Bleak, beyond belief: Why we still love Ingmar Bergman films

With the 60th anniversary of the UK release of Bergman’s ‘Through a Glass Darkly’, the first in the Swedish director’s Faith Trilogy, Geoffrey Macnab looks at why these depressing films have endured, when most blockbusters from the same era have long since been forgotten

Harriet Andersson as the mentally ill Karin in Ingmar Bergman’s ‘Through A Glass Darkly’ – the film was released internationally 60 years ago (Granger/Shutterstock)

They are gloomy and angsty – about madness, sexual betrayal, existential despair, and incest. So why is Ingmar Bergman’s early 1960s Faith Trilogy, including Through a Glass Darkly – which was released in the UK and internationally 60 years ago – still holding us in its grip? If you want to understand why Swedish director Bergman’s trilogy feels so relevant today, watch the scenes in Winter Light (1963) in which a distraught-looking Max von Sydow is shown wrestling with the metaphysical monstrosity of existence.

Von Sydow, one of Bergman’s favourite actors, plays Jonas Persson, seemingly a very ordinary and well-adjusted Swedish fisherman. Jonas is happily married with three children and “another on the way”. His wife is “a good woman”. He is in good health. Nonetheless, despair is eating away at him. He is near suicidal, afflicted with a strange abstract dread about the world that comes from reading far too many newspapers. He may not have Tory tax cuts, rising energy bills, a sinking pound, or a threat of nukes from Putin to worry about, but he is terrified that China, which he regards as a rogue state with nothing left to lose, might drop an atomic bomb.

“Why do we have to keep on living?” Jonas suddenly blurts out to the pastor (Gunnar Bjornstrand). The pastor struggles to give him a satisfactory answer.