[On] Through a Glass Darkly

About the text

Bergman describes film and other performing arts as cult-like rituals, carried out by priests with certain obligations to their audience. He rejects his earlier conception of the role of the artist, now seeing the artist solely as an instrument.

At the acting school, we discuss why an actor becomes an actor. We reach different conclusions, become absorbed, lose our way. It’s not an easy process. Teacher and student alike are on terra incognita, full of peril and pitfalls. There exists a theory of theatre, but it’s conceived and written by theoreticians, and its practitioners have either been overly presumptuous or ineffably anecdotal. The few exceptions serve only to prove the rule.