Bergman 18, 19, 20: Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Winter Light (1963), The Silence (1963)

I do love that san-serif font for the titles. (The Devil's Eye, incidentally, doesn't use it, perhaps indicating that Bergman considered this a less personal film?) Anyway, it's a little difficult to add to the large amount of writing that these films have already generated. What interested me most, perhaps, was the sense in which they are a trilogy. Clearly they address related themes about faith and faithlessness, but even more interesting is the way that specific phrases recur - most famously, probably, Karin's "spider-god" from Through a Glass Darkly is mentioned by Tomas in Winter Light. Obviously in one sense this ties the films in all the more closely to Bergman's own obsessions, but it also creates a feeling of parallel worlds, of intersections between otherwise distinct realities that can be surprisingly Lynchian. (David Lynch also uses repeated phrases for uncanny effect, perhaps most extensively in INLAND EMPIRE.) Also unexpectedly Lynchian was much of The Silence - eerie hotel corridors, a kindly old hotel waiter, dwarves... Cinematographically and performance-wise all three films are impeccable, often extremely different (the agitation of Through a Glass Darkly, the minimalism of Winter Light, the heated claustrophobia of The Silence) but all resonant with one another. And yet the different films amplify rather than explain one another; I don't quite feel that one gains a better understanding of any of them individually by watching the others, so much as that they add to each other to give one a better sense of what Bergman is about. Which is pretty close to being a definition of an auteur, as unfashionable as that term might be.