Through a Glass Darkly - where Ingrid Bergman found his signature style
It's an overused cinematic trope: shattered glass, an obscured shot of a conflicted character through a broken window or reflected in a cracked mirror. A cliché of a person's life coming apart or, more likely, a mind close to madness. Few do it well and even fewer add any sort of resonance to the concept.
Through a Glass Darkly
Harriet Andersson, Max von Sydow, Gunnar Bjornstrand
Director: Ingmar Bergman
Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish filmmaker behind , never once uses the motif throughout the entire running time, despite the film's title and its themes of schizophrenia. He doesn't need to: the man was a master at filmmaking, and through his slow, sombre approach, we see more than any shattered vision could ever reveal.
Set roughly over a day during a summer vacation on a remote Swedish island, follows four main characters: a successful novelist father, his two children (a lonely teenage son and a conflicted adult daughter) and the daughter's caring husband. It opens on the ordinary, with banal scenes of everyday life, before we slowly learn of Karin's mental illness and the contrasting madness of the men around her attempting to control it.
Unlike the audience-friendly realisations of his more popular , or the epic everywhere-ambition of the five-hour , it's hard to immediately pinpoint ' place in Bergman's oeuvre - which makes it all the more fascinating.
Stripped raw and theatre-like in its efficient approach, the film's tiny cast and spare locations feel spontaneous and off the cuff, despite being meticulously lit, beautifully shot and well-composed.
