Through A Glass Darkly

I rarely watch a film I literally know nothing about, and I must say it's an unsettling experience. I've witnessed people walking up to a cinema and asking "What's playing today?" in shock and awe. "How can these people not know about the film they're going to see? Who are these people? Have they left the house just to see any film, rather than planning, sometimes weeks in advance, to go and see a specific film?" are often thoughts that run around my head and occasionally out of my mouth as the clerk at Odeon reels off a list of the current blockbusters and horrors  for the third time to a pair of elderly women in front of me in the queue, clearly looking for something starring Clark Gable. On occasion, and as happened recently with Time Regained, I will pause a movie I know nothing about some way into it, to have a quick check online or in the 1001 book, to give me some idea of what I'm supposed to be watching. If I do this, it's not generally a good sign, as a) I'm as yet unsure of what the film is about, and b) I'm clearly bored. This was not an option with Ingmar Bergman's Through A Glass Darkly though, for I watched it streaming via LoveFilm, and I find that if I pause it for more than a quick toilet break, the damn thing refuses to load unless it plays from the beginning, so I had to sit it out and find out what I was watching afterwards.