Winter Light

Director: Ingmar Bergman

1963 / 81min / DCP

His flock dwindling, his perfunctory performance of his duties now guided by muscle memory alone, small town pastor Tomas’s (Gunnar Björnstrand) slow loss of faith arrives at a moment of actual crisis when he is called to ease the torment of a parishioner (Max von Sydow) paralyzed by fear of the atomic bomb, for whom he can provide nothing in the way of comforting counsel. As photographed by the peerless Sven Nykvist, who spent a month studying how the light in the church that’s the film’s central location changed in the course of a day, Winter Light is a film of bleak beauty, a rigorously pared-down drama of the struggle to hold onto faith in the face of God’s silence.