Through a Glass Darkly
by Ingmar Bergman
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VHS Tape Cover Information
Actor: Gunnar Bj?rnstrand, Harriet Andersson, Lars Passg?rd, Max von SydowDirector: Ingmar Bergman
Edition: VHS Tape
Audio: English (Subtitled); Swedish (Original Language), Analog
Format: Black & White, NTSC
Running Time: 91 minutes
Release Date: 2000-06-16
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Publisher: Homevision
Studio: Homevision
VHS Movie Reviews of Through a Glass Darkly
Movie Review: A powerful film, but get it as part of the Criterion Collection "chamber trilogy" box.
Summary: 4 Stars
Ingmar Bergman's 1961 film SASOM I EN SPEGEL (Through a Glass Darkly) was the first of his "chamber films" of the early '60s. These form a trilogy, all of intimate plots involving a minimum of characters and concerned with the "silence of God", Man's burden of surviving in life on his own with no clear direction from above. They intensify even further the existential angst of the late '50s films (DET SJUNDE INSEGLET, JUNGFRUKALLAN) but introduce the interpersonal themes that were to preoccupy Bergman for the rest of his career.
As the film opens, we see four people coming in from a swim in the cold Baltic Sea. The novelist David (Gunnar Bjornstrand) has returned home after a sabbatical in a distant country, reuniting at their summer home with his son Minus (Lars Passgard), daughter Karin (Harriet Andersson) and her husband Martin (Max von Sydow). Karin has suffered from some time from schizophrenia, though she had regained lucidity to a degree. Four characters is all it takes. The plot is driven through Karin's illness, Minus' awkward budding manhood, and David's self-centeredness and uninterest in his family's plight. Though wracked by delusions, Karin ultimately provides a key insight about Man's place in the world.
The superb quality of Andersson's acting can be judged by how uncomfortably close to home it hits this viewer, who had a loved one suffering from schizophrenia. This was the first Bergman film where Sven Nykvist was principal cinematographer, and there's a certain purity to the shots, as if they were sculpted from marble, compared to his later work. All in all, this is a powerful effort, though my favourite of the chamber trilogy is NATTVARDSGASTERNA (Winter Light).
This Amazon listing describes a standalone DVD of the film. However, I'd recommend getting SASOM I EN SPEGEL as part of the Criterion Collection box of Bergman's chamber trilogy.
Summary of Through a Glass Darkly
The Oscar?-winning first film of Bergman's religious trilogy poetically studies one family's search for God in a time of crisis. Harriet Andersson is remarkable as Karin, a young woman who finds little respite from her schizophrenia when she vacations with her husband, father, and adolescent brother.Ingmar Bergman's gloomy but incisive 1961 classic about a woman's descent into madness--and the inability of her family to mitigate her pain with love--is still a stunning work. Harriet Andersson plays Karin, a psychiatric patient newly released from a hospital and staying in the island home where she found some measure of security in childhood. Instead of getting on her feet, however, Karin begins disintegrating after realizing she no longer loves her physician husband (Max von Sydow) and is being rather coldly observed by her writer father (Gunnar Bjornstrand), whose distant fascination with her plight is recorded in his daily journal. Hearing voices, believing God to be a spider, and pursuing an incestuous relationship with her brother, Karin slips into an inexorable decline, objectively witnessed by those too emotionally frozen to help. The first of Bergman's trilogy on themes of faith and isolation (the other entries being Winter Light and The Silence), Through a Glass Darkly finds the legendary Swedish filmmaker at an artistic and philosophical peak. --Tom Keogh
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