"As the religious aspect of my existence was wiped out, life became much easier to live. Sartre has said how inhibited he used to be as an artist and author, how he suffered because what he was doing wasn't good enough. By a slow intellectual process he came to realize that his anxieties about not making anything of value were an atavistic relic from the religious notion that something exists which can be called the Supreme Good, or that anything is perfect. When he'd dug up this secret idea, this relic, had seen through it and amputated it, he lost his artistic inhibitions too. I've been through something very similar. When my top-heavy religious superstructure collapsed, I also lost my inhibitions as a writer. Above all, my fear of not keeping up with the times. In Winter Light I swept my house clean. Since then things have been quiet on that front."


"I'm tremendously fond of [the book] The Diary of a Country Priest, one of the most remarkable works ever made. My Winter Light was very much influenced by it....I've seen the film seven or eight times, and it may well be that the film has influenced me too. But above all the book. I'm a mad fan of Bresson, yet at the same time find him insufferably dull."


"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."


"The shooting was extremely demanding, and dragged on for fifty-six days. It was one of the longest schedules I've had, and one of the shortest films I've ever made. For one thing, Gunnar Björnstrand was ill all the time. That autumn, or in the summer I think it was, he'd had severe heart trouble and was in personal difficulties. Besides which he detested the role. The part really isn't a glamorous one, and he had a hell of a time; was forced to use other means of expression than he was used to. Throughout the filming Ingrid Thulin was a tower of strength. The role appealed to her; but she was a moral support, too. So was Gunnar, with his professionalism—always ready, at every moment. But it was a heavy job. I showed the film to my wife at that time [Käbi Laretei], and she said: 'Yes, Ingmar, it's a masterpiece; but it's a dreary masterpiece.' There's some truth in that; but the importance of the dreary in art mustn't be underestimated. What amazed me most—for I really thought I'd made a rather mature and lucid film—was the critics' reaction."


"Winter Light is in many way's Bergman's most extraordinary film....[it] is one of the shortest (eighty minutes), starkest, and most uncompromising of Bergman's films. One has the feeling here that no concession whatever was made to the audience's desires and presumed needs: a truth Bergman wanted to convey is presented in all its darkness, quasi-sterility, and lack of comic or aesthetic relief. Even the plot is minimal—probably the most stripped of story elements in Bergman's oeuvre. For this reason alone, Winter Light tends to be, on first viewing, a disconcerting film. But it is not a case of using bleakness and denudedness merely as a form of novelty with which to jolt us, or of disappointing us through failure to reach an intended goal. Winter Light cleaves relentlessly to its purpose and vision, and does not even stop to consider whether anyone or anything beyond the artist and his materials is involved in the equation that is art."


"It is satisfying to see Winter Light after a quarter of a century. I believe that nothing in it has eroded or broken down."


"More even than in Through a Glass Darkly, the performances seem part of the visual strategy. Bergman, as we know, used the same faces and voices over and over: they become so familiar that they function as elements or humours. In Winter Light his actor-characters have the grim authenticity of icons. Björnstrand's thin, circumflex mouth clamped by portcullis upper lip, the incarnation of Christian abnegation; Thulin's ascetic beauty sensualized by a thick mouth that twists upward at one end, skewed with wryness: two people designed to torture each other from opposite corners of the carnal/spiritual world. And like a ghost between them, von Sydow's sepulchral, lantern-jawed face—almost whited out by windowlight in some shots—comes from a third dimension altogether. As the catalyst of doubt, he seems a haunter for all ages, heraldic, medieval. If the sacrificial Thulin is a distaff Christ, as many critics proposed, then these three characters make up a secular trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Bergman sorts and fans his deck of faces as if already rehearsing for Persona. When Björnstrand opens Thulin's letter of recrimination to him, we cut to a closeup of the actress, who simply recites the letter straight to camera. The words matter less than that visible lexicon of despair, love, and bitterness. Earlier and later, faces are overlapped or profiles 'hinged' in the Persona style, the one adopted with such adoring servility by Woody Allen in Interiors."


"Working in this profession of butchers and whores, you develop this great need to please people. You keep wishing your movies will be successful, that this strenuous effort you put into making a film...this Sisyphean task—you want people to approve of it, and you want houses to be sold out. Well, I was a bit tormented by all that. I felt I was being ingratiating. And so I thought to myself, 'I'm not going to worry about it. I'm not going to worry about being ingratiating. I will write strictly about the problems that occupy me. Not for a moment, not for a minute, do I want the story to be ingratiating. I'll tell the story exactly and precisely the way I envisioned it.' We maintained this very strict form. Which meant that all the light...would be this grayish, shadowless light. November light. Sven and I went up to Dalarna, to a church in Skattungbyn, where we sat from morning till night taking notes. Sven took pictures the whole time of how the light moved through the church. He then invented something that had never existed before, a kind of lamp that could provide a shadowless light. I'm very fond of this movie. I think in a way this is the movie that is closest to me. Because for once I made a film that I consider a brave film."


"Often in this profession that I'm in, you're simply a whore, it can't be helped; you have a permanent need to please the audience. Nothing strange about that—after all, they are the ones that pay, who come, who are going to watch. You always think that you have to be obliging. This time, when I made Winter Light, the producers were wringing their hands because the film became extremely expensive, mainly due to that church, it even had a flat stone floor so as to get the right acoustics. It cost a terrible amount of money. And then the actor who played the main character didn't like his part because he wasn't allowed to show his charm. Then we had an outbreak of influenza that struck down everyone working on the film. Everyone was ill! I can safely say that all hell broke loose!"