Through a Glass Darkly, like Face to Face (1976), is a reference to Corinthians 13, a paean to love.

It is Karin who remarks memorably that we are “like children cast out into the wilderness at night”. Tomas, the doubting pastor in Winter Light, senses not a gentle fatherly figure with “benign answers and reassuring blessings” but “a spider-god, a monster” – the form in which God appears to schizophrenic Karin in Through a Glass Darkly (1961). The absent spiritual father, if he exists at all, is inscrutable: his face is hidden and the devotion of his children is unrequited. In Persona (the title derives from the Latin for ‘mask’), an isolated child reaches out to a fading image of his mother. In his autobiography The Magic Lantern, he asks his mother: “Were we given masks instead of faces?” She kept young Ingmar at a distance (“I used to try to find ways to win her love”) and he was prohibited from addressing his parents with the intimate du. From his first screenplay, Torment (1944), to his last, Saraband (2003), Bergman portrayed adolescent rebellion and often futile attempts at reconciliation. “I was an unwanted child in a hellish marriage”, recalls the protagonist in Wild Strawberries (1957), echoing the director’s own feelings. Unrequited love began at an early age for Bergman.

Yet art can provide consolation: Bergman found “human holiness” in the music of Bach, which offers his characters “a flickering light”. For all his earnestness, Bergman had no pretensions about his art his work is sceptical of its own power, as seen in his 1958 film The Magician, and even more so of the virtue of artists, depicted as parasitical creatures feeding off the turmoil of their subjects.

Seventh Seal by Ingmar Bergman