Cinema – “Winter Light”

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Cinema — “Winter Light” at Teatro Guiniguada, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Cycle – Bergman before Bergman Before Bergman was Bergman — before the surname became an adjective, before the severe face carved in Nordic granite, before the island of Fårö became a mental homeland — there was a young filmmaker learning how to look. And to look at himself. The cycle proposed by Filmoteca Canaria for the months of April and May, titled “Bergman before Bergman”, is precisely that journey backwards, or rather: inwards. It is not about solemn archaeology, but about witnessing the moment when a voice begins to recognise itself, still insecure, still all too human, still unaware that one day it would be synonymous with metaphysical storm. Free admission with prior ticket collection at the box office and on the website In “Crisis” (Kris, 1945), “Prison” (Fängelse, 1949), “To Joy” (Till glädje, 1950) and “Summer Interlude” (Sommarlek, 1951), the spectator will not find the Bergman of already canonised abyssal silences, but a storyteller who gropes his way forward, who tries on masks, who argues with theatre, with literature, with God and with love as if they were all sitting at the same table and no one wanted to be the first to get up. These are films that move forward like long letters written in the early hours, where melodrama crosses paths with guilt, faith tumbles down a poorly lit staircase and happiness always appears in the form of a memory, a parenthesis or an unrepeatable mistake. Everything is there, but still in a raw state: death as an uncomfortable interlocutor, the artist as a being guilty merely for existing, love as a promise fulfilled just when it is already too late. And almost at the end of the journey, closing the cycle, “Winter Light” (Nattvardsgästerna, 1963) functions as a deliberate anomaly: not so much a conclusion as a key. Because seeing it alongside the early works makes it clear that Bergman did not move in a straight line, but in a spiral. What seemed like learning was already obsession; what seemed like youth, an early form of lucidity. “Bergman before Bergman” is therefore not the prologue to a greater body of work, but the story of an origin that never stopped repeating itself. As if all the later cinema were already contained — in a larval, feverish, nonconformist state — in these films that still do not know they are going to outlive us. WINTER LIGHT (Nattvardsgästerna, 1963) Director: Ingmar Bergman Country: Sweden Screenplay: Ingmar Bergman Music: Evald Andersson Cinematography: Sven Nykvist Cast: Ingrid Thulin, Max von Sydow, Gunnar Björnstrand, Gunnel Lindblom, Allan Edwall Running time: 80 min Black and White Original version with Spanish subtitles Thomas, a Protestant pastor who conducts religious services in an almost empty church, is a lonely man suffering a deep spiritual crisis whose life has lost all meaning. Even the love that the schoolteacher Marta feels for him has become an unbearable burden. His situation worsens when he finds himself unable to offer any help to a peasant couple who come to him seeking his advice. Recommended age: 16