The Ingmar Bergman movie that made Paul Schrader realise that cinema could be “serious art”
In an industry that’s full of strange and quirky artists, Paul Schrader might just be among the quirkiest of them all. While most cinephiles know him for his collaborations with the likes of Martin Scorsese or even his own directorial efforts, such as First Reformed, Schrader has also garnered a massive following for his incomprehensibly bizarre Facebook account where he posts his unfiltered thoughts on anything under the sun – from the current student protests in the US to waitresses that caught his eye.
Quite parallel to his descent into the bowels of social media discourse, his filmmaking has also taken a strange turn, as was evident from the last solipsistic entry to his body of work – Master Gardener. Despite all this, nobody can deny that many of Schrader’s contributions to the world of cinema have survived the test of time.
In addition to his screenwriting credits and directorial features, Schrader will be the first to admit that he has always been a student of cinema. The greatest example of this is his book Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, a collection of his observations on the unique style of three of film history’s greatest pioneers.
While the works of Ozu, Bresson and Dreyer have played a major part in shaping Schrader’s cinematic identity, there are others who showed him the magic of cinema, during a conversation with A.Frame, the Taxi Driver writer opened up about the impact that Ingmar Bergman had on him during a formative time in his life.
Bergman’s filmography is stacked with acclaimed masterpieces, but the movie Schrader singled out is the 1961 psychological drama Through a Glass Darkly. Undoubtedly among Bergman’s bleakest works, which is definitely saying something, it stars Harriet Andersson as a young woman who is drowning in a battle against her demons in the throes of schizophrenia.
Schrader recalled: “Through a Glass Darkly made me realise that films could be serious art. At the time, I was a student at Calvin College, which was also a seminary, and movies were not allowed by the church. But it was the ’60s then, and things were changing, you know? There was a cinema in town that had all sorts of Russ Meyer-esque softcore programming, and the owner wasn’t doing very well, so he thought, ‘Well, I’m gonna program a month of Ingmar Bergman films for all the college students,’ and it caught fire.”
According to Schrader, who was studying theology at the time, the students developed a profound connection with Bergman’s cinema because he was burdened by the same spiritual concerns that they were reading about in their course books. Through a Glass Darkly showed them that it was possible to engage with such complex religious frameworks through cinema.
He added: “That film was a revelation for me. Before it, I’d only seen a few movies, and I had been pretty disappointed in them because I didn’t watch them as a kid. I’d watch teen fare like Wild in the Country and be left a little unimpressed. But then I saw Through a Glass Darkly, and it was the first film that I felt like I really saw as an adult — even though I was only 18 at the time.”
Bergman explored the concept of psychosexuality many times throughout his career, perhaps most famously in Persona. However, Through a Glass Darkly is among the most harrowing cinematic depictions of insanity, whose darkness is all-consuming.