"Earlier I played the guardian....My fictional people were not left alone; I interfered with their actions and their destinies. Since Through a Glass Darkly I can let them live their own lives."


"Through a Glass Darkly and Winter Light and The Silence and Persona I've called chamber works. They are chamber music—music in which, with an extremely limited number of voices and figures, one explores the essence of a number of motifs. The backgrounds are extrapolated, put into a sort of fog. The rest is a distillation."


"Ingmar sent me the script just after I'd had a baby, and I told him I didn't think I could do it. 'Well,' he said, 'we're starting in three weeks or so.' So I went to a mental hospital and the doctor told me that I should act with my eyes and the inside of my head, schizophrenics often being indistinguishable from normal people in their external behaviour patterns."


"If you don't count the epilogue that I tacked loosely onto Through a Glass Darkly, you could say that the film is above reproach both technically and dramatically. It is my first real small ensemble drama and leads the way for Persona. I had made a decision to compress the drama. This is immediately apparent in the first scene: four human beings come out of a roaring sea, appearing from nowhere.

"Even on the surface, Through a Glass Darkly is obviously the beginning of something new, perhaps not yet worked out here. The technical staging can hardly be faulted; it is rhythmically irreproachable. Every shot sits just right. The fact that Sven Nykvist and I have laughed many a time at our not always successful lighting is another story. At that point in our collaboration, we began to have intense discussions about lights and lighting. These discussions led to a totally different concept of cinematography; the results can be seen in the later Winter Light and The Silence. So, from a cinematographic point of view, Through a Glass Darkly marks the end of a stage, of earlier attitudes. For me, it stands as a conclusion.

"The epilogue has, with some justification, been criticized for being loosely tacked onto the end. In this scene between David and Minus, the boy's final line is 'Daddy spoke to me!' I suppose that was written out of my need to be didactic. Perhaps I put it there in order to say something that had not yet been said; I don't know. I feel ill at ease when confronted with the epilogue today. Throughout the film runs a false tone, hardly detectable to others, which may account for the scene."


"So [in Through a Glass Darkly] I had my string quartet. But one instrument, [Gunnar] Björnstrand, played false notes all the time, and the other instrument, [Lars] Passgård, certainly followed the written music but had no interpretation. The third instrument, Max von Sydow, played with purity and authority, but I had not given him the elbowroom he needed. The miraculous thing is that Harriet Andersson played Karin's part with sonorous musicality. She needed no coercion and went without visible steps in and out of her prescribed reality. She portrayed Karin with a clear tone and a touch of genius. Through her presence the product becomes bearable."


"Through a Glass Darkly was a desperate attempt to present a simple philosophy: God is love and love is God. A person surrounded by love is also surrounded by God. That is what I, with the assistance of Vilgot Sjöman, named 'conquered certainty.' The terrible thing about the film is that it offers a horrendously revealing portrait of the creator and the condition he was in at the start of the film, both as a man and as an artist. A book would have been much less revealing in this case, since words can be more nebulous than pictures.

"So here we started with a falsehood, largely unconscious, but a falsehood nevertheless. In a weird way, the film floats a couple of inches above the ground. But falsehood is one thing, the weaving of illusions another. The illusion maker is conscious of what he is doing, as is Albert Emanuel Vogler in The Magician. Therefore The Magician is an honest film, whereas Through a Glass Darkly is a conjurer's trick.

"The best thing about Through a Glass Darkly...emanated from Käbi's [Laretei, the pianist and Bergman's then-wife] and my relationship. Through Käbi I learned much about music. She helped me find the form of the 'chamber play.' The borderline between the chamber play and chamber music is nonexistent, as it is between cinematic expression and musical expression."


"In Vilgot Sjöman's book about Winter Light, entitled Diary with Ingmar Bergman, there is a discussion that hints at a connection between The Virgin Spring and Through a Glass Darkly. He wrote that I had planned Winter Light as the last part of a trilogy that began with The Virgin Spring and Through a Glass Darkly.

"Today I see this view as a rationalization created after the fact. I tend to look skeptically at the whole trilogy concept. It was born during my conversations with Sjöman and was fortified when the screenplays for Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence were published together in a book. With Vilgot's help I wrote an introductory note that explained:

These three films deal with reduction. Through a Glass Darkly—conquered certainty. Winter Light—penetrated certainty. The Silence—God's silence—the negative imprint. Therefore, they constitute a trilogy.

"This note was written in May 1963. Today I feel that the 'trilogy' has neither rhyme nor reason. It was a Schnaps-Idee, as the Bavarians say, meaning that it's an idea found at the bottom of a glass of alcohol, not always holding up when examined in the sober light of day."


"The film's playful, pre-Gothic hints of Hour of the Wolf seem today like early cracks in the shell of Bergman's penitential realism. A late shot of von Sydow, Björnstrand, and Andersson milling through the cottage's hallway before final departure is done with giant shadows thrown Eisensteinianly on the walls. They seem like human versions of the heroine's 'spider God,' players in a vaunting, grotesque Insect Passion that works to destroy God by deriding Him first."