Word: pastoral
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Winter Light. Ingmar Bergman probes deeper into religious philosophy in this relentlessly somber and icily beautiful film about an afternoon in the life of a Swedish pastor who finds himself unable to help or love others because he fears that he himself is beyond the help or love...
...clique-minded; but most seem to be made up of dedicated Christians who have found that in company with a few fellow believers, they can learn about theology and the Bible and grapple with the concrete problems of living as a Christian in a secular society. Says Lutheran Pastor William R. Snyder, president of the Minneapolis Ministerial Association, and an ardent believer in the efficacy of such cells: "This is the way of the future for the church. We're only using Christ's strategy. He spoke to his 5,000, but he also spoke...
Church bells ring on a winter Sunday in a Swedish coastal village. The devout -they number just nine-assemble in the drafty little stone building. The pastor (Gunnar Björnstrand) serves Communion as if he were an actor in a play near the end of a long run-withdrawn, saying the words without compassion. The contrast between this remoteness and the fervor on the faces of the communicants as they receive the Host and the Cup states Bergman's theme: a vain search for faith down ways that are closed. Besought, after the service, to counsel a fisherman...
...afternoon, having told the fisherman's wife of her husband's suicide without managing to give her a morsel of faith or comfort, the pastor goes to conduct vespers at a church in a nearby parish. A crippled verger waits for him in the study before the service. "There is too much talk of Christ's physical suffering in the Bible; I've suffered as much as Christ, in a physical way," he says. "Christ's real suffering was on the Cross, faced with God's silence in the moment of horrible doubt before...
...through the suicide, the ordeal of the schoolteacher and the verger's measuring of pain, spoken a lesson of his authority and man's humbleness? Bergman draws no conclusions. Doubt darkens the ending: the pastor stands rigidly before the altar to begin a prayer to his unfelt and perhaps unfeeling...