Art

When watching an Ingmar Bergman movie I often forget I'm watching a movie.

I can't imagine Bergman storyboarding a scene or telling an actor how to read a line, as there is no scene and there is no actor.

The black Volvo that drives away with the body of Max von Sydow, who's killed himself in the woods beside the river, is a black Volvo carrying away a man so despondent about the condition of the world, "the Chinese have the bomb," that he kills himself, leaving a wife and three young children.

Nothing the pastor said to him earlier consoled him, as the pastor himself is in crisis. He's dying, he's involved in an unhappy affair with the village schoolteacher, his congregation is dying too, shrinking to a size in which the pastor will soon be preaching to himself, the church organist, and the sexton, a hunchback whose faith in Christ is pure.

Not being a movie, the film never ends. The story, told in black and white, goes on and on. It's titled "Winter Light" and Bergman made it in 1963.