Friday Night and Sunday Morning

WE LIVE IN A SECULAR, NARCISSISTIC, EVEN HEDONISTIC AGE. Is there anyone out there who still doubts this? If you do, have a look at two films made forty years apart-Winter Light (1962) and Friday Night (2002)-and you'll see what I mean.1 This is not to say that the latter picture couldn't have been made in the sixties (particularly the late 1960s) and that something like Winter Light couldn't be made now. We're dealing here with the rule and not the exception, the middle, not the extremities. None of this is intended to denigrate either film as a mediocrity, or a priori to privilege one over the other. Each was made by a unique cinematic artist, not a mere movie artisan. Still, "men are as the time is," as Edmund declares in King Lear, and no artist in any medium-particularly one so popular, or immediate, as the cinema-can claim exemption.

Let's begin with the older film, the one that takes place on what used to be a day of rest and devotion-the Sabbath, in this case one wintry Sunday in a rural clergyman's life, between matins and vespers. The middle entry in Bergman's "faith" trilogy, Winter Light suffers far less from the defect of the other two parts, Through a Glass Darkly (1961) and The Silence (1963): such an excess of symbolism that each picture breaks down into a series of discernible metaphors for spiritual alienation rather than an aggregation of those metaphors into an organic, affecting work. Though, apart from its literary-like piling up of symbols, Through a Glass Darkly relied on almost none of the arty legerdemain that marred The Magician (1958) and The Seventh Seal (1957), Winter Light is even starker and more circumscribed. So much so that this film, somewhat more than the one that immediately followed it, makes one feel that the (ir) religious vision Bergman had been formulating in all his major pictures up to now has finally shed its excrescences and become as simple and direct, as pure and honest, as it is possible to be.

Winter Light is only eighty minutes in length compared to the ninetyone of Through a Glass Darkly and the ninety-six minutes of The Silence; and it uses relatively few actors and settings, like those "chamber" works. But they at least have musical scores (in both cases by Bach), whereas the only music in Winter Light occurs during church services in accompaniment to Swedish psalms. Such economy of means, of course, is a matter of great artistry, of artistic refinement. And no filmmaker, not even Michelangelo Antonioni, was ever Bergman's superior when it came to knowing what to leave out (one can almost divide true cinematic artists from mere moviemakers on the question of such exclusion)-the absences in Winter Light being as significant as what is presented. They in fact contribute in the most central way to the picture's theme, as well as to its visual architecture, since Bergman is dealing here with an image of spiritual darkness and desolation, with an "absence" in the soul.

That absence is a crisis in, almost a loss of, faith, and it's a middle-aged Lutheran minister who is in its grip. To describe his condition in this way is entirely accurate, for his anguish is experienced like a violent seizure, the "silence of God" being a palpable thing. Since the season is winter, the days are short and the light is sparse and sterile-a counterpart to the weather, the climate as well as the illumination, in the pastor's soul. The planes and angles of the camera's investigations (black-and-white cinematography by Sven Nykvist) mark out this universe of gray emptiness within a framework that makes it even more austere or stringent. And the "gray area" here, the study in varying shades of gray, is entirely appropriate, because the clergyman's crisis is a continuing one; nothing is resolved either for or against religious belief. In a different film, a different life, we would abide in the expectation of answers; in Winter Light, we can only take heart from a continuity of questions.

The minister is accompanied, in his clerical vocation, by a school-teacher who loves him and wants to marry him and whose presence he accepts-but whom he cannot love in return. For it develops that when his wife died some years before, his capacity to love died with her, and it becomes clear that for him such a loss is itself a demonstration of God's absence or indifference. Thus does Bergman, in the most delicate, unrhetorical, yet profoundly moving way, link the realms of natural and supernatural, diurnal and supernal love, keeping the tension between them at a high pitch and never resorting to cheap or arbitrary solutions. For him life's special agony is just such a rending of the loving bond between God and man. Unlike Antonioni, whose work also concentrated on this subject, he does not believe that man invented God but now must be manly enough to admit it and destroy him. Bergman is concerned to find a way of living with-at the very least-the memory of God, and the only way to such divinity is through affinity: if not the loving marriage between two human beings, then fellow feeling of the kind that is contained in the very idea of "ministration."