Grace Presbyterian Church, Montclair, New Jersey

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Pastor's Pulse

by Paul Leggett, Pastor

Ingmar Bergman’s Search for God

September 2007

“When the Lamb opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour.” – Revelation 8:1

“Regardless of my own beliefs and my own doubts, which are unimportant in this connection, it is my opinion that art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship.  It severed an umbilical cord and now lives its own sterile life, generating and degenerating itself.  In former days the artist remained unknown and his work was to the glory of God.” – Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007)

Ingmar Bergman will be remembered as one of the great film artists of the twentieth century and his recent death has occasioned a considerable amount of discussion from scholars and critics, as well as filmmakers like Woody Allen.  The fact is, no sensitive Christian can avoid attempting to come to terms with Bergman.  The fundamental themes of his films were God, death and human relationships.  For over a decade he focused on the difficult but nonetheless Biblical topic of the silence of God.  Whole books have been devoted to his treatment of this subject.

Bergman himself was the son of a devout but very strict Lutheran pastor.  He first attracted international attention with his film Smiles of a Summer Night (1955).  This was followed by the film many regard as his first masterpiece, The Seventh Seal (1957).  Both films won awards at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival and both show the continuing preoccupations of their director.  Smiles of a Summer Night is a film about human relationships with all their complications and deceits.  It is a comedy which blends both an ironic and romantic tone.  The Seventh Seal concerns a knight returning to Medieval Sweden after the Crusades who has an encounter with a dark figure he comes to realize is Death.  Throughout the film the knight struggles with questions about faith, God and mortality.  The knight’s frustrations with God’s silence in the face of his many questions blends with his own admittance that he is indifferent to his fellowman and has cut himself off from their company.

The irony in The Seventh Seal is that God is present but unnoticed because God doesn’t fit the image (or idol) of those who claim to be searching for him.  God appears as a mute servant girl in the film, a figure overlooked by the knight.  At the end she finally speaks in the face of Death.  She quotes Jesus’ word from the cross, “It is finished.”  But at that point it is too late for the knight.  The Seventh Seal could well be the first genuinely post-modern film (we showed it at our officers’ retreat this past February).  Bergman followed The Seventh Seal with another film about a person on a search, this time for the meaning of his own life in Wild Strawberries (the title itself is a quote from The Seventh Seal).  He then went on to make a challenging trilogy of films on the subject of God’s silence: Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Winter Light (1963) and The Silence (1963).

Bergman struggled with the question, “Why is it that God appears to be silent?”  At the same time he presented multiple and contradictory images of God, from a frightening spider to another name for love.  Both realities are affirmed in Scripture.  God is love (I John 4:8) but God can remain silent as a form of judgment ultimately seen in Jesus’ refusal to answer his captors (Matt. 26:63; Mark 14:61; John 19:8-9; cf. Isa. 1:15; Amos 8:11-12).  The continuing struggle in Bergman’s work is the effort to recognize Jesus while God appears silent.  In what is perhaps Bergman’s final masterpiece, the autobiographical Fanny and Alexander, the minister, like Bergman’s own strict father, represents a distortion of God.  When we place our favorite idols in front of God, God will often be silent (Ex. 20:3-4).  One can see the symbol of Christ in Fanny and Alexander in the figure of a Jewish antique dealer.  The film ends with the birth of a child at Christmas.

Bergman’s films represent his own struggles with doubt, fear and death.  They also show his fascination with human relationships and particularly with women (Persona may be the best film about women ever made by a man).  I believe Bergman’s ultimate greatness lies in his presentation of two key Biblical concepts.  The first is that God can never be reduced to our own image of him.  The more we seek to define God the more we distort him.  The second is the challenge to see Jesus present with us.  He will not be what we expect.  That point is affirmed over and over in the Gospels.

At the close of Winter Light the doubting pastor stands in the pulpit and speaks the words, “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty.  All the earth is full of his glory …”

This struggling pastor stands for Bergman himself who in spite of his doubts fashioned works of art to the glory of God.