Tap to listen
In the divine comedy Dante Alegre, between hell and paradise lies a place called purgatory. There, the sinful souls of believers lie waiting to be purged by the flames and torment of their sins, to make them lightened from all sin, free from any sin. With punishment, the cleanser prepares the spirits of sins to become transparent and pure, ready to enter God's eternal paradise where the veil will finally be removed from his face and illuminated by his splendor, love and mercy. (1)
We can imagine many of the heroes of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman's films in that cleanser; these characters are not necessarily believers, but they seek in various ways for faith, and in their own cleanser, the harshest torment is suspicion; each of them sits in painful anticipation and wonder, Will God talk to her from behind his veil after long waiting? Or will she stay there forever without breaking through her silence but with no doubt that she has no doubt if behind the scenes there is really nothing at all. This suspicion is most evident in his three films, "The Seventh Seal", "Through Opaque Glass" and "Winter Light", making the journey the heroes make in the first place a journey for the interior themselves to seek certainty.
"Knowledge .. not faith"
The knight, Antonius Block, went back home after ten years in the Crusades. In his country, he did not find warmth and welcome, here is the face of death overlooks him again, but this time in the form of a plague began to kill people and wear dead bodies dead. With the death of his idea for years, dozens of questions began to rise unanswered. But in the first minutes of "Seventh Seal," something happened that Block never expected. On the beach where he slept the night before, he woke up to find death, but this time he was embodied standing in front of him face to face. The block did not die, but on the contrary, challenged him to play a role of chess on the condition that he kept him alive as long as the game continues.
Death automatically sends questions about life.As long as you are trapped in the truth of your mortality, you cannot stop thinking about the meaning of your days, and your fate after you close your eyes for the last time. This is the case in which Anthony Block, the hero of the film "The Seventh Seal," which is besieged by death wherever it comes, is gone. What if life itself is doomed to nothing? Where is God from all this?
Block goes to church wanting to confess. But in his faith-free heart, he finds nothing but emptiness, and in his tormented mind dozens of questions: "Why is it so difficult for us to perceive God with the senses? Why should he hide behind vague promises and hidden miracles? How can we believe believers when we are unable to believe? Believe ourselves? What will happen to us, we want to believe but we can not? I want knowledge, not faith. "
Bergman does not provide any answers to these questions, and keeps his hero from the same perplexity from start to finish. But he puts in his path and in front of us another model of living, for people who know the truth of death and prefer not to think about it, and do not find humility in the status of faith before knowledge.
This model is led by the family of actor and clown Yoff, made up of him and his wife, Maya, and their young son, Michael. While the knight sees visions of death at the beginning of the film, Juve sees visions of a very different kind, one morning witnessing the Virgin Mary in its full splendor and its light manifested in front of him in a lush garden; Believe, the torment of questions is the fate of all those who put knowledge before faith.
Small family lives a simple and happy life, filled their hearts love to each other and only concern them with the tasks of daily life of work and care for the small. On the other hand, we know that Block came from a wealthy family, they would not have been busy making money, and although he came to mention his wife once, but we do not touch in the coolness that he talked about that he never loved her real love. In that film, we see the same thing Bergman will repeat again and again in many subsequent films: there is faith where love exists; no love, no faith, no faith, no love. This does not necessarily come into contact with religions in terms of canons and worship, but it captures its essence based primarily on a feeling rather than a mental faith, and is necessarily incompatible with Block's desire to rationalize everything that causes his doubts and torments.
Among the Yoff and Block families, Bergman sets out a third model, led by Younis, Block's servant. Fones shared Block his war and journey, but he did not share his confusion; he fears death a lot, but prefers not to think of it; To live a life of all this, enjoying the moment.
Block and Yunus roads intersect with Yoff and Mia, and for the first time in years, Block tastes the taste of tranquility and comfort. The family shares their simple food of wild strawberries and yoghurt, plays their beautiful little ones, and listens to Yoff singing songs about spring. Block does not hide his feeling of the quiet happiness that engulfed him in that family, saying goodbye when he left, saying: "I will remember that hour of peace, I will remember strawberries, and the milk pot, and your faces in the dusk, and Michael asleep, and Yove on his return. I carry a vase of fresh milk. "(2) (3) (4)
"Love is the guide"
In the later Bergman films, we find the Yuv and Mia model decaying, replaced by the cruelty and coldness that dominate all human relations. What may seem like a happy family from afar in the first minutes of "Through the Dark Glass," four people see them from a distance overlooking the heart of the beach and their loud voices loud in the morning of a clear summer sun. But the picture does not remain the same, Bergman does what he always likes to do, the scenes of happiness and harmony fall rapidly and realize that it was only a fragile cover under which hide an ugly fact.
From the heart of the summer day, a storm and rain reflect the real state of heroes. The four individuals are a father, son, daughter and stepdaughter on vacation together on a remote beach. They have a troubled relationship with Karen sitting in the middle. The father is a novelist whose work went away from his children, leaving behind a distance filled with the feeling of bitterness and abandonment of children. The husband is close to the father in age, which suggests that the daughter may have taken it as compensation for the loss of the father. The daughter, although she seemed completely normal at first, we soon discover that she suffers from a terminal psychiatric illness and hallucinations that make her represent things that do not exist.
Bergman returns to what he referred to in the Seventh Seal of the intermarriage of faith and love through the Yoff family, but this time he is proving the opposite. In Dark Glass, we see a total absence of warm feelings, which is clearly reflected in Karen, the most sensitive person. Her writer's father takes advantage of her illness and feels "overwhelming curiosity and a keen desire to record every detail that breaks her mind" and then uses it as a topic in one of his writings as he wrote in his memoirs. Her husband and doctor, despite his full knowledge of her bad condition, but he does not stop the pressure to Ttraha Gram when he turns away from him Inbha Bnzarath and words that pretend tenderness and line of desire. In the midst of all this, Karen finds none other than God himself.
Karen was quick to bridge the gap left by the absence of sincere love in her life by faith. But her faith takes another turn in her waning mind, besieged by voices calling her to the shed of the house where she bows down on her knees and sometimes feels the walls sometimes waiting for God to look at her from a crack. Karen escapes to Hallaus and pictures of a non-existent place: "Enter a giant room that I find lit and overwhelmed by a sense of safety. There are people walking back and forth, some talking to me and understanding them, their faces radiate light. Everyone is waiting to come, but no one is worried. I am present when he comes. Sometimes I feel very eager, longing for that moment when the door will open and all faces will go to God. ”
Bergman does not explicitly say that, but we feel that Karen's madness is mainly due to her lack of love, and her resort to Hallaus takes on a religious form resulting from the same thing. In Bergman's films, the relationship between faith and love is always close: the Yoff family's faith in a God who monitors them and keeps them afar off and the love they feel towards that God is reflected in their relationship with each other; With Karen the weak, and the same coolness was what makes her mind drifting away from reality to a parallel world in which a God is compassionate and make up for what she missed in that life.
But even that sanctuary has her mind on her. In a final sequence in the film, Karen is the god, but it is only a terrifying and giant spider attacking her, shouting and groaning in horror. At that moment, we realize that Karen drifted completely into madness, and that cruelty swallowed up to her imaginations and transformed the source of reassurance into something terrifying.
After witnessing what he witnessed, Karen's teenage brother turns to his troubled father who complains about his inability to live in this world after what he saw, and the father responds to the necessity of supporting him. The Son asks him: "Is it the Lord? Give me proof of his existence, you will not." The father replied: "All I can tell you is the idea of making my own hopes: love exists in this life, I do not know if this love is a sign of God or love is God himself." 5
"My God my God why did you leave me"
"Winter Light" does not begin with any illusion of happiness. From the first few minutes, the cold and cruel face of their angry faces has not bothered to hide behind a mask. In the first scene, we see an austere mass in a remote, snow-covered village church in winter when the bright sun has only known its sky. The prayers are read by Pastor Thomas with facial expressions devoid of any strict snowy feelings and voice. When the camera moves away, we see the austerity of the villagers' faith, too, with only a few people attending the mass with only empty seats.
But the mask still exists; not the mask of happiness this time, but the mask of faith. Worn by Pastor Thomas while doubt necrosis his heart. Since his wife died, the only person I love, faith has been lost. Faith died this time with the death of love, leaving behind as usual in Burjuman's selfish and cruel films.
That selfishness took full control of Thomas when a fisherman and his wife came to him asking for help. After the fisherman "Yunus" read in the newspaper about the intention of China to make nuclear bombs to explode the entire planet, living in a state of existential anxiety and besieged dozens of unanswered questions, topped by the most difficult question: Where is God from all this evil? Yunus stands on the verge of a crumbling hole. If life is so fragile that some humans can catch it without the God's intervention, if God is silent because it simply does not exist, as Marta's mistress Marta says, then what does it mean to continue life?
But Thomas does not even try to relieve Yunus, but finds resonance with his own doubts. Thomas concludes those doubts with his conclusion at the end: "If there is no God, will this make any difference? Life will be understood, and death will become just evaporation of that life, decomposition of body and soul. Cruelty, loneliness, fear, all these things will become clear and transparent." ". At that moment, Yunus, who could no longer bear out of the room, would stand out as if the priest stood up as if he were receiving a revelation. My God, my God, why did you leave me? ".
In less than an hour, an old lady rushes to the church and tells him that the hunter has pointed a gun at his head and emptied bullets. We know as well as Thomas why Jonah committed suicide. In the absence of God, his life ceased to have any meaning and he chose to call it the end bullet.
In his subsequent films, Bergman never addressed God's question with the same directness ever again. He mentioned the relationship of art to religion more than once, including the dialogue that he said: "Despite my beliefs and doubts - which are not important in this regard - I think that art lost its main engine of creativity when it was separated from worship, his secret rope was cut and he lives now. A sterile life is born and degrades itself, in the past days the artist remained unknown while his work was to glorify the Lord. '' (6)
Bergman's heroes continued to live in that same cursed place with suspicion and loss of love, their selfishness and cruelty. We do not know what Ingmar Bergman himself reached about God before he closed his eyes for the last time eleven years ago, but at least through his films we know how he saw the lives of human beings having lost faith in them, a life with which Allegri's antiseptic may seem more merciful.