Lying beneath the arches and mosaics of the moderately decorated architecture, the dusty half empty pews, and the flooded natural sun leaking down over the congregation is a clandestine struggle quietly waging war within us. In a Bergman film, this is merely setting the stage.

Winter Light is an example of a perfect film, at least in the Bergman vocabulary sense. For a film designed almost in a theatrical concept for its minimalism, it remains largely cinematic, and achieves a great deal over the course of a hour in real time and only an afternoon in film time. In the space between morning congregation and afternoon ceremonies, the lives of a small group of individuals is tested in the most…

I am going to ramble until I make sense of my thoughts on this:

It is no coincidence, I think, that the one person in this film to have a deeper understanding of Jesus and his own faith does so through open compassion. Algot, who is apparently physically disabled, dismisses the physical pain of Jesus in favor of the spiritual and emotional pain of being abandoned, citing it as the more severe form of pain suffered during the Passion. His insight into Jesus' suffering is in contrast to the faithless and broken Tomas, who has failed (in a manner that is, to me, a personally devastating manner) to reach out with compassion to anyone (in the course of the film).…

"I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing." (John 15:5)

Second part of the auteur's trilogy dealing with man's relationship with God. It is literally impossible to relate with this masterpiece's protagonist unless you are a son of God. "But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name." (John 1:12)

What is so absolutely accurate and brilliant about the movie is the fact that it states how agnostics, atheists, etc. lose their credibility in God based on the actions of humans, not…

God is going. Winter Light is a very personal film for Ingmar Bergman, whose father was a priest. It's a very small scale film, even for Bergman, but about the largest of all things: God and creation itself. Made in the 1960s, Winter Light slots into an era when Bergman spent years making thematically connected films, as opposed to the somewhat unpredictable genre jumping of his late 50s output (religious - The Seventh Seal, social realist - Brink of Life, historical - The Magician, sentimental drama - Wild Strawberries). Winter Light is the middle and best of Bergman's Silent God Trilogy (or Faith Trilogy), and grapples with faith on a very powerful individual level.

Scandinavia, like much of Europe, has turned increasingly secular…

Winter Light is part of Ingmar Bergman's trilogy 'Silence of God' which consist of three films about the crisis of a human's faith; Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence. In despite of likely I was misunderstood in the order in which I watched it, it's not really matter since each story of the three films doesn't quite relate to one another. Bergman seems to have shifted somewhat from his work of expressionism and surrealism in the 50s to focus on a sequence of dramas regarding to the morality of the faith that explored beliefs and their alienation in modern times, trilogies examining the necessity for religion and questioning the promise of faith.

Winter Light focuses on the…

Openly theological, Ingmar Berman's Winter Light is perhaps the legendary Swedish filmmaker's bleakest film. It's the central passage in what would later come to be referred to as his "Trilogy of Faith", following Through a Glass Darkly and preceding The Silence. Its primary concerns are suicide, physical suffering and harsh Scandinavian winters. 

Taking place throughout an afternoon in rural Sweden, as one church service ends and another begins, it accounts a Lutheran pastor named Tomas Ericsson (Gunnar Bjornstrand) undergoing a crisis of faith. The pastor has found the number of his congregation members dwindling until only a few people remain, including Tomas's ex-mistress, Märta (Ingrid Thulin), an atheist who is blindly in love with him.

Scepticism about God's presence is…

Bergman's craftsmanship - his dialogue, his performances, his cinematography - is never shy of masterful, but, based on my impressions of his last few films that I've watched, I think I might continue to hit this 3.5 star roof with him, and here's why: He keeps making religion the heart of his films, but religion without myth. He secularizes christianity in his films, making it little more than a philosophical entity, rather than a transcendent one. I understand this is necessary because what he's really tackling at this point in his career is the war between the rational and the religious, but, as an audience member, I can't help but feel like I'm watching a bird with its wings clipped.…