Ingmar Bergman and God

“When the French film-maker François Truffaut was first exposed to the films of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman he said: ‘Here is a man who has done all we dreamed of doing. He has written films as a novelist writes a book. Instead of a pen he has used a camera. He is an author of cinema.’ Bergman himself has said: ‘The motion picture, with its complicated process of birth, is my method of saying what I want to say to my fellow men.’

“Bergman has used his camera to compose a continuing essay on man’s relationship to God in the context of the problem of evil. Two things have influenced Bergman’s film-making. One is his background in the theater, which accounts for his expert handling of the repertory of film actors he has built up.

“The other is his early upbringing as the son of an Evangelical Lutheran pastor, which accounts for his preoccupation with the more somber side of religious truth in his films. As early as 1948, in The Prison (American title: The Devil’s Wanton), one of his characters reflects that ‘if one can believe in God, there is no problem; if one cannot, there is no solution.’ . . .

“[I]n many of Bergman’s films belief in God is reaffirmed only after a character has been dealt a staggering blow which brings him literally to his knees in resignation to the God he cannot hope to understand in this life. This is true of The Virgin Spring (1960), which won a U.S. Academy Award. The film is based on the medieval tale of a young girl who is raped and murdered on her way to Mass by two brutish shepherds. When the girl’s father (played by Max von Sydow, who was also Antonius Bloch [in The Seventh Seal]) discovers the deed he reverts from his Christian beliefs to his pagan ways and brutally kills not only the two shepherds but their younger brother who had no hand in their crime.

“Then, kneeling near his daughter’s body and realizing how his own crime has matched that of the shepherds, he prays, ‘You saw it, God. The death of an innocent child, and my vengeance. You permitted it, and I don’t understand you. Yet I now ask you for forgiveness — I do not know of any other way to reconcile myself with my own hands. I don’t know of any other way to live.’

“A spring of water then bubbles forth from where his daughter’s body had lain. After this strong affirmation of God many thought that Bergman would now begin to examine the more positive aspects of religious belief. Instead Bergman next mounted a trilogy which shows how people who fail to reconcile themselves with other human beings cannot reconcile themselves with God. ‘Most of the people in these three films are dead, completely dead,’ he explains. ‘They don’t know how to love or to feel any emotions. They are lost because they can’t reach anyone outside of themselves.’

“The three films are Through a Glass Darkly (1961), which won an Academy Award; Winter Light (or The Communicants, 1963); and The Silence (1964). Some critics were somewhat dismayed because the characters in the three films get further and further out of touch with God and man in each succeeding film. Yet the fact that the films treat the loss of faith rather than the finding of faith is no reflection on Bergman’s own beliefs. The theme of each film would be the same had they been made in reverse order. As they stand, the need for human and divine love is stressed more strongly in each film in proportion to the absence of both in the characters of each film. . .

“Basically, Bergman seems to be saying in his films, when we look at them as a group, that the coexistence of good and evil is all that we can hope for from our fragmented existence. Moreover he seems to imply that life is easier to bear when one is willing to take the risk of communicating with others and seeking union with them. One cannot hope to establish a relationship with God by bypassing fellow human beings.

“But Bergman avoids being explicit in stating messages or meanings in his films. In his preface to the published edition of Cries and Whispers he says, ‘As I turn this project over in my mind it never stands out as a completed whole. What it most resembles is a dark flowering stream: faces, movements, voices, gestures, exclamations, light and shade, moods, dreams; nothing fixed, nothing really tangible other than for the moment, and then only appearing to be. A dream, a longing or perhaps an expectation, a fear, in which that to be feared is never put into words — I could go on indefinitely describing key and color, but we shouldn’t be any wiser.’

“His chief interest, then, is to present the problems of human existence for filmgoers to ponder in order that they can come to their own conclusions, for he does not pretend to be able to make anyone any wiser. When he is asked the general purpose of his films he replies with a parable about the medieval artists who contributed their efforts to the building of the great cathedrals: ‘I want to be one of the artists in the cathedral on the great plain. I want to make a dragon’s head, an angel, a devil — or perhaps a saint — out of stone. It does not matter which; it is the sense of satisfaction that counts. Regardless of whether I believe or not, whether I am a Christian or not, I would play my part in the collective building of the cathedral.’”

— from Gene D. Phillips, S.J., “Ingmar Bergman and God,” in Ingmar Bergman: Essays in Criticism, edited by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Oxford University Press, 1975)

Links to posts and programs featuring D. C. Schindler:

Commodification

Links to posts and programs featuring Junius Johnson;

Links to posts and programs featuring Reinhard Huetter;

Links to posts and programs featuring Fr. Augustine Thompson, O.P.:

Links to posts and programs featuring Louis Markos:

Links to posts and programs featuring William C. Hackett:

Links to posts and programs featuring Thomas Albert Howard:

Links to posts and programs featuring Thomas Pfau:

Links to posts and programs featuring Hans Boersma:

Links to posts and programs featuring Bruce Hindmarsh:

Links to posts and programs featuring J. Budziszewski:

Links to posts and programs featuring Steve L. Porter:

Links to posts and programs featuring Norman Wirzba:

Links to posts and programs featuring Timothy Larsen:

Links to posts and programs featuring Bruce Herman:

Links to posts and programs featuring Rod Dreher:

Links to posts and programs featuring Kevin J. Vanhoozer:

Links to posts and programs featuring Esther Lightcap Meek:

Links to posts and programs featuring Alan Jacobs:

Links to posts and programs featuring Kimbell Kornu:

Links to posts and programs featuring David Lyle Jeffrey:

Links to posts and programs featuring David Setran:

Links to posts and programs featuring Peter Bouteneff:

Links to posts and programs featuring Francis J. Beckwith:

Links to posts and programs featuring Marianne Wright:

Links to posts and programs featuring David W. Fagerberg:

Links to posts and programs featuring William T. Cavanaugh:

Links to posts and programs featuring Michael Ward:

Links to posts and programs featuring Michael Dominic Taylor:

Links to posts and programs featuring Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung:

Links to posts and programs featuring Robin Phillips:

Links to posts and programs featuring Jonathan McIntosh:

Links to posts and programs featuring Marian Schwartz:

Links to posts and programs featuring Andrew Kaethler:

Links to posts and programs featuring Donald B. Kraybill:

Links to posts and programs featuring Thomas Storck:

Links to posts and programs featuring Jonathan Chaplin:

Links to posts and programs featuring James W. Skillen:

Links to posts and programs featuring Richard Stivers:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mark Regnerus:

Links to posts and programs featuring Emma Mason:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mark Noll:

Links to posts and programs featuring David Ney:

Links to posts and programs featuring Greg Peters:

Links to posts and programs featuring David I. Smith:

Links to posts and programs featuring Jason Paone:

Links to posts and programs featuring Kelly M. Kapic:

Links to posts and programs featuring Eric O. Jacobsen:

Links to posts and programs featuring Jessica Hooten Wilson:

Links to posts and programs featuring James Turner:

Links to posts and programs featuring Matthew Rubery:

Links to posts and programs featuring Simon Oliver:

Links to posts and programs featuring Jason Blakely:

Links to posts and programs featuring Kathryn Wehr:

Links to posts and programs featuring Holly Ordway:

Links to posts and programs featuring Paul Tyson:

Links to posts and programs featuring Matthew D. Stewart:

Links to posts and programs featuring David Sehat:

Links to posts and programs featuring John Durham Peters:

Links to posts and programs featuring Oliver O'Donovan:

Links to posts and programs featuring Nigel Biggar:

Links to posts and programs featuring Margaret Harper McCarthy:

Links to posts and programs featuring Andrew Paul Davison:

Links to posts and programs featuring Alison Milbank:

Links to posts and programs featuring Brian R. Brock:

Links to posts and programs featuring Scott Newstok:

Links to posts and programs featuring Fiona Hughes:

Links to posts and programs featuring R. Jared Staudt:

Links to posts and programs featuring Grant R. Brodrecht:

Links to posts and programs featuring Antonio López:

Links to posts and programs featuring Brent Hull:

Links to posts and programs featuring Matthew B. Crawford:

Links to posts and programs featuring Kerry McCarthy:

Links to posts and programs featuring Robert P. George:

Links to posts and programs featuring Christine Rosen:

Links to posts and programs featuring Scott Cairns:

Links to posts and programs featuring Diana Pavlac Glyer:

Links to posts and programs featuring O. Carter Snead:

Links to posts and programs featuring Steven D. Smith:

Links to posts and programs featuring Jeremy Beer:

Links to posts and programs featuring James K. A. Smith:

Links to posts and programs featuring Richard Weikart:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mark Evan Bonds:

Links to posts and programs featuring Perry L. Glanzer:

Links to posts and programs featuring Dana Gioia:

Links to posts and programs featuring Thomas E. Bergler:

Links to posts and programs featuring Susan Srigley:

Links to posts and programs featuring J.A.C. Redford:

Links to posts and programs featuring Carl Elliott:

Links to posts and programs featuring Victor Lee Austin:

Links to posts and programs featuring Sørina Higgins:

Links to posts and programs featuring Steve Wilkens:

Links to posts and programs featuring Gilbert Meilaender:

Links to posts and programs featuring Martin X. Moleski:

Links to posts and programs featuring Brendan Sweetman:

Links to posts and programs featuring Allan C. Carlson:

Links to posts and programs featuring Jason M. Baxter:

Links to posts and programs featuring Barrett Fisher II:

Links to posts and programs featuring Paul Weston:

Links to posts and programs featuring Steven Knepper:

Links to posts and programs featuring Susan M. Felch:

Links to posts and programs featuring Fred Turner:

Links to posts and programs featuring Matthew Dickerson:

Links to posts and programs featuring Jack R. Baker:

Links to posts and programs featuring W. Bradford Wilcox:

Links to posts and programs featuring Bill Vitek:

Links to posts and programs featuring Adam K. Webb:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mark Bauerlein:

Links to posts and programs featuring Felicia Wu Song:

Links to posts and programs featuring Joseph E. Davis:

Links to posts and programs featuring Thaddeus Kozinski:

Links to posts and programs featuring Craig M. Gay:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mark T. Mitchell:

Links to posts and programs featuring Karen Dieleman:

Links to posts and programs featuring Tim Clydesdale:

Links to posts and programs featuring J. Mark Bertrand:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mathew Levering:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mark G. Malvasi:

Links to posts and programs featuring Kirk Farney:

Links to posts and programs featuring Bradley J. Birzer:

Links to posts and programs featuring Ralph C. Wood:

Links to posts and programs featuring Paul Heintzman:

Links to posts and programs featuring Gil Bailie:

Links to posts and programs featuring Zygmunt Bauman:

Links to posts and programs featuring Matthew Lee Anderson:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mike Aquilina:

Links to posts and programs featuring Bishop Robert Barron:

Links to posts and programs featuring Frederick Buechner:

Links to posts and programs featuring Jeffrey Bilbro:

Links to posts and programs featuring James A. Herrick:

Links to posts and programs featuring Andrew Wilson:

Links to posts and programs featuring Susan Cain:

Links to posts and programs featuring Marilyn McEntyre:

Links to posts and programs featuring Andrew Spencer:

Links to posts and programs featuring Albert Borgmann:

Links to posts and programs featuring Catherine Prescott:

Links to posts and programs featuring Maggie M. Jackson:

Links to posts and programs featuring Garret Keizer:

Links to posts and programs featuring Andy Crouch:

Links to posts and programs featuring Kyle Hughes:

Links to posts and programs featuring Philip G. Ryken:

Links to posts and programs featuring Eric Miller:

Links to posts and programs featuring Ted Prescott:

Links to posts and programs featuring Landon Loftin:

Links to posts and programs featuring Barry Hankins:

Links to posts and programs featuring Quentin Schultze:

Links to posts and programs featuring Dale Ahlquist:

Links to posts and programs featuring Paul Walker:

Links to posts and programs featuring Jason Peters:

Links to posts and programs featuring Fr. Damian Ference:

Links to lectures and commentary by Ken Myers: