What do Ingmar Bergman's "cold" films—Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light and The Silence—mean? Are they just a terrifying diagnosis, or are they something more?

Treatment afforded Winter Light by Britain's film journal Sight and Sound is typical of the secular film enthusiasts' response; refusing to give the movie a full review, it observed tersely that "Bergman has little to say" (Summer 1963). Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., writing for a wider audience in Show (July 1963), noted of the same film, "I must confess my bafflement as to the point Bergman is trying to make."

More disturbing, reviewers for The Christian Century have said little more. "Bergman's vision of the divine [in Through a Glass Darkly] leaves us in doubt" (Oct. 3, 1962). "The meaning is ambiguous [in Winter Light]" (Nov. 20, 1963). Bergman "describes with admirable and vivid clarity [in The Silence and the trilogy as a whole], but we search in vain...for prescription" (July 8, 1964).

If one is to go beyond these meager conclusions—and I believe the films demand it—one must first abandon what appear to have been inadequate methods of analysis. Specifically, pieces must be put in context. A character and what he says must be considered in terms of the entire film. And with each successive film it becomes clearer that all three must be viewed as a whole; Bergman published the works as a unit (in Swedish) and designated them a trilogy, certain elements have appeared in more than one film (e.g., uses of music by Bach, references to God as a spider) and characters have reappeared again and again (the person loved but unable to love in return—Karin, Tomas, Anna; the person capable of some commitment but doomed to find it unreturned—Martin, Märta, Ester; and the innocent who is destroyed by others—Minus, Jonas, Johan).

Finally, we must look at as well as listen to the films. Many have complained that Bergman has stripped his cinematic style so bare that he has ended with stage plays. This is just not so. Important parts of the stories are told through the medium of the selective and analyzing eye of the camera.

Put simply, the so-called cold films of Bergman are, I believe, filled with both light and warmth. Each is concerned with the transforming insight experienced by King Lear on the heath (a place of desolate and chilling blackness): the discovery that man must "show the heavens more just."

Through a Glass Darkly appeared first and is crucial in that it gives us the terms of the trilogy. For this reason it is particularly unfortunate that it was widely misinterpreted. The prevalent reaction, expressed in The Christian Century, the Hudson Review and elsewhere, was to object to the film as a sentimentally positive statement made in a non-dramatic and hence unconvincing manner. The father, David, says "God is love" at the end of the film and this, the reviews maintained, is hardly what is demonstrated by the film. The daughter, Karin, has found God a spider. Because the father's orthodox pronouncement comes at the close of the story, however, many critics took it to be Bergman's message.

That such an interpretation was hasty became embarrassingly clear in Winter Light when, at the end of that film, Bergman apparently mocks remarks such as David's when he has a church organist tell Märta, "God is love. Love is God. Love proves God's existence....Tripe."

Clearly, what was neglected by critics of Through a Glass Darkly was the composite dramatic statement. In terms of the entire film, God can be love (David finally shows an interest in and concern for his son, Minus, and the movie closes with the son's joyous and multi-level line "Father spoke to me"), or God can be ugly, inhuman and spider-like (it appears that David also created this God as he neglected his daughter and contributed to her mental illness). The fact is that man has a certain freedom to define immanent God for others. Apparently sensing this, the son remarks at the close, "Anything can happen now, Father. Anything." However, this statement, like all the others in the film, must be put in context. In this case, the context includes Karin's husband, Martin, who loves her (in a humanly imperfect way, though genuinely) but can do nothing to help her. As she indicates to him, she simply does not love him in return.

As the title would suggest, then, no one person isolates the full truth of his situation in Through a Glass Darkly. The total artistic statement, however, is clear: man is free, within severe limits that are not always explicable, to construe God for others as love or indifference or worse.

Winter Light, though commercially unsuccessful, seems to me the strongest of the three films. Directly related to its predecessor, it is again a story of the way God is destroyed. The opening scene takes place in a church. Tomas Ericsson, the pastor, prays, "...Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven...," and the camera shifts to a series of exterior scenes in snow and cold. This is the condition "on earth"; this is the climate of the human heart. In the same opening sequence other symbols that indict are suggested. One of the first views of the congregation is of a figure coughing, and in the course of the story we learn that Tomas and others are sick. There is something in man that is diseased. The service concludes with the snap of a lady's purse. Shortly afterward there is another close-up, this time of a few coins being shaken from a collection bag, with the cross in the background. For Tomas the church is a business, and a rather unfortunate one.

Bergman's depiction of the bad priest—the weakling shepherd—is thorough and pointed. Here the man who professes to serve as Christ served turns away the cripple (when the sexton first tries to speak to Tomas, the pastor cuts him off with a "Yes, yes") and cannot reach the fisherman Jonas (he tells the despairing man, "If God does not exist, what does it matter?"). After brutally sending the fisherman to his death he repeats with horrible irony lines that Christ spoke as he gave himself sacrificially: "God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Later he attends the fisherman's corpse with more diligence than he had his spirit (he stays with it, by the thunderous silence of the river rapids, as the police bring a truck).

Tomas emerges as the man who defines love not after I Corinthians but as devotion to what is attractive. Love does not include commitment beyond condition. Märta describes their past: "[My] sores disgusted you....I understand you now....The disease broke out on my hands and feet and that was the end of our affair." In a sense Tomas' moral size is measured when, trying to stop his harsh tirade against her, she says to him through tears, "I can't see you without my glasses."

In this film too, when the spirit of a man responsible to others decays, he takes away the faith of those others. The fisherman's wife had watched the pastor's first limp attempts to reconcile her husband, and had withdrawn in the belief he might do more with her gone. When Tomas reports to her that her husband has killed himself, the conversation is brief. Mrs. Persson: "I'm alone then." Tomas: "Shall we pray?" Mrs. Persson: "No."

As in Through a Glass Darkly, sentimentality is eschewed. Freedom is limited (Tomas acts this out symbolically and in a way that suggests Providence when, after abandoning Jonas, he asserts "I'm free," only to cough so severely that he sinks until his head touches the floor before the cross). Märta, like Martin, finds that her love can change nothing. When Tomas mocks her by asking if he is to learn to love from her, she replies in defeat, "That is beyond my power." We learn later of her prayer: "God—you don't put my strength to any use."

In Winter Light there is no positive example of conversion such as Minus constitutes in the prior film. But for the person who will watch the closing sequence, there can be no doubt where Bergman places his hope. The church, the sanctuary of which is faced with angels rather than a crucifix as in the first building, is readied. The sexton, who has demonstrated a profound understanding of the suffering involved in the crucifixion (suffering most closely approximated by Märta's), smiles affirmatively as Tomas tells him the service will be held despite the fact that there are only four of them. In the back pews the organist tells Märta she should leave Tomas, but she refuses to listen. Then, in one of the most indescribably beautiful close-ups that Bergman's camera has ever recorded, the scene moves to Märta's face against the back lighting of a window. The ugly glasses are taken off and her eyes, which have appeared swollen and bleary at other times, are clear. The artist could not have made a stronger visual statement of faith.

The Silence concludes the trilogy—a trilogy begun with an examination of the nature and obligations of human freedom, continued with a story about a man's failure to use that freedom, and finished with a depiction of the hell to which such a failure leads. We have moved from a kind of simple and Edenic island to the complex sounds and rubble of urban Europe. The Silence is, however, the simplest of the three works because its terms are so nearly absolute (as much so as the gray and relative natures of credible characters allow). The final statement is the same; parents are not conducting themselves as parents. The boy in the film is orphaned out into the surrealistic corridors of the hotel where he, his mother and his aunt are staying. He has no earthly father present and, fittingly, the film makes almost no mention of God. The Father is silent because fathers are absent.

This last film suggests, perhaps more than the others, that basic to any examination of the trilogy is a recognition of the importance and validity of negative witness. It could be argued, I suppose, that the center of Dante's hell is the murkiest and most frigid dead end in the history of man's imagination. But of course it is this dead end that points Dante and centuries of readers toward light and warmth. Bergman's trilogy is itself concerned extensively with the components of despair: darkness, cold, silence. But the subtitle that Bergman appends to the Swedish script for The Silence—The Photographic Negative—is apt in relation to all three films. As any photographer knows, a negative cannot be made without light, and once it is made, a carefully measured amount of light must pass through it to produce a positive image.