Any thoughts as to why the demographic ratings breakdown the way they do?
Why do men like this so much more than women and why do younger viewers prefer it to older viewers? Usually when the splits are this wide the reasons are clear but I don't understand it with this film.
Yeah, I was suprised that women 40+ rated it 2.5.
Maybe the 40+ women are people more inclined to have seen it when it still was going commercially at the cinema (a bit of a reach seeing as it was almost 50 years ago, but you never know) which means a broader spectrum of viewers not only filmfanatics. While the younger demographics had to have been fans of either film or Bergman to track the movie down therefor the treatment of the main women by the priest can be overssen while the mainstream fans didn't like the movie for just that reason.
Can´t really think of any reasonable explanation as to why that is (unless they feel bad about the verbal humiliation Thulin... or object to the film´s generally depressing, downbeat tone... which, of course, takes a slight turn upwards in the very end though), but indeed I´ve never seen such a huge gap between men´s and women´s rating - 8,0 vs 5,8. Perhaps it would be understandable if Winter Lights were some pseudo-macho, juvenile action movie, but this... hm.
"facts are stupid things" - Ronald Reagan
There are two ways to look at a film like this. One is to appreciate the way Bergman examines his own doubts within the context of a story made up of fictional characters. We can feel the genuine soul searching, a search for truth even if it leads us to unpleasant places.
The second is to see this search as too limited by Bergman's own worldview, and specifically in too harsh and insistent manner what becomes a virtual assumption that God does not talk to us in any way.
I appreciate the former view, but can't rule out the lack of patience one would have who looked at this film more in the second way.
It's strange too that, while males rank the movie much higher than females, the highest rating (8.8) is given by females under 18. So somewhere from age 18 to 45 females' appreciation of this film dramatically drops off. While the male rankings lower with age it is not so dramatic. Very strange. Although it does make sense that the younger generations would appreciate it more since they more than likely had to go out of their way to find this movie in the first place, and hence are probably interested in more slower, intellectually-driven foreign films for this reason. Older audiences had a greater chance of seeing this when it was released, or having it shown to them by a parent or someone else who saw it when released.
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