Winter Light

The middle panel of Ingmar Bergman's "faith trilogy", between Through a Glass Darkly and The Silence, Winter Light (1963) is the starkest of the three and, for many admirers, the greatest. Bergman himself counted it among his purest achievements: a film about a clergyman who has stopped believing, made with merciless concentration.

Gunnar Björnstrand plays the widowed pastor, hollowed out by his wife's death and a creeping loss of faith, going through the rites in a near-empty rural church while God's silence presses in. Ingrid Thulin is the schoolteacher whose love he cannot return, and Max von Sydow a fisherman paralysed by dread of nuclear annihilation. Sven Nykvist photographs the wan northern daylight with documentary plainness, and the film unfolds close to real time, with no music and no ornament, each scene another interrogation of belief and of human coldness.

Its austerity is deliberate, and it did much to make Bergman's name as cinema's foremost dramatist of spiritual crisis. Paul Schrader built his theory of transcendental style partly around it, and its influence reaches on to contemporary directors of slow, searching drama and to the wider cinema of doubt. Winter Light is Bergman at his most concentrated, a chamber piece about the agony of a faith that has gone silent, and many critics regard it as the summit of his art.