Here I begin experimenting with something new. I have long thought that film — especially classic films — often raises important religious and/or moral questions that deserve comment. I also think, given the bilge produced by the current “entertainment industry” (particularly in the U.S.), that many people are unfamiliar with films worth watching and thinking about. So I plan to write a once-a-month blog post on a particular film, convinced NOR readers are people who’d like to sit down on a weeknight or weekend with a film that makes them think, maybe even argue. Let us see.

The Swedish director Ingmar Bergman made Winter Light in 1963. It’s part of his film trilogy about religion and faith (or, rather, non-faith), though he also produced other films dealing with those issues (e.g., The Seventh Seal). Winter Light focuses on a winter Sunday in the life of a Swedish Lutheran pastor, Tomas Ericsson. The whole film runs from his morning Communion Service in one town through the opening of Vespers in another.

Ericsson is a widower in whom parishioner Marta, a schoolteacher, is interested, though at this moment Tomas is not. The film opens with the morning Communion Service, over which Tomas presides with about six parishioners (and a few coppers in the collection basket). The film quickly moves to post-service meetings in the sacristy. Tomas reads Marta’s love letter; she later comes and he does all he can both to repulse and keep her by. Parishioner Jonas and his pregnant wife come for counseling: the husband is now concerned about the meaning and fragility of life, given that Communist China just tested an atom bomb, so he’s thinking of self-destructive behavior. After Tomas’s pastoral counseling, the man drives his wife home and then leaves to commit suicide. Tomas identifies the body. Then we’re treated to more of Tomas and Marta’s relationship as they drive to the next town for evening Vespers, with a detour by her schoolhouse to get him some medicine for his flu. Winter Light concludes with a few more “pastoral” remarks to one of those parishioners always in church, and then the beginning of Evening Prayer: “Holy, Holy, Holy.”

The core issue in the film is faith: few of the characters have it. Ericsson admits he does not, but, in the established Church of Sweden, pastor is a secure job. Marta doesn’t really believe in God but she does believe in Tomas. The organist would rather go home than sit at an organ in a cold Swedish church in the evening. If you want to see what Vatican II meant by the corrosive effect of “practical atheism” — people who nominally profess faith in God but lead lives that say otherwise — meet some of Bergman’s characters. This isn’t purely a moral question; faith is transformative of lives. That should be even more apparent to a sola fides Lutheran.

Bergman’s movies are marked particularly by this problem of faith, or rather its lack. Part of it may be unresolved conflicts from his own childhood: daddy was said to be a strict Lutheran minister. Part of it seems to be the Western European/Nordic mindset, already apparent in the 1960s, that religion is something best left to old ladies and children, a crutch smart people outgrow.

The problem is: they grow out of the faith but not the institution and the culture/security/respectability it provides. So, they go through empty motions. It’s not by accident that, on the way to Evening Vespers, Tomas and Marta have to wait for a train to pass across the road, a train whose cars all look like black coffins. It’s not by accident that Jonas cannot resolve his existential dilemmas (Tomas’s advice about believing rings thin) and so kills himself, leaving a wife with children in the house and on the way. The women in the film at least try to get out of themselves: the parishioner’s wife wants to help her husband, Marta wants to be useful to Tomas. The men are hermetically sealed cans.

The film poses valuable questions on: the endurance of cultural and institutional vestiges when animating faith is gone; how closure to God leads to closure on self and a progressive decline of the person; how rational arguments don’t lead out of this circular trap. Of course, none of those things are likely what Bergman wanted to conclude, which only suggests that the modern and post-modern mind are, whether they admit it or not, practically nihilist.

What reminded me of the film was a news piece I read last week. The state Church of Sweden announced that at least seven churches would be closed for the winter this year because they burn fossil fuels and that undermines Sweden’s carbon neutrality goals. One of the churches is part of the ruins of a medieval Cistercian abbey expropriated during Reformation times. It’s unclear how many of these churches actually continue to be churches, as opposed to tourist destinations or cultural venues. But, whatever they are, they’ll bear the sign: “Closed for Winter” (which is pretty long in Sweden). No burning gas, oil, or incense to worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob if the climate gods are offended.

On the Protestant ecclesiastical scale, the Swedish Lutherans are rather high: unlike Zwingli, Calvin, and other Reformed Vandals with too much whitewash available, Swedish Lutherans (like their Anglican counterparts) preferred the architecture of the medieval churches they inherited. That’s apparent in Winter Light, though the morning church tends towards the low side.

But that’s not the point. The point is, regardless of the trappings, a “church” devoid of faith becomes a more-or-less aesthetically pleasing place. It’s form, its structure, still screams “church” but it’s a silent scream echoing in its now hollowed-out space, even if that space is used to preach a faux religion, like “the love of Christ compels us” to turn off the heat and not worship Him.

At the end of the film, the question is whether or not to have Vespers. The “congregation” is Tomas, Marta, the perennial parishioner, and the organist. The organist kind of hopes Tomas will call it off and go home, essentially aware of the dirty little secret that the temperature of the congregation’s religious faith mirrors the outside winter weather. But Tomas is a Kantian: duty calls, the “show must go on,” and who knows if he might be docked for time off? (As we saw earlier, he certainly couldn’t take it out of the collection). Nobody raises the question whether Vespers is justified not by the size or faith of the congregation but the worship due God.

The always-helpful parishioner turns on all the chandeliers, whose light causes the still-hopeful-for-an-early-night organist to slam his hat on the bench and start playing. So, in fact, do all the other players around their ecclesiastical stage.

Winter Light can be rented/purchased online at any of the sites listed here. Try it on a nice winter evening!