Winter Light

The central panel of Ingmar Bergman's “faith trilogy,” between Through a Glass Darkly and The Silence, Winter Light (1963) is the starkest and, for many admirers, the greatest. Bergman himself regarded it as one of his purest achievements — a film about a clergyman who has stopped believing, made with merciless concentration.

Gunnar Björnstrand plays the widowed pastor going through the rites of a near-empty rural church while God's silence presses in; Ingrid Thulin is the schoolteacher whose love he cannot return, Max von Sydow a fisherman paralysed by dread of nuclear annihilation. Sven Nykvist's cinematography renders the wan northern daylight with documentary plainness, and the film unfolds close to real time, stripped of music and ornament, every scene an interrogation of belief and human coldness.

Uncompromising and deliberately austere, it was central to Bergman's reputation as cinema's foremost dramatist of spiritual crisis, and it has been cited by film-makers from Paul Schrader, who built his theory of transcendental style partly around it, to contemporary directors of slow, searching drama. Bleak, beautiful and intellectually fearless, Winter Light is Bergman at his most concentrated — a chamber piece on the agony of a faith that has gone quiet. Its influence on the cinema of doubt and quiet despair runs deep, and many critics regard it as the very summit of Bergman's art.