Winter Light

About the film

In January 1961 Ingmar Bergman directs Anton Chekhov's The Seagull at the Royal Dramatic Theatre and August Strindberg's Playing with Fire for Swedish Radio Theatre. He is appointed artistic adviser to AB Svensk Filmindustri (a position previously held by Bergman's mentor and idol, Victor Sjöström). He wins his first Oscar, for The Virgin Spring, voted best foreign language film. On 22 April, the première is held of his now legendary production of Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress at the Royal Opera in Stockholm. At the same time he is putting the finishing touches to Through a Glass, Darkly, the first film, along with Winter Light and The Silence, of what would later be known as a trilogy.

His success is unprecedented. Bergman's status is such that he can – as he was to do the following year – turn down a 500,000 dollar contract with MGM, 24 times more than he was earning at the time. Yet he hardly feels comfortable with all this success, quite the opposite. 'I found myself in the position of being able to do what I wanted. It was time to risk a death-defying leap.' But this defiance of death is not simply an expression of courage. At the same time as he is cashing in on increasing success – not least internationally – Bergman still appears to feel misunderstood. Swedish critical opinion, although not lacking in admiration, is still basically unreceptive to a director who appears permanently obsessed with religious broodings at a time when the country in general is secularised, modern and hungry for success. Bergman confronts these constant reservations in an uncompromising way. He plans a film that not only features a doubting clergyman, but will also be 'ugly'. No cheap aesthetic tricks like 'a lot of uncalled-for direct light in a pretty girl's hair.' Furthermore, the stars of the film - Gunnar Björnstrand and Ingrid Thulin, two of Sweden's most stylish actors of all time – will be made to appear repugnant.

During the shooting of Winter Light, the crew give the film the apt nickname 'Snotty John and the Lip Balm'. They speculate on the sequel: 'The Further Tribulations of Snotty John and the Lip Balm'. Briefly speaking, Bergman is hardly expecting a hit. It is therefore no coincidence that during the course of the year he gives two interviews in which he predicts an imminent end to his success: the weekly magazine Se publishes an article in which Bergman compares his international celebrity to an influenza epidemic that 'goes from country to country, reaches its peak and then dies away'. An article in Expressen bears the telling heading 'Foreign interest in me just a fad – soon to be over'.

There is a general tendency in Ingmar Bergman to complain of being misunderstood, yet also to boast about his outsider status. This is hardly the place for a psychological analysis of what lies behind this, yet it is obvious that with such an attitude, success is a double-edged sword. Seen in this light, it is logical that the film he is currently planning seems intended to give his adversaries new ammunition with which to attack him. And perhaps it is not so much an act of 'death defiance,' as one of psychological necessity.

As so often in Bergman, the starting point for Winter Light was a piece of music. Whilst working on The Rake's Progress he listened to a great deal of Stravinsky, and when the 'Symphony of Psalms' was played on the radio one day over the Easter holiday, he decided he would like to make a film set in a solitary church on the plains of Uppland. In his workbook from the time, we can closely follow the film's genesis. This is the first note:

26.3.61

CONVERSATIONS WITH GOD

SUNDAY MORNING. Symphony of Psalms.

Work with Rake's progress.

One has to do what is necessary. When nothing is necessary, one should do nothing. The following has suddenly occurred to me. I shall try to write it down as starkly and simply as possible, yet I'm not sure how it will turn out.

In the next entry we find the first description of what was to become Winter Light:

This I know;

"I" go into an empty church to converse with God and to finally fall to my knees, to pray openly, to talk to God. To get answers, to give up my resistance at last or [unreadable] or this [unreadable] complication. The bond [unreadable] to the father, to the need for security or to that which does not exist which is like mice scurrying away in centuries gone by. Well now.

Next to this primitive altar in this deserted church, this drama about a human life is played out. Individuals materialise and fade away.

I go into the church, lock the door and remain there in a fever. Wait for the miracle which is akin to drinking from a woman's breast.

Blasphemy, contempt, hatred that knows no bounds. He encounters the altar of the church. The despairing silence of the night. The graves, the dead. [unreadable] and the rats. The smell of death and decay. The hour glass. The terror that the coming night will bring. The bottom has been reached. Gethsemane. The crucifixion. [Unreadable.]

I go out of my way, my own way from this thing, that is already obsolete and that I don't want to contemplate. With gratitude I leave my [unreadable], this grey nothing, shrunken, behind me with indifference. With this I am free to go. But Guilt. I strike it out. I will not leave the church before I have received an answer, be that as it may, but I am staying here.

Bergman's friend, the author and (later) film director Vilgot Sjöman was involved in the project at an early stage. He would subsequently become the film's assistant director, an experience he has documented in his excellent book L136: Diary with Ingmar Bergman. Yet at this early stage, he functions as someone whom Bergman bounces his ideas off: between Easter and Midsummer Bergman writes down various draft fragments which Sjöman reads and comments on. Quite quickly, the person of the initial notes becomes a pastor, and Sjöman is sceptical towards 'yet another film about a clergyman broken down by doubt in his faith' (even though he does not say so explicitly). On 14 June, however, Bergman develops his theme in a way that interests the non-believer Sjöman:

'You see, this person has a hatred of Christ that he won't admit to anyone. He is envious of Christ.'

'Envious?'

'Yes, and jealous. He feels something akin to the elder son's hatred of the prodigal son, who gets all the attention when at last he comes home: fatted calf and all the rest.'

It is also tempting to draw parallels between the clergyman in the film and Bergman's father, Erik. The pastor's name is Tomas Ericsson: Tomas (Doubting Thomas), Erik's son. Might there be an element of self portraiture in the character?

In early July Bergman and his wife go to the summer house they have rented on the island of Torö, where he quickly writes a preliminary screenplay. In the meantime, he lets Sjöman know how the work is progressing. On 20 July 1961 Sjöman receives a report from Bergman in which he confirms that he wants Gunnar Björnstrand and Ingrid Thulin to play the main parts. The pastor's wife, initially alive, is now dead:

I woke up one morning and killed her off. It was a lovely feeling. And right." He gives a loud laugh as he tells me about it.

[...]

Now the parson has a mistress instead. An hysterical, lonely, middle-aged, flat-chested school teacher in the country. So now things are moving.

Other vital elements also fall into place: 

'I don't usually give a damn about world politics, but this spring I read in the papers about the Russians and the Chinese, and I discovered that it's not the Americans that the Russians are scared of, but the Chinese. The Chinese who are so regimented that you could easily imagine them starting a nuclear war. And reading all that made me very depressed.'

Bergman describes the ending of the film as the 'stirrings of a new faith'. He finds this a difficult section to write. Yet in a conversation with Sjöman he feels he has found a solution:

Have you ever heard of 'duplication'? On certain Sundays the parson has to hold two services: one in the main parish and then one in the chapelry, the sub-parish in the next district. Now it is custom in the Swedish church that if there are no more than three persons in the congregation, no service need be held. What I do is this: when Björnstrand comes to the district church, the church-warden comes up to him and says: 'There's only one churchgoer here.' Yet the parson holds the service all the same. That's all that is needed to indicate the new faith that is stirring inside the parson.

Later, in The Magic Lantern, Bergman recalls the ending as having come to him during a visit to a church in the company of his elderly father:

It was an early spring day with mist and bright light reflecting off the surrounding snow. We arrived in plenty of time at the little church north of Uppsala to find four churchgoers ahead of us waiting in the narrow pews. The churchwarden and the sexton were whispering on the porch while a female organist was rummaging in the organ loft. Even after the summoning bell had faded away over the plain, the pastor still had not appeared. A long silence ensued in heaven and on earth. Father shifted uneasily in his seat and muttered to himself and me. A few minutes later we heard the sound of a car speeding across the slippery ground outside; a door slammed, and after a minute the pastor cam puffing down the aisle.

When he got to the altar rail, he turned around and looked at his congregation with red-rimmed eyes. He was a thin, long-haired man, his trimmed beard scarcely covering his receding chin. He swung his arms like a skier and coughed, the hair on the crown of his head curly, and his forehead turning red. 'I am sick,' said the pastor. 'I have a high fever and a chill.' He sought sympathy in our eyes. 'I have permission to give you a short service; there will be no communion. I'll preach as best as I can, then we'll sing a hymn and that will have to do. 'I'll just go into the sacristy and put on my cassock.' He bowed and for a few moments stood irresolutely as if waiting for applause or at least some sign of approval, but when no one reacted, he disappeared through a heavy door.

Father rose from his seat in the pew. He was upset. 'I must speak to that man. Let me pass.' He got out of the pew and limped into the sacristy, leaning heavily on his stick. A short and agitated conversation followed.

A few minutes later, the churchwarden appeared. He smiled with embarrassment and explained that there would be a communion service after all, and an older colleague would assist the pastor.

The introductory hymn was sung by the organist and us few churchgoers. At the end of the second verse, Father came in, in white vestments, with his stick. When the hymn was over, he turned to us and spoke in his calm free voice, 'Holy, holy, holy Lord of Hosts, heaven and earth are full of thy glory. Glory be to thee, O Lord most High.'

Thus it was that I discovered the ending to Winter Light and a rule I was to follow from then on: irrespective of everything that happens to you in life, you hold your communion.

The screenplay is inscribed 'Torö, 7 August 1961, S.D.G.' S.D.G. stands for Soli Deo Gloria – 'Glory to God Alone'. Johann Sebastian Bach used to sign the bottom of each page of his compositions with the same initials.

Sources of inspiration 

The immediate trigger for the film may well have been Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms, yet there were certainly other sources of inspiration. Given the film's religious theme, it has been the subject of an extensive exegesis, even by the standards of Bergman scholarship: theological interpreters have seen the film as a more or less disguised passion play. It has also been suggested that Tomas Ericsson passes through seven 'stations' which equate to Jesus' Way of the Cross. Others see Märta Lundberg as the film's Christ figure (like Jesus she is 33 years old, and has stigmata-like eczema on her hands and scalp). Bergman would later comment on this as follows:

Märta is something of the stuff saints are made of, i.e., hysterical, power-greedy, but also possessed of an inner vision. All tha business about the eczema on her hands and forehead, for example, I'd pinched that straight from my second wife. She used to suffer from it and went about with big pieces of sticking plaster on her forehead and bandaged hands. She had an allergic excema. But that it had anything whatever to do with stigmatization – that's utterly wrong. For me Märta is something furious, alove, intractable, pig-headed, troublesome. A great and – for a dying figure like the clergyman – overwhelming person.

Yet even though Bergman has refuted certain religious interpretations, they are not without foundation: it is clear, at least, that he himself has viewed the film as a theological parable. This is especially apparent in L-136 where Bergman himself speaks of Tomas' various "stations" (something which in itself may just as likely refer to the Way of the Cross as to Strindberg's To Damascus). And Algot Frövik, the disabled church warden, is an angel. 'Really, literally: an angel. Ther is fifty times more religion in that man than in the whole character of the parson.' In various instances, Bergman interprets the film as a religious allegory: Tomas is the lame man of the New Testament, borne along by Märta and Algot. The relevant verse in the Bible was obviously of major relevance to the film: it is quoted as a motto in the hand-written screenplay:

'And, behold, they brought to him a man sick of the palsy, lying on a bed:
and Jesus seeing their faith said unto the sick of the palsy;
Son, be of good cheer; thy sins be forgiven thee.
Matthew,  9:2.'