I was watching this film today and I got to the part where the pastor
says "Holy Holy Holy, Lord God Almighty" which is close to the end, and then
the dvd just stopped. Can someone tell me what happened next?
Thanks
2:I believe one clue that perhaps others have overlooked is given when the organist calls her a turtle dove. Here is the verse in the Song of Songs 2:11-12..."for, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle dove is heard in our land..." Bergman's Winter Light ends with a glimpse into a soul who has chosen , as all men can do, to acknowledge God's Holiness no matter the outcome of a great and dreadful testing--for when winter ends then Spring begins. It is my view that this man has decided he will cry out and acknowledge God's existence to the turtle dove sitting inside of a lighted church and your imagination is left to take over the rest of the story.
shareThe pastor's neglect and hostility hasten one suicide (Jonas Persson) and could quite conceivably have prompted a second (Marta). And do we know how his saintly wife died? There are lots of indications that the pastor's self absorption and lack of compassion pre-date his present crisis of faith.
The pastor, like the church, is not helpless or benign. A monster born as much from faith as a lack of it. An inability to empty their minds of God is the real cause of suffering for him and for Frovik, not God's silence. Their 'primitive' concerns are disparagingly contrasted with Persson's advanced fear of atomic annihilation and Marta's more earthbound torment. Hope, at the end of the film, cannot come from the pastor's restored faith or duty, but only from him responding to Marta's plea for tenderness.
The Pastor dies.
The ending is very similar to the ending in Sopranos. They both die.
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I always interpretted Tomas' speech as the motivation for the pastor to continue with his duty as a pastor....even if the church was empty.
That is what a true illustration of faith is, from the stories perspective. Do you believe when there is no reason to believe...Do you believe when hardly anyone else does?
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he's a really $#!tty pastor, and the next parishioner to bite it will be the last one in his congregation - she'll come to ask for some spiritual guidance, which he'll blink out with some desolate faithlessness - she'll run off and off herself, and he'll be left with a cold empty church and the winter light filtering in across the stone... but there's this lil itsy bitsy spider climbing up the water spout...
shareMany great points made on this thread.
As someone pointed out regarding the discussion of Jesus asking God why He abandoned Jesus (or seemed to), the story did not end there. Now assuming for argument's sake that there is a God, why he would set up the world, our experience in it, with this kind of soul testing that in advanced form is excruciating, is not a question I can answer. But it does seem that a form of testing is arguably necessary. If Faith were so easy to have that it could be arrived at without effort, well, you get what you pay for, if you will.
Part of Tomas's difficulty is very much world bound. He still holds love in his heart for his dead wife. Is there room or a way within him for him to truly love Marta? Perhaps not. His own crisis of faith, brought on as we are led to understand in large measure because his wife was taken from him, is not only a challenge to his religion, but also to his own way of being in the world. This is explicitly the case in regard to a priest, to one giving out "advice" to parishioners. But his crisis is also one that either prevents or allows him to avoid involvement with Marta, and through her involvement in Care and being with others in Heidegerrian terms. In other words his lack of faith becomes a sort of excuse for a lack of caring involvement with others.
On a simple pyschological level one can argue that Tomas is simply depressed about his wife's death and absence. God did not prevent that, and Tomas could be angry with Him.
As someone alluded to above, Tomas is perhaps asking the wrong question.
the dvd just stopped. Can someone tell me what happened next?
Every man went online and said the film agreed with his own opinion.
In the end, Tomas returns to the sanctity of the ceremonial mass - the one constant in his life - ministering the hollow words for those who seek comfort behind their meaning, deriving from them a reflection of their own spirituality and emotional equilibrium: an echo god.
I'm seeing a lot if comments about reaffirmed faith etc and I completely disagree with those people. Winter Light is reaffirming Bergman's most sacred philosophy that the world is inherently grim and painful & if you perceive it too honestly, life becomes unbearable. To live is to delude oneself of that harsh and brutal truth; to believe in a loving god who looks after all and a world where all will be fine. This is what it means to be human.
This is Bergman at his absolute darkest but a masterpiece nonetheless.
Relatively,
I have a post in this thread from about 4 years ago, and rewatched the film this past weekend, and came here. I see your post above, and wish to respond to it.
In one word I think it fair to say you see it as dark, but in the sense linked to despair. There is much to that, although I see the film more as a process where questions are raised, and no absolute statement is made in response to those questions. My single word, focusing on the process, is grueling.
I assume your choice in using a small g to describe God is meant to convey that you are an unbeliever, and instead view as "sacred" how you describe Bergman's philosophy. And while at times Bergman made statements in interviews and that sort of thing that can be viewed as atheistic, I don't think that two things follow from that. First I do not think his films in general or this one in particular amount to clear and forthright statements of conclusions regarding things in general and in this case the existence or absence of God in particular. Second I think there is much in his later life and interviews to indicate he was not a confirmed atheist by any means.
But back to this picture - what it is instead is an examination of one man's crisis of faith, but not only in God but also himself. In what sense?
To briefly digress I consider Winter Light as close to perfection that a film, as a film, can be. Part of that is that everything in the film is there for a reason. Everything.
Take the way the film addresses the reasoning behind Jonas's decision to kill himself. Jonas talks about China having the atomic bomb, no doubt tied to a fear that they might use it and trigger a nuclear holocaust. More to the point of Tomas's concerns Jonas kills himself directly after he has spoken to Tomas, and we of course are correct in concluding that what Tomas said did not encourage Jonas (not enough, anyway) to not kill himself. And later we see Tomas visit Jonas's wife Karin, at home with her children, a glimpse of Jonas's domestic life, with nothing apparent or implied that would provide a rationale for his suicide.
And yet... in what sense can we say that Tomas's "failure" in fact caused, or did not prevent, Jonas's suicide? Tomas discusses the suicide in a way that indicates he reproaches himself for it, and that he failed Jonas. But in what sense was this the cause of Jonas's suicide?
We see the character of Jonas through Tomas's eyes, including the vision of his family. But we do not really understand what was behind his thinking. I find the notion that his fears about the Chinese were the cause to be both ludicrous and laughable, and on some level I assume Tomas did as well. Hence in his mind the relative importance of his failure seems magnified compared to the (weakly) offered rationale concerning the Chinese and the atom bomb. But that does not in fact establish Jonas's real reason, either.
What I am driving at is that Tomas has been asking a sort of question that is not the right one. He sees what can be described as a lack of effectiveness in his role of minister to the troubled among his parishioners, and ties that to his larger lack of faith, in that sense faith in God. But did Tomas in effect cause Jonas to kill himself? No.
A more difficult question concerns what to make of the diminishing number of attendees at the services. What that is based on is not directly addressed, obviously, but again we see this through Tomas's eyes. Does he think it is, even if only in part, due to his lack of effectiveness as a minister? Or that the people have moved away from the worship of God that Tomas has (wrongly) in effect dedicated his life to in choosing to be a minister? Or, in fact, is it something else entirely? The film does not answer this, either.
In my previous post I discussed the connection between the death of Tomas's wife and his lack of love or unwillingness to commit to his relationship with Marta. But again this lack does not occur for any necessary reason. In their awful discussion in the schoolroom Tomas seems to finally reject her in absolute terms, and yet brings her with him later. In the final scene she is there in the church, and he shows no signs of going through with any actual rejection of her.
Tomas recognizes at least on one level that his difficulties with Marta come directly from his love for his deceased wife leaving him angry and despairing over her death, and what that means about his own faith in a God who would take his wife from him. He thinks either he should have no faith in a God who would do that to him, or more likely that such a taking means there is no God. But again, of course, those are not the only explanations possible here. This in turn leads us back to the realization that despite Tomas's recognition of the connection, he has not cast Marta out of his life, which at least raises the question whether he might overcome those difficulties.
If I am correct that Tomas has in effect been shown to wrongly understand the nature of his relationship to his work and to God, and has in any event not shown a willingness to find his questions taking him to their logical conclusion (both as respects his going about his work as a minister, and not finally and permanently tossing Marta away), then the obvious question becomes why not?
I think the reason has to be that he doubts his own questions and whether the logical answers to his questions are ones that he must pursue.
Tomas rather understands the meaning of the questions the Sexton asks before the service at the film's end. Because the narrative of Jesus questioning his faith in his Father did not end with such questioning. (Any minister would know that is not where the narrative ends.) The narrative as it proceeded showed that the assumption that we have been forsaken is wrong. (To be celar I am not talking about whether one believes or not in Christian theology here - the point is what the narrative itself says.)
Now, I am not saying as the film ends that Tomas is destined to a life of spiritual renewal, newfound purpose in his vocation, and putting aside his sense of loss of his wife enough that he can find happiness with Marta. That is not the film that Bergman chose to make, but neither is this film one that requires us to conclude the opposite of those things. But that is precisely where this film's value lies - we see the questioning examined, and that here Bergman does not provide any firm conclusions.
I wanted to add to this thread a clarification of a point I discussed in the previous post last May. It concerns the diminishing number of attendees at the church services.
The film in fact raises a third possible explanation, raised during the encounter between Tomas and Marta in the school classroom. Tomas there refers to an increasing sense that the people around them increasingly notice and disapprove of their relationship, a sexual one outside of marriage. To which Marta responds why don't you marry me, then? And the conversation then devolved into acrimony and despair.
But Tomas did raise the possibility that the decline in membership, and he specifically referred to there being in the past many more attendees, may be attributable to what the locals see as his fooling around with Marta.
Since we have no reason to think Tomas's assessment of their disapproval is without basis, it is therefore quite plausible that at least some of the decline is attributable to their not being married. One can I suppose say that is at least somewhat related to a lack of effectiveness as a minister. Whatever else one might think of sexually active unmarried couples, there is likely to be some greater disapproval if the minister of your church is involved. He is not in short living up to the standards he should have, which in turn is not only directly off putting to those who care, but also suggests he is something of a hypocrite, not caring at least in this instance to follow the rules as it were.
But of course this is not the same as the sense in which Tomas is or is not ineffective as a preacher, or even in the pastoral sense of caring for the lay members of the church. So in that sense it is a third explanation for the decline in attendees.
We don't know, it was purposelly left there. Either he will overcome the hardship of being "betrayed" and living without love or he will continue living the same way he'd been living.
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