God's Silence

Winter Light. Sweden's cinematic poltergeist, Writer-Director Ingmar Bergman, once more haunts the dark and chilly corridors where Man loses God, and once more the soul in torment seems to be his own. Bergman is the son of an austere Evangelical Lutheran parson who molded the boy with icy constraint and puritanical tyranny, and of a mother who was remote from both son and husband. To Bergman his parents were "sealed in iron caskets." This boyhood gave him the permeating motifs for his work: "God and the Devil, Life and Death, the drama of the couple and the tragic solitude of beings." In Winter Light, the hoarfrost of allegory gleams more icily than ever before.

Church bells ring on a winter Sunday in a Swedish coastal village. The devout --they number just nine--assemble in the drafty little stone building. The pastor (Gunnar Bjoernstrand) serves Communion as if he were an actor in a play near the end of a long run--withdrawn, saying the words without compassion. The contrast between this remoteness and the fervor on the faces of the communicants as they receive the Host and the Cup states Bergman's theme: a vain search for faith down ways that are closed. Besought, after the service, to counsel a fisherman (Max von Sydow) sick with world-sadness because "the Chinese now have an atom bomb," the pastor starts a confident trust-in-God homily that turns by stages into a pathetic malediction of the "echo God" who answers prayers with superficial comfort. The fisherman's consequent suicide leads the pastor to more destruction by words, cruel words to the village schoolteacher (Ingrid Thulin), whose life's meaning is her love for him. "I don't want you," he shouts. "I'm sick of your myopia, your fumbling hands, your weak stomach, your eczema, your periods--your candlesticks and tablecloths."

At the end of the afternoon, having told the fisherman's wife of her husband's suicide without managing to give her a morsel of faith or comfort, the pastor goes to conduct vespers at a church in a nearby parish. A crippled verger waits for him in the study before the service. "There is too much talk of Christ's physical suffering in the Bible; I've suffered as much as Christ, in a physical way," he says. "Christ's real suffering was on the Cross, faced with God's silence in the moment of horrible doubt before he died." In the winter twilight, the pastor goes to the altar and starts the service. The church is empty except for the figure of the shattered schoolteacher.

Has God, through the suicide, the ordeal of the schoolteacher and the verger's measuring of pain, spoken a lesson of his authority and man's humbleness? Bergman draws no conclusions. Doubt darkens the ending: the pastor stands rigidly before the altar to begin a prayer to his unfelt and perhaps unfeeling God.

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