Såsom i en spegel
Tags: bleak, insanity, atmospheric

Plot synopsis:
"Through a Glass Darkly," originally titled "The Wallpaper," is the first part in a film trilogy, the start to a new direction taken by Ingmar Bergman: "chamber films," so named for their analogy to chamber music.First Movement. The film opens with the mirroring of a gloomy sky on the placid Baltic Sea waters at the Faro Island shores, near Gotland's northernmost tip. Four bathers, all in a jovial mood, splashing and joking, are returning from a swim in the cold sea. As they reach the jetty, the youngest members of the quartet, Karin (Harriet Andersson) and her teenage brother, Fredrik, known as Minus (Lars Passgard), are sent off to get some milk at a nearby farm, while Karin's physician husband, Martin (Max von Sydow), and her father, David (Gunnar Bjorstrand), a writer, go and set up their fishing nets. David has just returned from Switzerland, where he was finishing writing his latest novel, and their task gives them a private opportunity to discuss Karin's status, whose schizophrenia has been diagnosed as most likely incurable.On the way to the farm, Minus expresses his hope that their father will be successful with his latest novel's publication. On the way back, Minus confides in his sister his sexual apprehensions, which eventually degenerates into his admonishment of Karin for the (maybe) too intimate attention she keeps showing toward him. But most importantly, he confesses how much he wishes he could communicate with his father.The quartet is reunited for the evening dinner around a table in front of their cottage. Again, a festive atmosphere prevails, but soon turns sour. David confesses that while he was anxious to return to his family after his long absence, that he is about to leave again, in spite of his earlier promise to his children not to travel so often. Somewhat guiltily, and seeking forgiveness, David distributes some presents, all of them turning out to be unsuitable. He goes into the house under the pretense of getting his pipe tobacco, but it is only to release his pent-up anguish at being trapped in his own narcissistic world. When David returns to the table, the family proposes to perform a short play, written by Minus as a gift to his father. The play, "The Artistic Haunting" or "The Tomb of Illusions," tells of a prince who chooses world fame over love. This, of course, strikes too close to David for comfort, but he nevertheless applauds.Readying themselves for bed, Karin and Martin discuss the evening, and Karin turns down her husband's tender advances. But later in the night, the cry of gulls awakens her and, following her inner voices, she steals out of the room to an abandoned upstairs room. In the room, she presses her ear to the wall, listening to voices emanating from behind it. She moves to the center of the room, falls to her knees in ecstasy, and achieves a sexual climax. Karin descends to her father's room, where he is still putting some last touches on his novel. He carries her to his bed, tucks her in, and she falls asleep. Minus appears standing on the window sill, and asks his father to come and join him in retrieving the nets. Some time after their departure, Karin awakens. Rummaging in David's desk, she finds his diary, which she opens toward the last written pages and reads, "Her illness is incurableI'm horrified by my curiosity, by my urge to record its course, to make an accurate description of her gradual disintegration, to use her." Karin is crushed by her discovery. She returns to her bedroom and tells her husband about some of her findings in David's diary. But she cannot bring herself to tell him that David is actually studying her descent into madness. Martin tries unconvincingly to reassure her.Second Movement. Karin and Minus are alone. Minus is "studying" his Latin book, into which he has hidden a girlie magazine. Karin uncovers the subterfuge and teases him about it. In this moment of familiarity, Karin tells Minus her terrible secret, her experience in the room upstairs, and takes him to the room. She explains her experience with the voices she hears from behind the flower wallpaper. She tells him how she passes through the wall into an adjacent room where people are waiting for "Him." Karin further confesses to Minus that she has sacrificed Martin for the "other." On the other hand, somewhat lucidly, she states she is not sure this is all real.Some time later, Minus is looking desperately everywhere for Karin, who has disappeared from his sight. At last, he finds her lying down inside the hull of a beached boat wreck. Minus approaches Karin, who is lying on the boards in a fetal position, and leans over her. Karin, with a devilish grin on her face suddenly reaches for him, and forces him against her in a passionate embrace. We guess from the next scene, where Minus is holding Karin in his arms that incest has occurred.Meanwhile, David and Martin, who went by motorboat to Gotland, have anchored the boat and are having lunch. Martin confronts David's having written in his diary about Karin and her sickness. What follows is a disturbing exchange of accusations. David admits to studying Karin and her illness as a subject for his next book, but doesn't Martin wish at times for Karin's death? David confesses that recently in Switzerland, he tried to commit suicide, but fate (God?) intervened and saved him. At that moment, David manages, for the first time, to communicate his inner most feelings:" From the void within me, something was born that I can't touch or name. A love. For Karin. For Minus. For you."David and Martin, returning to their island, are greeted at the pier by Minus, who tells them about Karin's latest crisis. They all run to the shipwreck. As Karin expresses her wish to talk privately to her father, Martin is vexed and possibly guesses what happened between the two siblings. He leaves to go get an ambulance for Karin. Karin tells her father that she is giving up "living in two worlds," and wants to be committed. She also hints unambiguously at the incest. David's transformation continues as he confesses his guilt to Karin.Third Movement. Karin is in her room, packing her bags. As Martin goes to fetch some medicine for her, she slips away to the abandoned room upstairs. When David and Martin find her there, she is standing in the middle of the room talking to "them." Martin enters the room and Karin tells him to rejoice at God's imminent arrival. She tells her husband to come and kneel with her, to wait for God to appear. The helicopter ambulance arrives in a roar of engine and whirring blades that makes the house shake and the closet door open. Through the window, we catch a glimpse of the helicopter landing like a giant spider suspended by an invisible thread. Suddenly, Karin is overwhelmed by her vision of the spider-God. She run down stairs and is stopped by Minus, thus allowing Martin enough time to inject her with a sedative. As she calms down, she describes her vision of a horrifying "spider-God" who tried to penetrate her. The ambulance nurse knocks at the door. Karin puts on her sunglasses, as if they were a symbolic of cutting herself from the world, and calmly walks to the waiting ambulance.Following his sister's departure, Minus enters his father's room for the first time. Minus tells him of his panic over going on living, after the latest happenings. David's answer to his son is that he can live if he can hold unto something. "I do not know if love is proof of God's existence, or if love is God himself," says David, but, "that thought helps me in my emptiness and my dirty despair." After some more exchanges, as David leaves the room to prepare dinner, Minus, in near ecstasy says, "Papa spoke to me."

Review: The reason most viewers do not grasp the importance of the magnificent "Man-God trilogy" or "the Silence trilogy" or "the Dark/Faith trilogy" (three films: "Through a glass darkly", "Winter light", and "the Silence") is that the trilogy deals with the theological question of God's existence.
All these films seem to have been influenced by this seminal work of Bergman.To those viewers, who are not spiritually inclined, the film could be reduced to the obvious action of Harriet Anderson's character Karin insisting on wearing goggles as she steps out of her home to live the rest of her life in a hospital.
The film can equally be interpreted as a film on mad people who feel they are in communion with god, who at other times are slaves to dark forces (voices).On the other hand one can argue the intensity of the light is a metaphor for a sign that God existsthe basic question that troubled Bergman, the son of a priest, in real life.
Structurally Bergman doffs his cap to Shakespeare by adding a one act play within the film on the lines of "Hamlet" to drive home a point to the father and his illusion of love for his perfect work of art at the expense of depriving love for his near and dear.In more ways than one, this is a thinking person's film.
"Through a Glass Darkly" is a typically great Bergman's film - four people arrive to an isolated island to spend a few days together, a young woman, her husband, father, and brother.
Harriet Anderson was amazing as Karin, a mentally sick young woman, who was just released from the hospital but I believe three other actors playing Father (Gunnar Bjornstrand), Husband (Max von Sydow), and Brother (Lars Passgård) were as good as she was.
Through Bergman's eyes we observe the effects of her situation on the three people closest to her, her husband, Martin (Max von Sydow), her father, David (Gunnar Bjornstrand) and her brother, Minus (Lars Passgard).
An absorbing, evocative and sometimes tense drama, the film is impeccably delivered by Bergman, and the performances are all exemplary, especially Harriet Andersson, who brings the tortured soul of Karin to life with nuance and a depth and grasp of the character that is remarkable.
The first of Bergman's 'Faith' trilogy (followed by `Winter Light' and `The Silence'), `Through A Glass, Darkly' is one of his finest works, an intricate exploration of the fragility of the human psyche and the complexities of life.
it is fascinating to watch bergman come to terms with the absence of god and man's tragic isolation in an indifferent universe through the art he uses like no one else could or does, the art of film.
karin is a mentally disordered young woman, intensely loved by her family and well cared for but nonetheless subject to bouts of extreme madness and delusions of divinity that are so convincing and well performed as to be hard to watch (particularly the scene where she is convinced that a deity disguised as a spider is going to crawl out of a closet).
Karin (Harriet Andersson) is slowly going mad, her family (fiancée, father and brother) are trying to understand her and not send her away, trying to let her know that things may be alright as she descends into hysteria, talking to walls, waiting for god to come out of the closet.
The father's regret over the madness of his deceased wife, the husbands jealousy, his inability to act, the nearly sexual love the brother feels for Karin, his isolation and inability to get over his immaturity.
Here you can see how a film can have probably one of the best cinematography EVER without using any CGI and computers, just with manipulating the light, and perfect camera work.You can enjoy a compelling story about God and the numerous aspects in relationships between people, which works both on a grand scale and in every specific case between the characters.
The photography is magical and while not as praised as Wild Strawberries, Persona or Winter Light ( and a few other Bergman classics), its power and its passion reach inside your soul and dares you to resist living the story and the characters of the film.
All four members bring out the heart of Bergman's message, with Andersson playing Karin in true sincerity and passion for the plague of her mind that has brought a cloud over her and her father, husband and younger brother (a woman with three generations of men).
This "chamber film" by Ingmar Bergman (whose name is a quote in the Christian bible) has just four characters: a writer (Gunnar Bjornstrand), his schizophrenic daughter Karin (Harriet Andersson), Karin's husband, Martin (Max von Sydow) and Karin's teenage brother, Minus (Lars Passgard).
With the exception of Passgard, all the other three are Bergman regulars, having appeared in many of his films.The movie happens in a single day period in an isolated island, and it's basically about how Karin goes from being relatively normal at the beginning to absolutely crazy 24 hours later, and the reaction of the three people around her.
In some of his movies, like this one, this stage background makes a little more of "noise".So this is a worthwhile film, but not in my opinion among Bergman's best: At about the same time he did with Bjornstrand Winter Light which is somewhat lesser known, perhaps, but far better..
In a small family island, Karin (Harriet Andersson), her teenage brother Minus (Lars Passgård) and her husband Martin (Max von Sydow) welcome her father David (Gunnar Björnstrand), who is a writer permanently absent traveling around the world.
When Karin finds the journal of her father hidden in a drawer in his desk, she reads that her degenerative disease is incurable and triggers a breakdown."Såsom i en Spegel" is the beginning of Bergman's Trilogy of Silence, with a direct reference to the lack of communication and the absence of God. With this uncomfortable film, Ingmar Bergman won his first Oscar in 1962 in the category Best Foreign Language Film.
Karin, who has till lately been in a mental institution, her husband, who was her therapist, her brother, who has his own problems, and her father, a novelist, meet in an island after a long time, and tensions break out."Through a Glass Darkly" is a very interesting film, where Bergman continues his work about religion and family.
Her brother is still trying to cope with his just awoken sexuality, and her father is a self-centered person, detached, and who can't help but see his daughter's illness as a chance to observe a person on a path of self-destruction.Bergman plays again with death, God and love, how humans can destroy each other, and how our acts can have horrible consequences.
Visually gorgeous as it is stark, Through a Glass Darkly rakes the audience over the coals of its pensive intensity yet leave you safely in the warmth of its lyrical beauty.Returning home to his family island, self-absorbed writer David (Gunnar Björnstrand) is reunited with the son he often ignores, Minus (Lars Passgård), his daughter, Karin (Harriet Andersson) who has just been released from a mental institution, and her devoted yet frustrated husband Martin (Max von Sydow), David can't shake the feeling of regret that his children are such strangers to him.
The film tells the story of Karin a young woman who's recovering on a small island with her husband and family after a stay in a mental hospital.
As she tries to re-establish connections with her emotionally suppressed family, she begins to disconnect with reality and starts to believe she's being visited and spoken to by god.The film centres around four main characters, Karin(Harriet Andersson), her emotionally despondent father David(Gunnar Björnstrand), her husband Martin(Max Von Sydow) who's dealing with the inevitability of Karin's diagnosis not Improving.
Finally Karin's younger brother Minus, whose going through adolescence questioning everything with no emotional support from his father.Through A Glass Darkly is a beautifully shot, serene piece of film- making.
THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY is a drama about a young woman, who suffers from mental illness, relationships, illusions and religion.The story takes place during a 24-hour period while four family members take their vacation on a remote island.
Harriett Andersson really shows her range as an actress in this film from Director Ingmar Bergman, playing a young woman recently released from a mental institution, and suffering from schizophrenia.
With his distinct filming, frequent use of close-ups and through four characters functioning as mirrors to one another Ingmar Bergman (1917-2007) gives thorough depictions of relationships between a father and a daughter, a father-in-law and a son-in-law, a husband and a wife and a sister and a brother.
His stringently structured drama is played out during a summer day on an isolated Island surrounded by grand landscapes, where four related characters are misled by a God who has only given suggestions about his presence to the suffering main character, and is a study of character about a woman seeking comfort in her visions of God appearing before her and of a father fighting against his desires to use his daughter's mental regression in his novel.In one of the film's most memorable scenes Ingmar Bergman films the main character as she is in God's possession and placed in the middle of a minimal furnished room where she's surrounded by shadows and light.
This August Strindberg-inspired and dialog-driven chamber-piece is masterfully photographed by Swedish cinematographer Sven Nykvist (1922-2006) in black-and-white and incomparably acted by then 18-year-old Lasse Passgård, Max Von Sydow, Gunnar Björnstrand and especially Harriet Andersson who is unrestrained in her portrayal of her character's versatile emotional range.God's character in this existentialistic study of religious madness which is strongly influenced by Johann Sebastian Bach's atmospheric chamber music, manifests in the brilliantly portrayed light and darkness which is a pivotal aspect in this visionary director's universe..
"Through A Glass Darkly" begins the trilogy of Ingmar Bergman films dedicated to wrestling with God and faith.
It might feel less imaginative and creative than the films of the '50s, but the narrower scope keeps the attention where Bergman films require it the most: on the characters wrestling with reality and faith.Harriet Andersson as Karin, a young married woman home on the family island after being treated at a mental hospital, is the focal point of "Darkly" and she wears the part well.
She absolutely steals the film, even though Max von Sydow as her husband and Gunnar Bjornstand as her somewhat estranged father deliver heartfelt performances warranting sympathy.Karin's illness has its effects on all those who love her, the two aforementioned characters and her younger brother Minus (Lars Passgard).
Yet, Bergman's deepest thought and struggle was his inability to correlate a belief in God and the horrors of life.Set up as a play, this film explores a family of four with serious and deeply-set emotional conflicts built up over time and now coming to the surface.
Karin (Harriet Andersson) has just returned from the hospital after being treated for a mental illness and her husband (Max von Sydow), father (Gunnar Bjornstrand), and brother (Lars Passgard) all struggle to relate and support her as she attempts to refocus her life.
Much is made of the subtle themes Bergman presents here: lack of love between family members, sexual tension between Karin and Minus, and the hallucinations Karin experiences due to the lack of support from those around her.However, what really struck me about this film was Bergman's attempt at understanding God. There is a famous scene when Karin confesses that she saw God and he was a spider.
Sweden's enigmatic Ingmar Bergman wrote and directed this sub-Shakespearean piece of melancholia concerning a young woman, just out of the mental hospital, who retreats to her isolated island home along with her sad, frustrated father, her alienated husband, and her deeply disturbed brother.
Like "Wild Strawberries," "Through a Glass Darkly" examines the implications of lives lived in isolation, along with daunting questions about God. Four family members spend time on a remote island as the woman (Karin) is recovering from a stay in an asylum (the island itself is a symbol of their isolation, and of our isolation in the universe).
However , even if "Karin" was a real person, there would be hope for her from the medical atandpoint, regardless of whether the other people in her life finally realized that they had given her the "wrong" kind of love (Through a glass darkly--thhe whole implication of that is "flawed love" and it is only at the end that the father and brother realize this).
Through a Glass Darkly (1961) *** (out of 4) The first in Ingmar Bergman's trilogy of religious films has a woman (Harriet Andersson) just getting out of a mental hospital and spending time on an island with her husband (Max von Sydow), her father (Gunnar Bjornstrand) and younger brother (Lars Passgard).
long time passed and i fell that was not a good film some scene are bad but some are very cinematic)) I think thats a truth about Through a glass darkly .some scene are wonderful like where Karin and Minus are in the sank ship and rains came...but some like the last scene which minus told himself ((I finally talked to my father)) thats amateur because the audience who watch this kind of film known when he talked to his father for more than 3 sec on the screen he could talk to him and no need to tell us about it because we know we understand.at all Through a glass darkly is one of the best Bergman film ever come to silver screen the cinematography of Sven Nickvist is great ...
Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with his recent assertion (I disagree with Bergman on this one), each of these films can stand on its own and explores themes of love, loss, death and most importantly, God. This film was intended to be "God defined," in the trilogy (Winter Light is "God exposed," and The Silence is "God's silence.") This film has to be one of the dreariest films that I've ever seen, but at the same time it is so beautiful and poignant that the viewer is drawn in.The story revolves around Karin (Harriet Andersson) who is taking a vacation on the island of Faro in the Baltic Sea with her husband, Martin (Max von Sydow), Father, David (Gunnar Bjornstrand), and brother, Minus (Lars Passgard).
In this haunting film, a mentally ill young woman and three of her family members - younger brother, older husband, and aging father - vacation on an idyllic island.
That said, it's quite a good film that simply has not held up that well over the years as a de facto Chekhovian drama- partly due to the melodramatic acting of its lead character, Karin (Harriet Andersson), but more importantly because its handling of psychology and religion seems quite dated, in light of what we now know about mental illnesses and the structure of the brain.The film follows Karin, her doctor husband Martin (Max Von Sydow), father David (Gunnar Björnstrand), and seventeen year old brother Minus (Lars Passgård) at a vacation home on Fårö island.
She returns to her isolated family home and rejoins her father, writer David (Gunnar Björnstrand), teenage brother Minus (Lars Passgård) and husband Martin (Max von Sydow), with whom she has an awkward sexual relationship.
Minus is a Thespian Actor, Writer and Stage Writer (more allusions to Bergman's lust for art and also his installment into that artistry inventory), the brother who reads a lot and is an avid reader of the Language, but is an adolescent and a Dark and unwholesome character, whose fervor dampens their relationship, and Karin's husband is Martin (Max von Syndow from "The Seventh Seal") torn by the binds of her mind but all in all consoling her without success; she even in one scene has the inability to tell him what her Father scrolled about her (the only bit predictable in the film).
***SPOILERS*** Deep and powerful psychological drama from famed Swedish director Ingmar Bergman about the complexities of the human mind and how it effects one's conception of reality.The story takes place on the nearly deserted island of Faro in the North Sea with Karin spending her convalescence there together with her doctor husband Martin after being treated in a mental intuition for her severe schizophrenia.
This leads Karin to freak out and have a complete nervous breakdown where she's taken back to the mainland, by helicopter, for emergency medical treatment!It's then that things get back to normal on the island with both father and son, David & Minus, finally coming together in clearing up their differences and seeing that love, God's love, is the answer to all the worlds, as well as their own, problems.
As for Martin he's now able to continue his life without worrying about his very mentally ill and disturbed wife Karin in knowing that even though she's beyond his help she's not beyond the help of God who works,like in the movie,in strange ways to get her both help as well as salvation.
The first film in director Ingmar Bergman's "faith trilogy" - to be completed several years later with "Winter Light" (1962) and "Silence" (1963) - "Through A Glass Darkly" (1961) stars Harriet Andersson as Karin, a young woman who suffers from a mental illness.
Basically on a small remote island for a vacation, schizophrenic Karin (BAFTA nominated Harriet Andersson) has recently been released from an asylum, her husband Martin (Max Von Sydow) believes that her condition is almost incurable, her brother Minus (Lars Passgård) feels neglected by his father because of his work getting more attention, and her novelist father David (Gunnar Björnstrand) is suffering "writer's block" and he is upset on any attack on his character.