Through a Glass Darkly

The first part of the loose trilogy Ingmar Bergman devoted to faith and its absence (followed by Winter Light and The Silence), Through a Glass Darkly (1961) won him the second of his Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film. It marked a deliberate turn towards chamber drama: intimate, tightly enclosed, pared down to a handful of voices.

The film is set over a single day and night on a bare Baltic island, and it confines four characters, played by Harriet Andersson, Gunnar Björnstrand, Max von Sydow and the young Lars Passgård, to one summer house and its windswept shore. Sven Nykvist finds an austere beauty in the grey northern light, and Bergman strips the drama down until a young woman's fragile mental state becomes the lens through which the family's failures of love, and the silence or absence of God, are examined. Very little happens on the surface, and the pressure never lets up.

It was acclaimed on release and is central to Bergman's reputation as cinema's great anatomist of the inner life, and it established the spare, near-theatrical mode he would deepen through the rest of the decade. Concentrated and emotionally exacting, it circles the question of whether human love and the divine might be one and the same, and Bergman, being Bergman, offers no consoling answer.