Winter Light (1963)

Bergman has stated numerous times that he doesn't believe in God, but Winter Light's climax (where Ericsson, in Märta's company, begins his evening sermon before an otherwise empty church, in a nonetheless beatific close-up that parallels the final image of Chaplin's titularly similar City Lights) suggests that the director does believe in the essential goodness of the human spirit, the soulful desire to carry on with our many rituals of existence because of the knowledge that somehow, some way, our actions always manage to touch and to inspire at least one other.

Thank God Kaufman is so funny, and his sensibility is so off-kilter, or the film's forthright interest in aging and dying could easily seem like hackneyed canards, and the project could buckle under the weight of the toughest scenes, which a more conventional movie could never abide without turning into some kind of moribund, dehydrated, Winter Light-style affair.

Instead, Bergman spent the early part of the 1960s burrowing deeper into the soul with his “God’s Silence” trilogy—1961’s Through A Glass Darkly and two in 1963, Winter Light and The Silence—and refining a stark yet often piercingly dramatic black-and-white style that married spiritual inquiry with formal asceticism.