——Winter Light——

(A-)

Winter Light is an almost direct continuation of theme from Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly, although in this installment things have gotten much bleaker. The story concerns a pastor who has lost his wife some time ago and now preaches to near empty churches. After one service a man comes to him for help, since he has become depressed with the news that China now has the bomb and is not afraid to use it. He needs some reassurance, but the pastor can give him none because he has been plagued by “God’s silence” ever since his wife’s death and thus ends up giving the man such a bad speech that the man goes out and kills himself. The pastor slips into deep depression as he works out his relationship with an aging spinster teacher who is deeply in love with him, but he feels next to nothing for her.

This film makes connections with Through a Glass Darkly by repeating the image of the grotesque spider God and the idea that “love is God,” meaning that love is the physical manifestation that is the proof of the existence of God. This movie is much more bleak though, and much harder to get into. The movie at times becomes as stark as winter itself, and the viewer at times will find it hard to identify with the pastor, since he is kind of a prick. It is a challenging film, but by the end a very rewarding one. The pastor thinks that God has forsaken him by taking away his wife who was his love, and thus his proof of God’s existence. His preaching has become shallow and canned now, but at the end a cripple compares his own suffering to Jesus’ passion on the Cross, mentioning that the physical pain was probably nothing compared to the feeling of being forsaken by God. Then, even though there is only one person in the church for the service, his spinster sometimes mistress, he decides to carry on the mass nonetheless, bringing optimism to the picture that as long as there is at least one person to save, they are still worth servicing to.