Through a Glass Darkly

The Artistic Haunting

Ingmar Bergman's 1961 masterpiece Through a Glass Darkly takes its original Swedish-language name, Såsom i en spegel or As in a Mirror, from the Swedish Biblical verse, Paul's epistle to the Corinthians, which in the King James Bible is translated as "Through a Glass Darkly." We note the hypnotic splendor of the reflections in the rippling water that open the film. The four vacationers emerge from the sea onto the island of Fårö, in what is Bergman's first use of the remote locale where he will eventually build a home and live out his final decades. This recalls the opening of The Seventh Seal where all principals emerge from the watery edge of the world, creatures still in the process of evolution. 

Virility is a means for males of exerting their place as truly existing within the world amid sexual inferiority complexes — insofar as there's a woman to lord it over even if only somewhere on the personal periphery. Virility is an excuse and an escape. Strange conversation between Martin (Max von Sydow) and David/Papa (Gunnar Björnstrand) about Hemingway "leading the way" on virility, itself a murky remark in a conversation already complicated by the fact it occurs between a father and his son-in-law, on the subject of the latter's daughter Karin (the sublime Harriet Andersson). Through a glass, darkly, indeed.

The hormonal confusion of the diminutively christened Minus (Lars Passgård), Karin's brother, what with his longing for his sister — he spills his milk all over the shore. 

Within Through a Glass Darkly there are moments of Fordian poetry: Papa lighting his pipe at the outside table during everdawn, for instance — although such moments of reflection, of his editing his recent manuscript, are interrupted constantly even as he tries to make a go of one sentence's revision; whereas Minus in his credulity rejoins that this summer he has written 13 plays. Quantity over quality, if the backyard production of his play-ette The Artistic Haunting is any indication.

But Papa's got new artistic inspiration: as his diary reveals, upon Karin's snooping, he will be focusing upon his daughter's progressive perhaps-schizophrenia-based illness, "to use her." When Karin confesses her transgression, Martin exhibits a rather full displeasure. Will he be implicated in her father's text somehow? Something about virility and Hemingway?

"Have you written one word of truth in your life as an author?" Martin asks Papa on an afternoon boating excursion. 

"I must talk to Papa before it starts again." It does indeed, following her lovemaking to Minus in the hull of the beached ship (there before their arrival on Fårö, or having allowed their arrival?), and her breakdown in the wallpapered room in which she recounts an attempted rape by God the Spider. •

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Other writing on Ingmar Bergman at Cinemasparagus:

Kris [Crisis, 1946]

Skepp till India Land [Ship to India, 1947]

Hamnstad [Port of Call, 1948]

Törst [Thirst, 1949]

Till glädje [To Joy, 1950]

Sommarlek [Summer Interlude, 1951]

Kvinnors väntan [Women's Waiting, 1952]

Sommaren med Monika [Summer with Monika, 1953] 

Gycklarnas afton [Carnies' Twilight, aka Sawdust and Tinsel, 1954]

En lektion i kärlek [A Lesson in Love, 1954]

Kvinnodröm [Women's Dream, aka Dreams, 1955]

Sommernattens leende [Smile of the Summer Night, 1955]

Det sjunde inseglet [The Seventh Seal, 1957]

Smultronstället [The Wild Strawberry Patch, aka Wild Strawberries, 1957]

Nära livet [On the Brink of Life, aka Brink of Life, 1958]

Ansiktet [The Face, aka The Magician, 1958]

Jungfrukällan [The Virgin Spring, 1960]

Djävulens öge [The Devil's Eye, 1960]

Såsom i en spegel [As in a Mirror / Through a Glass Darkly, 1961]

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Documenteur: An Emotion Picture

Hangin' with les Cooper

The film begins with the first shot of the mural that had previously concluded Mur murs from 1980. The title here is, like the prior film (its companion work), a pun — Documenteur: An Emotion Picture of 1981 — Documenter, or at the same time, as is emphasized on the typography of the one-sheet that Varda showcases in the 2014 video introduction she made for both Mur murs and Documenteur, "Docu-Liar." The question is: Who is the liar? It's "documenteur" vs. "documenteuse" — could it be the dispositif itself? Other implications, e.g., something to do with a man, this film doesn't share in its 1 hour 7 minutes or so. It's not that men are absent, but Émilie Cooper (Sabine Mamou, excellent, needless to say dead: 2003) lives a fulfilling life without Tom or whomever, the love-making sessions with whom are sensual but in a way cool and perfunctory. (It's complicated: note the tearful and repressed reaction when her buttinsky friend calls her at work to inquire how Tom is. Émilie's "Non" is one of the most satisfying come-backs I can remember.) Her life is occupied by her son, played by Varda's son Mathieu Demy in one of the all-time great "child-performances" of the cinema. She treats him with cordial geniality and respect for his intelligence, even as they're moving house a few times over due to forced circumstances. Documenteur yields a cornucopia of pleasures — is one of those films that encapsulates so much and at only 1 hour 7 minutes leaves the spectator thinking: "But it's not enough..." •

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Other writing on Agnès Varda at Cinemasparagus:

La Pointe-Courte [1955]

Ô saisons ô châteaux [O Seasons, O Châteaux, 1957]

L'Opéra-Mouffe, carnet de notes filmées rue Mouffetard par une femme enceinte en 1958 [The Opéra-Mouffe: Diary Filmed on the rue Mouffetard in Paris by a Pregnant Woman in 1958, 1958]

Du côté de la Côte [Around the Côte, 1958]

Les fiancés du pont Mac Donald, ou (Méfiez-vous des lunettes noires) [The Fiancés of the Pont Mac Donald, or: (Beware of Dark Glasses), 1961]

Cléo de 5 à 7 [Cléo from 5 to 7, 1962]

Le bonheur [Happiness, 1964]

Elsa la Rose [Elsa the Rose, 1966]

Les créatures [The Creatures, 1966]

Uncle Yanco [1967]

Black Panthers [1968]

Lions Love... and Lies / Lions Love [1969]

Nausicaa [1970]

Réponse de femmes à une question produite par Antenne 2 pour le magazine 'F. comme Femme' [Women's Response to a Question Put Forth by Antenne 2 for the Magazine-Show 'F. comme Femme', 1975]

Daguerréotypes [1976]

Plaisir d'amour en Iran [Giddiness of Love in Iran] [1976]

L'une chante l'autre pas [The One Sings the Other Doesn't] [1977]

Mur murs [1980]

Documenteur: An Emotion Picture [1981]

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Mur murs

Shaking Through

The title of Varda's 1980 essay film, Mur murs, or Wall Walls, is a pun on the French word "Murmures," or "Murmurs." The walls in question are the concrete canvasses, if you will, for murals and graffiti — with the former, a community celebration and homage to a man, woman, or group; with the latter, the signature that reads "I was here." This is California Lascaux, in which rudimentary representations of "movement(s)" become reincarnated in the trompe-l'œil. This is SoCal vertigo — a vertiginous reaction to Manhattan's domineering skyscrapers must in East Los Angeles be induced at the third-story level.

Anonymity and braggadocio: when a work goes beyond a simple tag (or a less simple stacked pile of tags) it often contains a signature in the lower-right. A male voice in voice-over intones — murmurs — the surnames of the artists. 

Mur murs portrays the flotsam of the Sixties. The divide consists of thirteen years, more or less; these walls were made for talking. Used to talking from the moment of their inception. Hieroglyphics — more or less. Watching Mur murs one might be forgiven for believing it takes place in 1968. An archaeological site, seen from 1980; seen from 2022, 1980's 42 years old. The Sixties never left, the Sixties don't know they're past, but they're waiting for their next turn to speak. "The flower children who sought to beautify life?..."

Kent Twitchell's monumental portraits demarcate these boundaries of the time gap; the subjects of some of his paintings step forward in a tableau organized by Varda only a short time, presumably, since their likenesses had been painted by Twitchell. And yet: "Time and love have branded me with its claws..." Varda certainly caught that paint-scratch fever: due to her short stature, she has always been obsessed with monumentality in her work, like in that excursion with French goof JR. To her credit, Varda has always handed a torch to whoever excited her own excitements. She is implicitly gleeful to discover that Thomas Edison was né Álvarez, and that's whence he adapted the middle name "Alva." Varda draws the connection between Edison not only as arguably the creator of the cinema, but as the inventor whose efforts made a science-fiction conceivable — and in a daisy-chain sort of way laid the groundwork for a Chicanofuturism.

Question: "Who pays for it all?" — "In Jane's case, there are grants."

"It's virtually creating fanatics out of normal people." — The blade has two edges, though. There's the apotheosizing of the landscape vis-à-vis the view-blocking trompes-l'œil; there's 1960s-80s Los Angeles, where the "image" comes home to roost... or to die. Flip your eye, or roll the die... •

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Other writing on Agnès Varda at Cinemasparagus:

La Pointe-Courte [1955]

Ô saisons ô châteaux [O Seasons, O Châteaux, 1957]

L'Opéra-Mouffe, carnet de notes filmées rue Mouffetard par une femme enceinte en 1958 [The Opéra-Mouffe: Diary Filmed on the rue Mouffetard in Paris by a Pregnant Woman in 1958, 1958]

Du côté de la Côte [Around the Côte, 1958]

Les fiancés du pont Mac Donald, ou (Méfiez-vous des lunettes noires) [The Fiancés of the Pont Mac Donald, or: (Beware of Dark Glasses), 1961]

Cléo de 5 à 7 [Cléo from 5 to 7, 1962]

Le bonheur [Happiness, 1964]

Elsa la Rose [Elsa the Rose, 1966]

Les créatures [The Creatures, 1966]

Uncle Yanco [1967]

Black Panthers [1968]

Lions Love... and Lies / Lions Love [1969]

Nausicaa [1970]

Réponse de femmes à une question produite par Antenne 2 pour le magazine 'F. comme Femme' [Women's Response to a Question Put Forth by Antenne 2 for the Magazine-Show 'F. comme Femme', 1975]

Daguerréotypes [1976]

Plaisir d'amour en Iran [Giddiness of Love in Iran] [1976]

L'une chante l'autre pas [The One Sings the Other Doesn't] [1977]

Mur murs [1980]

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