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Binding: DVD
EAN: 5023965334626
Format: PAL
Number Of Discs: 1
Sales Rank: 94193
Theatrical Release Date: September 05, 1962
Editorial Review:
Amazon.com essential video:
Ingmar Bergman's gloomy but incisive 1961 classic about a woman's descent into madness--and the inability of her family to mitigate her pain with love--is still a stunning work. Harriet Andersson plays Karin, a psychiatric patient newly released from a hospital and staying in the island home where she found some measure of security in childhood. Instead of getting on her feet, however, Karin begins disintegrating after realizing she no longer loves her physician husband (Max von Sydow) and is being rather coldly observed by her writer father (Gunnar Bjornstrand), whose distant fascination with her plight is recorded in his daily journal. Hearing voices, believing God to be a spider, and pursuing an incestuous relationship with her brother, Karin slips into an inexorable decline, objectively witnessed by those too emotionally frozen to help. The first of Bergman's trilogy on themes of faith and isolation (the other entries being Winter Light and The Silence), Through a Glass Darkly finds the legendary Swedish filmmaker at an artistic and philosophical peak. --Tom Keogh
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - A powerful film, but get it as part of the Criterion Collection "chamber trilogy" box.
Ingmar Bergman's 1961 film SASOM I EN SPEGEL (Through a Glass Darkly) was the first of his "chamber films" of the early '60s. These form a trilogy, all of intimate plots involving a minimum of characters and concerned with the "silence of God", Man's burden of surviving in life on his own with no clear direction from above. They intensify even further the existential angst of the late '50s films (DET SJUNDE INSEGLET, JUNGFRUKALLAN) but introduce the interpersonal themes that were to preoccupy Bergman ... Read More
Rating:  - Good
Ingmar Bergman's 1961 film, Through A Glass Darkly (Såsom i en spegel), is not one of his best films, although it is one of his most lauded, winning an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. That said, it's quite a good film that simply has not held up that well over the years as a de facto Chekhovian drama- partly due to the melodramatic acting of its lead character, Karin (Harriet Andersson), but more importantly because its handling of psychology and religion seems quite dated, in light of what we ... Read More
Rating: - A god steps down from the mountain
Although Bergman considers "Through a Glass Darkly" to be a failure (and, to a certain extent, I agree), it was an important step (he says) in liberating himself from the gloomy Lutheran theology of his childhood. Ostensibly, the story is about the relapse of Karin (Harriet Andersson) into mental illness--a relapse, one suspects, which is incurable. Karin is convinced that a god lives on the other side of a strangely papered wall (in fact, Bergman's original title for the film was "The Wallpaper"). ... Read More
Rating: - "For now we see through a glass, darkly"- Bible, 1 Corinthians xiii. 12.,
Well, we don't see darkly through a glass, and Bergman explains in his "Introductions" that during the ancient times, there were no glass, the mirrors were made of metal, bronze, for instance and while looking through the metal mirror, the face and the background appear darker than in reality. Does it mean that when we look inside ourselves like in the mirror, we appear darker and more sinister than we are? Or the other way around?
"Through a Glass Darkly" is a typically great Bergman's ... Read More
Rating:  - Perfect
I was a little bored with what seemed the extraneous events of the beginning, but it turned out they were important (I always feel you should watch a Bergman film backwards, that way the beginning won't seem pointless). I loved this movie, not that I'm such a fan of mental illness. I thought it was perfectly written, directed, acted and crowded with "meaning." I won't go into the plot (all the other reviews have pretty well divulged that to a fare thee well), but I highly recommend it, even if you don't like ... Read More
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