Ingmar Bergman’s the Faith Trilogy

Description

Ingmar Bergman’s trio of films concerned with man’s relationship to God and the futility of spiritual belief. ‘Through A Glass Darkly’ (1961) traces a schizophrenic young woman’s (Harriet Andersson) descent into madness as she spends a holiday on a remote holiday island with her father, brother and husband. Her husband is a doctor but feels helpless, her father seems to watch her disease with fascination and keeps a journal of her condition, whilst she seduces her 17-year-old brother when she discovers he is a virgin. In ‘Winter Light’ (1963), a pastor (Gunnar Bjornstrand) who seems to have lost his faith after his wife’s death finds himself unable to give spiritual reassurance to a local fisherman (Max von Sydow), whose wife Marta (Ingrid Thulin) has long been in love with the pastor. As the pastor deals with his own demons and the (to him repulsive) advances of Marta he finds that God may still have some hold over him. In ‘The Silence’, the third part of the trilogy, the relationship of two sisters Ester (Ingrid Thulin) and Anna (Gunnel Lindblom) reaches breaking point when they arrive in a strange country and stay in a large hotel, empty but for a troupe of dwarf entertainers. Ester is suffering from a terminal disease and has become overly protective of Anna and, to escape, Anna goes out to find a man and ends up bringing back a waiter to her room. This then proceeds to both arouse and anger Ester culminating in a bitter and violent argument between the sisters.