the same denying it.