The Silence

An Ingmar Bergman film always takes me to film school. `Silence' offers the PhD. Metaphors and character arcs: No one does it better than Bergman.

It's a study in contrasts. It's about the strife sewn into the lining of family intimacy, contrasted with the perfection of strangers engaged in the base behaviors. Complexity vs. Simplicity. The common ground shared by youthful innocence and ignorance vs. the confusion imposed by years of living. Short people seeking acceptance vs. normal folk who are so completely unacceptable to each other. It's about a dying woman whose life's work is translating one language to another so others can understand it vs. two people who speak the same language who cannot understand each other (further) vs. two other people who speak different languages who have a better understanding than those sharing a common lexicon. And on and on.

Watching this film, it occurred to me how deeply Bergman's work influenced the likes of Kubrick and Hitchcock and Aldrich and Leigh … so many more. 2001 Space Odyssey, Psycho, so many of the great films have seeds here. The screen was Bergman's canvas; the camera his brush. Neither the script nor the imagery alone created the work. His work has a soul from the combination of all of it.

Watch Bergman's life's work and save yourself a bundle on film school. You'll be in the master's care.

A landmark film - pure breakthrough cinema from Bergman - not just depicting, but living inside the existential dread-abyss of Modernity and its loss of mythic meaning. Two sisters' polarized answers to that dread - one deadens herself - the other seeks escape in mindless sensuality - while the son is abandoned to wander in an empty hotel with only absurd characters to play with, all in a stifling, gray, nameless, tank-ridden, Soviet-Kafkaesque-Eastern block industrial- waste, oppressive city. (I'd be very surprised if this film wasn't a seminal influence on David Lynch.) Brilliant performance by Ingrid Thulin as the cerebral, repressed sister. Startling and beautiful imagery and montage (visual and aural), brilliantly depicting the alienated inner and outer worlds.

A cryptic, ambiguous, abstraction, seeks to challenge through oblique interaction, impossible to pin down, you'll present with a large frown (while scratching chin inquisitively), misinterpretation, mistranslation, misinflection - who knows what it's really about!

Often referred to as the third in a trilogy, it is more profoundly the third in a sequence of three world class pieces of cinema, as the emotions and frustrations of Ester (Ingrid Thulin) carry the viewer over a threshold of uncertainty, inconclusiveness, bewilderment and confusion - with Gunnel Lindblom as Anna playing her part to perfection too - but don't ask me why, because the gaps reach to the sky.

Do not be put off by some reactions to this movie. It is not easy to watch, as it is light on plot and deliberately obscure in places. But if you can go with the flow of the film, you will be rewarded with some top class acting, incisive argument and lots to think about afterwards. It reminds me a little of a Pinter play - if you like those you should also like this film.

The film also has one or two monumental pieces of cinematography - not least the scenes with the small boy in the large lobby of the hotel - far more effective in this film than in the "tribute use" by Kubrick in the Shining many years later. The shots of tanks rolling through the unnamed Southern European town will stick in my mind for a long time.

Ingrid Thulin and Gunnel Lindblom were two of Bergman's best women and he works with them to terrific effect in this movie.

This is one of the great movies - highly recommended.

"Tystnaden", "The Silence", is perhaps Bergman's most disturbing film without the shocking images of, say "Cries and Whispers" and "Fanny and Alexander". It is more the atmosphere and what is not said that makes this film so uncomfortable to watch, but that is one of the things I love about the cinema- to be shocked, moved and disturbed by the images. I can understand why some people, my mother for example, do not like Bergman, but I believe he is a great artist and one of the true canonic directors we have, along with the likes of Dreyer, Mizoguchi, Fellini, Tarkovsky and Kubrick (just to mention a few!).

Bergman's women shine in this film, too, although they must have been exhausted afterwards. Ingrid Thulin and Gunnel Lindblom star as the two sisters, whose apparent incestuous relationship has destroyed them both, Esther (Thulin) physically (she is dying) and Anna (Lindblom) mentally. They arrive, with Anna's son Johan, in a foreign city at war, which creates an uncozy atmosphere around Sven Nykvist's exterior shots. The tanks roll down the city streets, becoming a metaphor of the war of emotions between Anna and Esther. Thulin makes a very physically demanding performance, like Harriet Andersson in "Cries and Whispers" she is dying (of cancer?), and her pain is showing. Anna clearly wants to hurt her sister, who is the oldest and smartest of them, by saying cruel things and playing with Esther's apparent sexual love for her.

Sigmund Freud would have loved this film, and Anna seems to want to break free from her sister by having casual sex with a man she meets at a bar. She then tells her sister about it, and Esther's reactions to this is extremely ambiguous, like most of the film is. Anna's wish to become free of her sister is deeply rooted in childhood experiences, and it leads Anna to say things like "I wish she was dead" to the man who does not understand a word she is saying. All these things make "Tystnaden" the disturbing film it is. The only release is when Johan explores the corridors of the hotel alone, meeting a bunch of short men who perform at a circus-like variete Anna visits to escape from the sight of Esther. But Johan meets a kind (or is he a paedophiliac?) old man who works at the hotel, and it is he who has to care for Esther as she draws her last breaths, Anna tearing Johan away from her sister's arm in a very cruel manner. The long periods of silence in the film perhaps makes the title, or perhaps it means that the silence about the sisters' past is never broken to us, the spectators. A lot is left up to us to interpret, typically of Bergman's cinema.

All in all, a very ambivalent, Freudian and disturbing film from one of the masters of the cinema.