This is a clear and lustrous transfer, which is just as well given the exploration of black-and-white photography that Bergman and his crew make throughout. My one reservation about the presentation is the subtitles: they tend to come in pairs, each with a dash in front of them. So you're oscillating between watching and reading both to ensure you're reading the right one at the right time. A few moment's later, you're back to read the second as it's spoken. It's distracting.
The extras are good, but limited by the lack of any extra material from the film. There's a pointless and rather murky collection of five stills (the negative is the wrong way round, too) and the filmographies are comprehensive, but only cover Andersson, Bjornstrand and Bergman, and are of limited interest anyway.
Philip Strick's film notes are interesting, if at times obvious and rather too short. They tell you that Orkney was planned as the location until Faro was found at the last moment! With completely different light and water, it would have been a very different film if shot on Orkney. There's also a couple of lines on the influence of Strindberg and what constitutes a chamber piece.
The big extra is 20 pages from Bergman's book, published in 1994. They're a bit bizarre but worth reading. Despite badly needing a clearer layout, they are a fascinating illumination of Bergman's narcissism. His self-belief and pomposity ("the technical staging can hardly be faulted; it is rhythmically irreproachable. Every shot is just right") sits intriguingly next to his accurate self-criticism ("the slightly too beautiful words, the slightly too grandiose formulations, and the slightly too pretty shape of Through A Glass Darkly").
His criticism of the actors may seem too much: "So I had my string quartet. But one instrument, Bjornstrand, played false notes all the time, and the other instrument, Passgard, certainly followed the written music but had no interpretation.
The third instrument, Max von Sydow, played with purity and authority, but I had not given him the elbowroom he needed. The miraculous thing was that Harriet Andersson played Karin's part with sonorous musicality. A touch of genius. Through her presence the product becomes bearable.' But they ring true in their exaggerated, metallic way. There's also an involving discussion with himself which hints at Strick's conclusion that every character in the film is autobiographical.
The trailer reveals 26 films in the Bergman Collection. Given the evidence of this, the first in the current release series, let's hope for more of the same.
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