冬日之光

和英歌伯格曼的缘分应该是从大学开始，电影史和视听语言的老师力推博格曼大师的作品，连考试也是用他的创作生平来作为考题。第一次看野草莓的时候，完全被梦中看到自己尸体的荒诞场景给迷住。觉得那是有史以来我看到的最让我心悸的片段。后来很无意中看了《第七封印》，说实在的，当时并不能够完全懂究竟在讲些什么，但是博格曼的电影就是会有种魔力，哪怕不能get导演的意图，却还是愿意一直一直看下去。
研究生时，上男神的课被男神问到为什么会选择和电影相关的课程，答曰，只是想要看懂那些我看不懂的电影。博格曼的电影位居前列。这次终于有机会在电影院看了冬日之光。
最近在看一些电影的时候总是在想，内地究竟有没有对应上的风格。比如看完《东京物语》包括侯孝贤的作品时就在想内地有没有相关的，平静记述的这种类型的电影，这次看完冬日之光，也在考虑我们是否有拍过信仰缺失的电影，想来，作为一个本来就没有什么信仰的国家，可能信仰最缺失的时候也就是在文革吧，又刚好遇到文化管制。这个点日后可以好好挖一下。

Fear and Trembling
Michael Joshua Rowin on Winter Light


The published screenplays of Ingmar Bergman’s “religious trilogy” contain, as a sort of introduction, a single-page announcement of the director’s intentions. “The theme of these three films is a “reduction”—in the metaphysical sense of the word.” Then, as if Bergman wanted to descriptively reduce these films of reduction, one-line summations of each film of the trilogy follow: “Through a Glass Darkly—certainty achieved. Winter Light—certainty unmasked. The Silence—God’s silence: the negative impression.” While the first and the last entries seem inadequate to their respective films’ complexities, it is the middle that, if one has seen Winter Light, brings pause. “Certainty unmasked”: the two words at once totally evoke and yet only hint at what might be the greatest achievement of Bergman’s mature work, an incredibly—almost painful—personal struggle with the nonexistence of God and the responsibility to oneself and others in the harsh light of doubt. The unmasking of religious certainty informs Winter Light’s sparse, skeletal story and structure, in which Bergman sheds any artistic ornamentation that remained from earlier films like The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries. But, like a leafless tree in the dead of January, the film also contains jutting branches, subtle articulations of concept and character that touch upon a multitude of emotions, ideas, and considerations, eventually extending into one of the most spiritually ambiguous endings in all of cinema and provoking a profound and haunting transformation.

In Through a Glass Darkly Bergman first presented his vision of the “spider-god,” an insidious, corrupt obverse to the benevolent Christian God, a tormenting idea of God’s failure within a meaningless reality. As Bergman himself described the concept in interview, “It’s a question of the total dissolution of all notions of an otherworldly salvation.” Everything in this first film of the religious trilogy points to an Inferno, and yet Bergman backs off. Creating the character of Karin as a schizophrenic allowed him, as well as the viewer, to keep a safe distance from the consequences and possibilities of God-as-evil-manipulator. And after Karin completely succumbs to insanity, her father closes the film by letting son Minus and the viewer know that all is not lost, that “God is love” and that Karin is surrounded by this love. One senses that this speech ends the film on an utterly false note, offering a facile solution in face of an enormous existential dilemma—the director even admitted as much later on. While Bergman begins to grapple with religious uncertainty in Through a Glass Darkly, the process is undertaken with trepidation and lacks sustained moral conviction.

Winter Light, on the other hand, tackles the issue of a sick or absent God directly, with a greater sense of gravity and with precise mastery of form. For one thing, the mise-en-scène of Winter Light never overwhelms or startles as it does in the previous film, instead becoming quietly and effectively integrated with the action. The various settings of Through a Glass Darkly provide natural habitats for a spider-god, allowing Bergman to create expressionistic cinematic set pieces like the sea-wrecked ship and the room with ripped wallpaper. But in Winter Light the surroundings become muted, hushed, as if God’s silence had left a palpable expectancy in the very air the characters breathe. Bergman, like Ozu, is a seasonal director (Summer Interlude, Virgin Spring, Autumn Sonata, etc.), and the role winter plays is as important as the Reverend Tomas’s church, providing a cover of gray, melancholic resignation and suffering.


 
    The film opens, however, within the interior of a cold, humble church in the rural Swedish town of Mittsunda. A service is in progress, with Rev. Tomas Eriksson leading the congregation. Tomas tells the story of Christ’s last supper with the disciples, in which he offers them his body and blood as eternal salvation. Thus Bergman introduces the film’s main theme—communication, a true giving and receiving between beings that redeems the meaninglessness of existence. As visual commentary, something occurs soon after that is, cinematically, almost preternatural in its simplicity and power. As the Reverend says the Lord’s Prayer, Bergman cuts to three exteriors (each fading into one another) that normally would serve as opening establishing shots, with the church looking like an abandoned ruin among winter trees, the hardened ground, and a half-frozen river. This unconventional but structurally integral insertion of a montage sequence at this point in the film creates a feeling of extreme alienation and loneliness—through a seemingly gratuitous move to the bitter outside world during a prayer of great strength and confiding, Bergman undermines the potential warmth of the words and transforms a God’s-eye-view into its opposite, a hollow, empty space where a caring God cannot reside. Communication and solace seem remote.

Similar in environmental effect is a scene in which Tomas visits the place where Jonas, the man whose fear of nuclear war he had previously attempted to address, has killed himself. The body lies near that same earlier shown river and, over the course of five long shots handled from two strategic camera positions, the viewer sees, in documentary-like footage, Tomas’s encounter with the rote process of tending to a fresh corpse: the body is covered with tarp, kept company by Tomas when the doctors leave the scene, and finally transported to a hospital van. Bergman shoots all of this in as subjective a manner as possible by remaining completely objective—that is, as Tomas now sees the world as being absent of any higher power, Bergman films the scene with attention to the concreteness, the pure materiality of the landscape, as if existence were pressing itself upon Tomas for the first time. There is no recourse to a close-up which would neatly spell out Tomas’s emotional state—Bergman demonstrates here his aesthetic restraint in creating a sorrow rooted in nature, in the half-glow of the dreary surroundings and the relentless rushing water nearby.

The languishing sadness of Jonas’s suicide comes from its particular pertinence to Tomas. Bergman unmistakably links both in their individual torments, Tomas’s an intensely personal one in his relationship to God, Jonas’s a global one in a sane assessment of an insane world’s death drive. The reverend’s earlier offhand, routine remark to Jonas—a seemingly pathetic try to dispel anxiety—haunts the screen during his lonely stay with the body: “We all go with the same dread, more or less.” Both fears emanate from the same, desperate place in the soul, the annihilation of the earth deeply related to the annihilation of the self’s significance in reality. Tomas’s existential dread carries with it a terrible possibility—might not the winter light that accompanied Tomas’s acceptance of meaninglessness also be the blinding flash of the A-bomb?


 
    Tomas’s openness with Jonas is the crux around which the film revolves. Tomas reveals that God for him was once a secure “echo-god . . . who loved mankind, of course, but myself most of all,” one that became “a spider-god, a monster” emerging after his wife’s death. Although the nursing, unchallenging God of his conventional Christian upbringing and practice revealed its perversity in the face of personal tragedy, Tomas’ desperation is unlike Karin’s madness. Tomas’s spiritual and emotional breakthrough, his realization of God’s silence and the falsity of his role as a man of the cloth, brings with it freedom, a terrible existential vertigo. Winter Light here answers Through a Glass Darkly by allowing the “spider-god” a positive manifestation without falling back onto evasive reassurances like “God is love.” Thus, when Tomas cries out, in the midst of his consuming illness and after his monumental admission, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” the question is answered by the expressionist winter light of the title streaming through the windows, mysteriously illuminating the features of a man reborn.

The passage from exterior to the interior, from the absurdity of existence to the individual’s realization of that absurdity, takes place within this crucial moment. It was initiated, in part by Marta, Tomas’s mistress and the local schoolteacher. Marta is one of Bergman’s most complex characters, a substitute mother/wife, searching atheist, and stigmatized Christ figure all at once. In her extended letter to Tomas, Marta details her own struggle with God, reminding him of how one day she prayed “to be of use,” to put her abundant strength to a task that will give her life meaning. The prayer was prompted by eczema that, symbolically, afflicted her hands, feet and crown. The Christ symbolism is clear, and Marta easily sees Tomas’s religious compromises corresponding with the breakdown in their relationship—after mentioning the moment she realized Tomas didn’t love her she pinpoints his lack of faith, his “peculiar indifference to the gospels and to Jesus Christ.”

Tomas’s reading of the letter while waiting for Jonas is another example of Bergman’s simple, delicate and yet rich approach in dealing with storytelling. When the reverend begins to read Marta’s words it becomes rendered as—instead of, typically, a voiceover or flashback—a four-and-a-half minute shot of Marta, seated in front of a bare wall, talking directly at Tomas and the viewer. This is unmediated communication, openness and expressivity, the spiritual and emotional nakedness that has been lacking ever since the service that was conducted entirely with foreign (i.e., the Church’s) words, and not the characters’ own. Prefiguring the radical forms of address in Persona and Hour of the Wolf, it is as if Bergman announces the intent of the entire trilogy with this shot (a similar two minute shot follows a minute-long flashback scene), a complete demolition and removal of psychological, emotional, and cinematic defenses—an unmasking.

Marta’s confession of finding meaning in wanting to share a life with Tomas, as well as her critical insight into Tomas’s hidden jealousy and hatred toward God, shifts the focus of the film. Later, in reaction to Jonas’s suicide, in reaction to a meaninglessness that only further exasperates questions of responsibility and duty, Tomas flees from individual salvation by bluntly confronting Marta. His grievances—that she treats him like a child, repulses him with her various illnesses that require constant attention, and her failure to replace his true love, his late wife—come as a shock. So accustomed have we been to Tomas’s resignation that this outburst comes across as a frantic testing of freedom and at the same time a return to the spiritual stalemate in the struggle to understand God’s silence. Marta (the praying, physically suffering atheist) offers a new kind of faith in the form of human love and companionship for Tomas (the atheistic, physically suffering reverend) but—as the location of their conversation, a schoolhouse, suggests—the teacher’s lessons in love and connection cannot reach the confused, bitter priest-turned-pupil. Tomas’s renunciation of a dead God now only allows him to burrow deeper into his own pity and coldness.


 
    Ironically, Tomas finds redemption in a church, a place he earlier damned for stifling his life with the false cover of servile Christian faith. There, Algot, the hunchback sexton, tells Tomas before the service something that has been troubling him about the Gospels: Christ’s physical agony could not have been as bad as his own. The true agony was Christ’s abandonment by the disciples and his ultimate moment of doubt on the cross when demanding to know why God had forsaken him. “To understand that no one has understood you. To be abandoned when one really needs someone to rely on . . . Surely that must have been his most monstrous suffering of all? I mean God’s silence.” Tomas responds in the form of a decision—will the service proceed in the absence of any congregates, save Marta? Bergman moves the entire sequence from gothic, candle-illuminated lighting to electric, reflecting both the otherworldliness of the atmosphere and its unbeautiful blandness. As Marta herself offers a silent prayer (“If we could dare to show each other affection . . . if we could believe in a truth . . . if we could believe . . .”), Tomas comes out to lead the service: “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty. All the earth is full of His glory . . .”

In unmasking the certainty of religious faith, Bergman ends Winter Light with the almost unfathomable image of a godless reverend conducting a service for no reason other than his own sense of religious responsibility. Tomas’s final gesture suggests neither a reconciliation with God nor a turn toward self-parody, but a Sisyphian struggle in coming to terms with the absurdity of life. Marta’s prayer calls for the aspects (affection, truth, belief) still missing in the lives of damaged souls, while Tomas’s prayer confirms the ability to continually search for them, not through hollow ritual which made the first church service a theater of the grotesque, but through a personal, austere dedication to challenging and helping oneself and others in the face of meaninglessness. If God exists anywhere in Winter Light it is in that “absurd image,” as Tomas calls it, of Jesus on the cross questioning God as to the purpose of the Passion. The anguish of doubt, magnified in the cavernous, nearly empty church, proves that God need not exist for us “to be of use.” Instead, it proves that communication of that doubt—even absurdities like Tomas’s prayer to an empty church and a dead god—renders the silence bearable, makes it know that we are not dead in life, that we are constantly rediscovering ourselves in the midst of chaos and inertia, in the brilliance of that winter light which casts itself upon the valley of woe.

Bergman would complete the religious trilogy with The Silence, taking doubt to what is perhaps its inevitable flowering: communication, but for the faint candle that is Ester’s letter to Johan, becomes completely obliterated; war, only talked of in Winter Light, literally comes to town; and disease—that consistent Bergman metaphor—destroys mercilessly, hardly abated by human kindness or prayer. Persona moves further in this direction, with the relationship between Alma and Elisabeth a distillation of all the trilogy’s stumbling attempts at understanding. Winter Light, then, located in the middle of Bergman’s film career, stands as Bergman’s strongest testament to the nature of doubt, that paralytic wavering over the waters of faith and skepticism that infuses this singular film with its world-weary eyes and shivering soul.
 
 
 
 

 

上世纪60年代初期，伯格曼祭出了影史留名的“信仰三部曲”。延续《犹在镜中》对上帝是否存在的探讨，《冬日之光》用教职人员这个更为密切的角度，在集约的时空中完成了关于信仰与怀疑的思辨，如今回望当年测探的深度，仍觉轰然作响。

上帝失声

“信仰三部曲”是伯格曼电影生涯中的又一座高峰，独立成章时能在宗教思辨与人性哲思上独当一面，串联成片后又在同一主题下汇聚出强劲的穿透力。虽然承上启下的《冬日之光》在评奖上未能承继《犹在镜中》的好运，但并不能否认这部作品的艺术性与思想性。

这部电影的瑞士原名“Nattvardsgästerna”主要有两重意思，一是英文名片“冬日之光”，二是指在圣餐典礼间的心境，或者直译为“受圣餐的人”、“教友”或“信使”，也不无不可。

既然要探讨上帝存在与否，以中世纪戏剧为雏形的《冬日之光》索性把故事背景架设在瑞典小镇的教堂里，由御用男演员甘纳尔·布耶恩施特兰德担纲主角牧师托马斯。托马斯身上有着强烈的矛盾性，作为神职人员，他向信众布道，主持圣餐礼，还要为人解惑，但另一方面，当妻子去世后，最初因为家人才当上牧师的他逐渐丧失了对主的信仰，深陷重重怀疑，备受折磨。甚至，当深受中国研究原子弹困扰的约拿在妻子建议下咨询托马斯，对方反而向他大吐自己怀疑的苦水，最终约拿走向自杀之路，这一段极尽无奈的嘲讽。

当局者迷，旁观者清。在托马斯迷失的同时，他身边最紧密的三个人都看得清透，对于信仰的思量，也有了不同的参照体系。

依恋他的玛塔并无强烈的宗教信仰，前往教堂只为托马斯。但这份感情是不对等的，哪怕玛塔愿意做他“顺从的奴仆”，以此作为“生命的意义”，托马斯对此只感到强烈的厌恶。他丧失了爱人的能力，枯萎死寂的心境让人惊恐。最终玛塔说出了真相，托马斯没有办法活得下去，因为什么事都没法救他，他只会把自己恨死。后来教堂的琴师在玛塔面前说，恰是“爱”毁掉了托马斯，这种论调嘲讽的正是“上帝是爱，爱是上帝”，顺理成章地接续了《犹在镜中》的辩题，尽管持了相悖的方向。

而托马斯的助手艾格特最后所谈及的疑惑充实、固话甚至升华了全片的思考。艾格特新近读《圣经》，觉得每天与耶稣在一起生活的人都不理解他，还在最后弃他而去。耶稣死前，天问没有得到上帝回应，最终，耶稣在怀疑中死去。这一说法也呼应了托马斯长久思忖的困境，两个角色的重叠，带出沉痛感与无力感。而跳脱出宗教主题，这种世俗命理还是能够唤起现代人的共鸣。

在已拍摄的众多电影中，《冬日之光》是伯格曼的最爱。他曾表示，即便经过四分之一个世纪再回头看《冬日之光》，仍然令人满意。那种“完整，没有变质”的论断，指向的便是这种超越时空的对话可能性。

电影拍摄之前，伯格曼在斯德哥尔摩剧院，努力研究美籍俄罗斯作曲家伊戈尔·斯特拉文斯基的《圣诗交响曲》，他觉得这部作品相当了不起，而《冬日之光》也受其启发。早春时期伯格曼开始筹备《冬日之光》，他常在乌帕岭那一带去探寻各家教堂，在那坐上几个小时，思索如何为电影收尾。那时伯格曼的母亲因为心脏病发作而住院，父亲的身体状况也每况愈下，但即便需要借助于拐杖与矫形鞋，他还是会竭尽所能在皇家礼拜堂内履行职责。某天伯格曼带着父亲前往教堂，结果牧师因病迟到，并说只能做一个短礼拜，不领圣餐，伯格曼的父亲愤而争辩，继而协助主持。当唱完圣诗，他转向所有人平静念到：“神圣的主啊！天地之间充满你的荣耀。荣耀归于你，噢！至高无上的主！”恰是这一幕，给了《冬日之光》绝好的结局。

《冬日之光》的剧本从7月初写到了7月28日，效率非常高，毕竟，这部电影虽然看似很简单，但是包圆在促狭空间中的故事相当复杂。

在最初，伯格曼想过场景会是一座废弃教堂，大门常闭，内里放置一架破旧的风琴，长椅间有老鼠四处流窜，而主角则被自己锁在此间，面对种种幻觉。这种于死寂中对峙的设置，在伯格曼看来，也许更像是剧场的模式，而非电影的做派。但从《犹在镜中》那种信仰的质问转到《冬日之光》这种世俗的诘问，伯格曼觉得还是要选用不一样的场景和光线。

他急于表明这两部电影有着极大差异，并在《伯格曼论电影》中评论说，“充满着虚矫的《犹在镜中》，具有浪漫而且卖弄风骚的调性。没有人敢说《冬日之光》也有同样的缺点。两部电影之间唯一的关联，就是前者是后者的起点。那个时候我已强烈地想摒弃《犹在镜中》，只是尚未对外宣布而已。”兴许，这也是为何伯格曼并不赞同把他这两部作品连同《沉默》一起并称为三部曲。

然而，伯格曼当时还罕见地为《犹在镜中》摇旗呐喊，说是这部电影无论是技术还是戏剧角度去看的话，都无可指责。对比来看，伯格曼自身趣味与思辨角度的更变，其实非常迅疾。不过，当时《冬日之光》被外界排斥的程度反而很高。对伯格曼来说，正巧制片组的负责人患病，他获得了随心调配资源的权力，于是愿意破釜沉舟地拍摄《冬日之光》。这是一名电影人的坚持，哪怕他长久以来都在努力讨观众的欢心，但当《冬日之光》需要冒险的时候，仍会决定放手一搏。

这种情况下，老搭档布耶恩施特兰德也经受了不少煎熬。托马斯缺乏同情心，布耶恩施特兰德在诠释的过程中感到了前所未有的痛苦，甚至会出现记不清台词的状况，对于身体抱恙的他来说，确实不易。为迁就他的身体状况，伯格曼选在在白天拍摄不长的时间。而镜头架设在阴霾与雾气之下，反倒造就出迷蒙但特殊的氛围，这样萎靡的气质，恰好契合托马斯本人，甚至现实的绝境。

诚如伯格曼当时的妻子凯比·拉雷特所说，“这是一部杰作。但这是一部沉郁的杰作。”

（连载于《看电影》）

主要参考来源：
《魔灯：伯格曼自传》
《伯格曼论电影》
《英格玛·伯格曼》
Google、Wiki
IMDb、豆瓣、时光等电影网站

《冬日之光》被伯格曼称为是自己最得意电影作品之一，这和他的另外两部作品《犹在镜中》和《沉默》并称为“信仰三部曲”。伯格曼从片中人物细致微妙的关系出发，探讨信仰，爱等问题，为后世西方电影的发展提供了丰富的给养，一直被认为是现代电影的经典之作。
伯格曼的电影带有很明显的北欧室内剧风格，《冬日之光》的地点仅限于一个小镇内，人物的活动围绕着镇上的教堂，主要的情节冲突发生于教堂后狭小的休息室内，这种空间上明显的压缩就从外部给观者以压迫感，使得目光更容易深入剧中人物微妙的关系网中。另外，伯格曼善于通过对于人物对话的精到把握和面孔的细致描绘，达到直指内心的效果。例如在《冬日之光》50至60分钟男女主人公的长对话中，托马斯细数对于玛塔的厌恶，玛塔作为一个沉默的听者把内心的感受表现在面部的细微变化中，使观众惊叹于大师对于这样一种爱恨交织，怜悯和失望并存的情绪的完美呈现。而这些电影手法的运用，为导演传达自己对于爱与被爱，信仰的沦丧和坚持的理念作了很好的铺垫。
首先，不可否认，影片是关于上帝之爱的，上帝到底在哪里，为什么眼睁睁看着世间人经受的苦难而不予以回应。片中帕森因为中国拥有原子弹而思维陷入困境，终而走向自杀，这种纯知识分子为思想而殉道的方式在我们看来似乎是难以理解的，但是在二战后普遍陷入信仰危机的西方人中却并不少见。托马斯作为牧师本有责任让上帝之爱重新充满帕森的内心，而事实却是，他连自己也说服不了，上帝带走了他最心爱的妻子，他所经受的一切苦难都无从解释，北欧的冬天，无论外在环境还是人物内心都是冰冷昏暗的，如果“上帝不存在了”似乎一切都顺理成章了，但同时，一切的意义也失去了，活着也变成了一种近乎荒诞的自我折磨，因而帕森选择的是早早收场。
但是，仅仅停留在对于上帝的探讨，显然不是柏格森电影具有如此大的普世价值的原因。《冬日之光》归根结底，还是写形而下的人世，写微妙的人际关系。女主人公玛塔在给托马斯的长信最后写道：“我爱你，我为你而活，占有我享用我吧。在我虚假的自尊和独立背后，其实只有一个愿望：能被允许为某个人而活着。”爱情赋予玛塔以生存的意义，这意义是美好的，可感的，尽管托马斯仍旧冷酷得说自己是如何厌恶玛塔为他所做的一切，这让她近乎伤痛欲绝，但是在电影的最后，玛塔还是心甘情愿得做托马斯布道的唯一一个听众，尽管她是不信神的。从某种意义上来说，托马斯就是玛塔的上帝，一个不予回应的被爱者。
可是，拥有信仰的托马斯和玛塔都是拒绝沦落的，这让他们得以坚守，得以让爱充满人心，电影取名“冬日之光”的原因就在于此，冬日的光是若有若无，难以把握的，但同时又是温暖的，充满希望的。电影提到耶稣的受难之源是怨恨上帝的抛弃，可见爱而不可得的苦痛由来已久，这并不能构成我们放弃信仰爱的理由，因为爱的意义不在于获得被爱，而在于使自身获得救赎，坚守希望。
艺术从来就是给人以美感和希望的，伯格曼的电影亦是如此，上帝隐没了，爱归还于人间。身在不同文化语境和时代背景下的我们，似乎很难体会到他电影所传达出的理念，那么就从想通的人心和人性出发，获得属于自身关于爱与被爱的体会，一部好电影的价值，就在于此。