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March 29
We watched Through A Glass Darkly by Ingmar Bergman, and were given these questions:
Here is a synopsis of the film:
The movie opens with orchestral music in the background while the camera shows clouds and a lake. The credits are rolled to these backgrounds, and then the movie shoots over to a woman and 3 men playing in the ocean and laughing. Karin, the woman, starts telling the men to ‘do the nets’, and a small good-natured argument ensues between Minas (brother), David (father) and Martin (husband). David makes the comment to Martin (who are the two that end up ‘doing the nets’) that virility is greater then health, so they should do the nets in their robes and not change into dry clothes. We learn that Martin is a doctor, David is a writer, Minas is a student, and Karin just got out of a hospital. Martin makes the comment that Karin’s hearing has improved since she left the hospital, and the two men discuss Karin’s health briefly. We then see the four eating at a picnic table outside their house, and discussion turns to David’s trip and future plans. He reveals his plans to tour Yugoslavia, and Minas and Karin become upset that he’s breaking his promise to stay home from then on (a promise he forgot that he had made). David gives everyone presents, and goes inside and cries in despair, while Minas, Karin and Martin all open their presents to reveal gifts that they already have (presumable from him on other trips). Karin tries to be positive by saying that the thought is what counts, while Minas is realistic in his statement that he probably forgot about presents until he got to Stockholm (which is implied to be the last stop before the island). David returns outside, and is blindfolded and led away to the three’s ‘surprise’ – a play performed by them and written by Minas. The play is about a dead 13-year old princess who is visited by a pauper prince declaring his love. She gives him a test to prove his love: enter the tomb after the clock strikes two and be locked in eternity with her (dead, as a ghost). The prince decides against joining her in death, and the play ends. Everyone then goes to bed and we learn that Karin is unable and/or unwilling to have sex since she left the hospital, and that Martin is incredibly patient with her and doesn’t care about the physical so much as the fact that she is alive and well. Meanwhile, David is upstairs trying to sleep but can’t so he takes some pills (presumably for ulcers or sleep-inducing), and he then attempts to proofread his writing.
Hours later Karin awakens (around 4 am) when she hears birds singing and a foghorn resounding. She can’t sleep, so she leaves the bed and goes upstairs following whispering sounds, she enters a room and hears more whispering but there is no one there. The scene progresses from voices (presumably in her head), to her touching herself and moaning while in the middle of the room, and ending with her falling into a heap on the floor. She gets up after a minute as if nothing had happened and goes into her father’s room, where David is working on his book. They talk for a minute and then he puts her to bed “just like when I [Karin] was little”, and she promptly falls asleep. Minas appears and he asks David to help him take up the nets, so they quietly leave while Karin sleeps on. David and Minas discuss writing, and we learn that Minas has written 13 plays and 1 opera during the summer. Minas asks his father is it’s the same way for him – to write in a driven frenzy and then consider all of your work bad once it is finished – and David says it’s not that way for him. Meanwhile, Karin awakens and goes over to David’s desk, and starts rummaging through it until she finds his diary. She then reads his most recent entry, which talks of her illness being incurable and his desire to follow her progress and recession as a book (to in fact use her for his profession). She becomes distraught and goes and wakes her husband to go swimming (it’s now 5 am), and he calms her and promises to ask David what was written in it when she asks him to. Later, while Martin and David go fishing, Karin helps Minas with his Latin, but finds him with a “girlie magazine” on top of his Latin books. She teases him for a while, and asks which one is his favorite, and he becomes uncomfortable and agitated with her. Then they really do practice Latin, until she decides to tell him about “the others.” She takes him to the room, and tells him of her experiences in it: she is in two worlds, and in that room, the other world is just beyond the wall. She can see people in it, waiting for ‘him’ to come, and they tell her that she will be there when he comes. Minas realizes that his sister is sick again, and hallucinating or something. He tries to be supportive but eventually tells her that it’s not real to him, so he isn’t afraid of it. Meanwhile, David and Martin are on the boat and Martin confronts David about Karin being distraught that morning from reading his diary. David tells Martin what he had written, and Martin becomes, um, highly agitated with David – he goes off on a tangent about David not caring about his children, or anything except his writing, and David tells Martin that it was true until recently. However, recently, David learned the emotion of hope – he had attempted suicide and, when he failed to drive off a cliff completely, realized that he wanted to live and see his children and help his daughter with her illness – an illness we learn is the same as what her mother had had and died from. Back on shore, Karin has disappeared and Minas is frantically searching for her, until he finds her in an abandoned ship. She is helplessly curled into a ball, and refuses to leave the ship. Minas runs home to get her blankets and them both some rain gear, since it had started raining, and returns to her and holds her while she sleeps. She is joined by her father and husband as soon as they return, and asks to speak to her father alone. She tells him that the voices made her look in his desk, read his diary, and do other [undisclosed] things. She makes him promise that she will be put back in the hospital, but without medication – and he agrees. She disappears again while packing for the hospital with Martin, and they find her in the room talking to the others. She keeps talking of ‘him’ coming soon, and her having to be there. Then there is a weird scene of her fighting something invisible and running into walls to avoid it. The helicopter from the hospital arrives by sound into the scene, and Karin freaks out and so Martin gives her a shot while the three men hold her down. She tells them that the ‘him’ they had all been waiting for was a spider-god, and how he had tried to go into her and she had stopped him, but he had still crawled up her body. The men are terrified for her, but don’t yell or dispute her visions, just help her get her coat and shoes on to leave for the hospital. The walk down to the jetty, but Minas stays behind completely distraught. The orchestral music from the beginning comes back on, and David and Minas have a discussion about love. They conclude that love is either God himself, or proof that God exists. They are obviously uncomfortable around each other, and the last words of the movie are Minas calling to a departing David “Papa, talk to me.”
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