Karen Ponzio Photos.
Andrianna Campbell-LaFleur introduces "Through A Glass Darkly"
Best Video went big with its newest film series Tuesday night, bringing the first of three films by legendary Swedish director Ingmar Bergman to a welcoming crowd. The series opened with Through A Glass Darkly, the 1961 film that is considered the first in a trilogy of Bergman films that explore similar themes of God and spirituality. The next two films, The Silence and Winter Light, will be shown on March 28 and April 4, respectively. According to event coordinator Teo Hernandez, it was something he has wanted to do for a while.
“We haven’t really done any of the masters” in a Best Video film series, he said. He considered that although Bergman is a “household name,” people may not have seen these particular films. “I think this series is perfect for that,” he added. Hernandez also noted that Bergman himself never called the films a trilogy, but “they were made fairly close together, so people like to group them together.”
Another three-film series, The Vengeance Trilogy from director Park Chan-wook, had been scheduled first, but got preempted due to weather-related cancellations. That one will be shown in April after this one is complete. In May Best Video will return to a four-part series.
Hernandez said Best Video has been noticing an “uptick” in the number of people attending all of the film series, and as of next month, all film screenings will be free to Best Video members, “so that will be a big boost, hopefully.”
Each film in this new series will be introduced by a Best Video member, according to Hernandez. On this night that role went to Andrianna Campbell-LaFleur who is a lecturer and associate research scholar for history of art and African American studies at Yale University. She has also written about media and film for such publications as Pitchfork and Artforum.
Bergman “returns to the same actors over and over again,” Campbell-LaFleur noted, “and creates a wonderful sequence of interior dialogues with the characters that are developed on screen.” She also noted his “love affair with black and white media. He makes you forget that there’s no color there because there’s so much color within the characters’ character development.” She also thinks this time of year is a good time to “interact with this kind of solitude and this kind of landscape.”
Campbell-LaFleur praised Best Video for its “wonderful selection,” including movies that are hard to find, noting that she has been a member of many video stores over the last three decades and “this is in the spirit of all the best ones.”
Executive director Julie Smith spoke of Bergman’s “penchant for dark introspective and psychologically insightful films into individuals and their relationships,” noting that in this series he “excelled in an infatuation with silver nitrate.”
She also gave a brief synopsis of the night’s film (without spoilers, of course) as well as the next two films of the series, and a wealth of details about Bergman both personally and professionally, including connections to other Bergman films, such as Wild Strawberries.
Karin listens.
Through A Glass Darkly centers on four characters vacationing on a remote island: Karin, a young woman who is suffering from psychological issues; her husband Martin, a physician; her father, a novelist who is suffering from writer’s block; and her younger brother Minus, who is having relationship issues with both his father and his sister. Though the story focuses mainly on Karin, the voices she hears and the struggle between what is real and what is not, all the characters have their own struggles with what is right and wrong, not just for themselves, but for the others. Is God talking to her? And is he going to reveal himself to her as well?
Throughout the film Bergman deftly captures the profound loneliness and despair of these characters even when there is no dialogue, the exquisite direction and cinematography highlighting their isolation and desperation.
I won’t spoil the film, but at one point Minus says to Karin, “I wonder if everyone is caged in.” It seems Bergman believes so, but only to a point, as later Minus says “reality burst open and I tumbled out.” It is these types of introspective investigations, leading to the challenging of what God is (and isn’t), that this filmmaker excels at, making this series one that begs to be continued.
Best Video’s Ingmar Bergman film series continues on March 28 and April 4 at 7 p.m. More details about this series as well as others can be found on Best Video’s website.
