BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

Notes from Bergman, "Through a Glass Darkly"


certainty unmasked.

One draws a magic circle around one's self to keep everything out that doesn't fit ones secret games..secret garden...

Each time that life breaks through the circle the games become puny and ridiculous so one draws a new circle and creates new defenses.

I'm scared Papa--anything can happen. Reality burst open and I tumbled out. It's like in a dream.Anything can happen.Anything.

" I know."

I can't live in this new world.

"Yes, you can. But you must have something to hold onto."

What would that be? A God? Give me some proof of god. You can't.

"Yes I can. But you have to listen carefully."

Yes, I need to listen.

"I can give you only a hint of my own hope. It's knowing that love exists for real in the human world."

A special kind of love, I suppose?

"All kinds. the highest and the lowest, the most absurd and the most sublime.All kinds of love..

The longing for love?

"Longing and denial. Trust and distrust."

So Love is the proof?

"I don't know if love is the proof of God's existence, or if love is God himself."

For you, love and God is the same.

"That thought helps me in my emptiness and in my dirty despair."

Tell me more, Papa.

"Suddenly the emptiness turns into abundance and despair into life. It's like a reprieve, my son, from a death sentence."

Papa, if it's as you say, then Karen is surrounded by God, since we love her.

"Yes."

Can that help her?

"I believe so." Papa leaves the room.

Papa spoke to to me...

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

A friend seeks God on earth. I saw the Bergman Trilogy recently: through a Glass Darkly, The Silence, and Winter Light. Bergman sought the God that he thought he lost by engaging with families, as though it would be in the family that God might be found. The Trilogy deals with families. I doubt that Bergman found a God in those families.

He changed cameraman from Gunner Fisher to Sven Nykvist, and yet, although quite different, these films also have a photographic quality that engages the viewer. Fisher was more of a studio lighting expert and achieved stark expressionist scenes by manipulating the light in the studio--my favorites being the portrait of Death in Seventh Seal, and the greatest portrait in film, in Wild Strawberries, of the old professor on the brink of death, wistfully, sadly looking into a vision of his happy childhood with his parents fishing together at the edge of the sea.

But, the cameraman for the Triology, Sven Nykvist, worked almost strictly with natural light, and his outdoor scenes are marvelous and true.