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Rating:  - Perhaps Bergman's most thought-provoking film, and achieved with a remarkably spare cast and span
NATTVARDSGAESTERNA ("The Communicants", given the odd title "Winter Light" in English) was released in 1962 and is the second of Ingmar Bergman's "chamber films", a trilogy of separate efforts all marked by streamlined plots and a small cast exploring religious faith. Note that this film is available in a Criterion Collection box set along with the other two films of the trilogy.
NATTVARDSGAESTERNA is perhaps the smallest Bergman film in scale, taking place only over a single Sunday afternoon. As the film opens, the priest Thomas (Gunnar Bjoernstrand) presides over Sunday services with a meagre congregation. In a bold extended scene, Bergman captures the entire Lutheran liturgy from the "Lamb of God" to the dismissal. While the parishioners are mainly bored or distracted, Thomas seems iron-cast in his faith. But subsequent events reveal his tormenting uncertainty on the existence of God and the meaning of life. He proves unable to comfort a parishioner (Max von Sydow) consumed by fear of nuclear war, nor is he able to sustain his long but rocky relationship with the village schoolmarm Marta (Ingrid Thulin).
While the characters experience great pain due to their inability to see God and relate with their fellow human beings, this is not an entirely bleak film. I have always seen an element of reconciliation in the closing shots, the one time in Bergman's oeuvre where hope is still clearly alive. This was, however, the last time he dealt with religious faith in any overt way. In TYSNADEN ("The Silence"), the last film of the chamber trilogy, any discussion of God is notable by its complete absence. Then, following the chamber trilogy, Bergman shifted his focus dramatically from religious faith to human relationships.
Bergman broke new ground in cinematic storytelling here, and not only in the opening scene. When Thomas reads a letter from Marta, the text is delivered by her in soliloquy, speaking directly to the camera in two long shots. Indoor scenes are driven by dialogue, while in outdoor scenes, reflecting the grim Swedish winter, there is little talking at all.
I consider this Bergman's greatest film not only in its flawless screenplay, but also in the achievements of his collaborators. The acting is superb, with Bjoernstrand giving the most convincing performance of his career. Sven Nykvist's camera work successfully conveys the emotions of the characters and the bleakness of their winter surroundings. The real power of the film to me is evident in that, though I've seen this film several times over the years, the questions it raises still provoke much thought.
Rating: - Masterpiece
Winter Light (Nattvardsgästerna- literally The Communicants) is the middle film in Ingmar Bergman's Spider Trilogy (as it too references the God as a spider imagery), following Through A Glass Darkly, and preceding The Silence. Made in 1963, it represents a dramatic notching upward from the well made, but often melodramatic and symbolic, Through A Glass Darkly. Where the first film of the trilogy suffers from the overacting of Harriet Andersson, and some over the top displays of incest (for sex is a subject that the cerebral Bergman is at his weakest in handling) Winter Light is simply one of the greatest Socratic dialogues ever put to film, and as close to perfect a screenplay as a mortal is likely to produce. The acting, in every single role, is pitch perfect, yet Bergman regular Ingrid Thulin gives one of the great dominant female performances in film history, as Märta Lundberg, an atheistic substitute school teacher in a small town with a now unrequited love for a Lutheran Pastor named Tomas Ericsson (Gunnar Björnstrand), head of a church whose congregation has dwindled to a handful. The gorgeous Thulin is at her frumpiest and dowdiest looking in this film, and it seems that after an illness, she lost the affection of Tomas, with whom she had lived with for two years.
Even Tomas does not believe any longer. His is a rote life, ever since the death of his wife four years earlier. He gives communion to a congregation that is bored- a boy licks the pews, others try to stay awake- including the church organist who checks his watch and reads, and the church hierarchy is dominated by money hungry apparatchiks, and Märta's swooning over Tomas is part of local gossip, which discomfits him. As he ends his noontime ceremony he is confronted by a fisherman, Jonas Persson (Max Von Sydow in a curly permanent wave) and his wife Karin (Gunnel Lindblom). The man is suffering from depression, ostensibly over the Chinese getting the atomic bomb. Of course, this is just a pretense, for we know Jonas is an unemployed fisherman, with three children and a fourth on the way, and even in the 1960s people were not so detached from reality to off themselves over an abstraction. Wisely, Bergman never reveals his true fears, as Tomas brushes him off and tells him to come back later, for a man to man talk. The Perssons leave, and then Tomas reads a letter Märta wrote him, confessing her love. It is a brilliant scene, shot with Thulin reading the words in two long takes, interspersed with a brief flashback. She addresses the camera so comfortably yet frankly that it puts the viewer in the place of Tomas, and we can later identify with his discomfit around this sincere, but needy and not altogether `there' woman, who has suffered from a variety of ills which she feels had led Tomas to be repulsed by her. Yet, we are also drawn to her by the quiet brilliance with which she utterly guts religion with her atheistic views.
Bergman, apparently, has always stated that this was his only perfectly realized film, and while others may add to that number, there is no denying the excellence of this filmic masterwork, which shows that while Bergman had his roots in the theater, he also knew exactly how to use the filmic medium. The original Swedish title, as The Communicants, would seem to be better title for this film, which deals with connections and communications, and their fragility. While Through A Glass Darkly deals with people on an island, this aloneness is handled even more deftly here, where winter seems to be the defining metaphor- whether as the winter of religiosity or human kindness. Winter Light ranks with Wild Strawberries and Shame as one of Bergman's greatest works, which makes them essentials as films. It does not indulge in the technical masturbation of some later works, not does it rely too much on stagy overacting, as it deftly balances the inner and outer worlds of film and life. It is a truly great work of art.
Rating:  - Spirituality crisis
I do not believe that there is a human being out there that at some point did not question the existance of God. Regardless if one believes in God or not, there is always a question about (un)certainty of his existance. What makes this film remarkable is that Ingmar Bergman is having a small town minister loosing faith. His own doubt is so intense, that even his parishiners seem to sense that something is off. As a result, only a few attend his masses and those few are desparate in their loneliness, depression and sadness. They are seeking some consolation in the church and their pastor is unable to provide them with because he is having his own doubts. His trouble comes from the fact that he has lost his wife five years ago and cannot get over her death. Her life and being was his sole happiness and without her presence and reassurance he is completely lost. Even his two year romance with the local school teacher is not bringing him any relief from grief; he has no hope as God is simply not responding to his prayers any more. The priest is dead spiritually and he is a shadow of himself; he has no compassion for his (former) lover and is not capable of empathy for his parishiners. His inability to help leads one of his parishiners to commit suicide. But, he is true to his vocation, so no matter how many people do show or do not show for the mass, he prays to God because the show must go on. It is a show because the priest does not have an ounce of humanity left in him. He is a shadow of his former self dwindling slowly towards his own old age and death. He is completely and utterly alone not because everyone has deserted him , but because he chooses so.
Rating: - When God goes silent--what then?
At one point in this best of all Bergman films, the despairing pastor Tomas (Gunnar Bjornstrand) realizes that life would be comprehensible if there is no God. All the paradoxes and dilemmas of faith would vanish, and evil, revealed to be meaningless and nonpurposeful, would at least no longer be mysterious. This realization immediately leads into Tomas' final loss of the last shreds of his faith. The silence of God which has been tormenting him is at least seen to be a necessary silence, and that realization gives him a momentary sense of liberation.
But it also leads to a troubling existential quandary: when God goes silent, once and for all, how does one lead one's life? How can broken, lonely, and frightened people make meaningful contact with one another? How can long-held habits of relying on what Tomas comes to call an "echo God"--an imagined deity who tells you exactly what you want to hear--be broken? How does one manage not, as Marta says, to "hate yourself to death"?
Bergman's "Winter Light" is an exploration of these questions (and surely is as autobiographical as it is philosophical). There are no definitive answers here. A life liberated by God's silence is still a life full of ambiguity and suffering, disappointment and unfulfillment. The silence of God--of ultimate meaning and purposefulness to the universe--is still a Christ-like passion many of us must endure in our own Gethsemanes. But the end of "Winter Light," with Tomas acknowledging the hear-and-now presence of Marta, offers some hope, filtered even as it is through the winter light of a new and godless world.
An absolutely essential text.
Rating: - "I think I have made just one picture that I really like, and that is Winter Light...,
...Everything is exactly as I wanted to have it, in every second of this picture." - Ingmar Bergman
"Winter Light", the second film in the writer/director Ingmar Bergman's trilogy of "faith" or "Silence of God" (it follows "Såsom i en spegel" (1961) ... aka Through a Glass Darkly and precedes Tystnaden (1963) aka The Silence) is a masterpiece of minimalism with great performances and appropriate static, dark and gloomy "wintery" cinematography. This is a very personal and important for Bergman film for it deals with the loss of Faith - the master was very proud of this work. Bergman, aided by his regular cinematographer Sven Nykvist and performances by Gunnar Bjornstrand, Ingrid Thulin, Gunnel Lindblom and Max von Sydow had created a compelling, tragic, and thought-provoking film about a village priest (Gunnar Bjornstrand) who can't give much comfort and hope to those who need them as he feels none for himself. Ingrid Thulin plays Martha, a local school teacher, the woman who loves him and tries to reach him through the wall of desperation and depression that surrounds him.
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