The Silence (Swedish: Tystnaden) is a 1963 film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman starring Ingrid Thulin and Gunnel Lindblom.
Synopsis
After a nightly train journey through desolate countryside, two sisters stop at a hotel in an unidentified Central European country on the brink of war or insurrection. The older, more cultured sister, Ester (Ingrid Thulin), who is a literary translator, is taken ill, and it turns out to be terminal. Her fear of death, as well as long-standing rivalry and need for control, cloud her relationship with her younger, beautiful sister Anna (Gunnel Lindblom), who's depicted as the fleshly side of the spirit/flesh dichotomy. The younger sister sometimes neglects her son Johan (Jörgen Lindström) (a boy of 8 or so), who wanders around the seemingly empty hotel while Anna looks around the city, resulting in a sexual encounter. None of the three know the language of the country.
Interpretation
After Bergman's death, Woody Allen, in the New York Times observed the film opens up when you realize that the two women represent different aspects of the same person.
In a scene, Johan stares out of the window as a lone tank rolls down the street at night; in Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag comments, "Again, Ingmar Bergman may have meant the tank rumbling down the street in The Silence as a phallic symbol. But if he did, it was a foolish thought." She then continues to say, "Those who reach for a Freudian interpretation of the tank are only expressing their lack of response to what is there on the screen."
Reception and themes
The film has been classified as a "landmark of modernist cinema" with Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad (1961), Michelangelo Antonioni's L'avventura (1960), and Luis Buñuel's Belle de Jour (1967).[1] Popular film critic Vernon Young reversed his position on Bergman and admitted in 1971 that The Silence was an "extraordinary achievement in its way...The Silence rewards effort..."[2]
The Silence was submitted to the film rating/censorship board (Biografbyrån) of Sweden in July 1963 and went through without any cuts. The general instructions for the work of the board had been modified just weeks before the film reached them, and this contributed to its passage, though Bergman claimed that he was not in any real sense trying to test the limits of what could be allowed in mainstream cinema. He actually did not expect this rather inaccessible film, with sparse and uncommunicative dialogue, to be a big box-office success, and commented in an interview in 1970: "I said to Kenne Fant /CEO of the Swedish Film Insitute which had produced the film/: "You might as well realize, this isn't a film that will have people storming the theaters". Oh the irony; that's exactly what people did."[3]
The original cut (the only one to be shown in Sweden and certain other countries) includes a number of brief but controversial sex scenes, showing nudity, female masturbation, urination and a couple making out on the seats of a murky cabaret theatre. This plus some strong language led to intense public controversy in Sweden and several other countries at the time. In many countries the film was cut,[4][5][6] while in Sweden it has come to be regarded as a beacon in a string of films that broke down the wall of censorship and opened the way for later films, both mainstream and more 'adult' or experimental, to include graphic erotic content as well as strong language without cuts being expected (e.g. Vilgot Sjöman's 491, I Am Curious (Blue) and I Am Curious (Yellow), and Stefan Jarl's They Call Us Misfits). Bergman's and Sjöman's prestige as directors, their high aims and the trend of openness during the decade made it untenable in Sweden to treat their films as tainted or semi-pornographic, and this in turn weakened the general acceptance of casual, intrusive film censorship.
While the film is noted for its sensual impact, enhanced by Sven Nykvist's camera work where long pans and contrasting shots of deep darkness and sweltering light, rapid movement (the train ride at the opening) and long, slow-moving and almost dialogueless shots, pull the viewer into the unfamiliar and unsettling scenery, it was hardly a movie about sex. The story seems to use sex and other factors to set up and explore tensions between the two sisters, tensions that run through the whole film and reach a series of climactic points towards the end. The erotic action is also motivated as a kind of last resort in a world where language has lost its function - the trio in the centre don't know the language of the strange city, and Anna and Ester continuously misread each other when they talk - and where the threat of destruction (war) is hanging over everyone. Bergman has commented in numerous interviews that the film marked a point of final exit from a set of religious problems that had been dominating his films since The Seventh Seal.
According to Jerry Vermilye, The Silence "...achieved a measure of sensationalistic attention by dint of its scenes of sensuality, mild though they were. It raised a great deal of controversy in Sweden, and its notoriety continued to raise hackles elsewhere in Europe. All of which attracted the attention of filmgoers; in Britain and the United States it became a considerable hit, perhaps for reasons of prurience rather than art."[7] Due to its reputation for "pornographic sequences" the film became a financial success.[2]
Printed screenplay
Together with the two films preceding it, Through A Glass Darkly and Winter Light this was the first Bergman film to have its script published in his native language, as En filmtrilogi ("A Film Trilogy", Norstedts, Stockholm, 1964]. Four scripts from his late-fifties breakthrough years, including The Seventh Seal had been printed in Britain a few years before, as translated into English, but they had seen limited circulation. The trilogy screenplays initiated regular printing of Bergman's film scripts in Sweden and elsewhere.
Cast
References
- ^ Michaels, Lloyd (2000). Ingmar Bergman's Persona. Cambridge University. p. 21. ISBN 0521656982.
- ^ a b Gado, Frank (1986). The Passion of Ingmar Bergman. Duke University Press. p. 305. ISBN 0822305860.
- ^ Bergman om Bergman by Jonas Sima, Stig Björkman and Torsten Manns; Norstedts, Stockholm, 1970, p.195 (in Swedish)
- ^ Robertson, James Crighton (1993). The Hidden Cinema: British Film Censorship in Action, 1913-1975. Routledge. pp. 127–128. ISBN 0415090342.
- ^ Morwaski, Stefan (1974). Inquiries Into the Fundamentals of Aesthetics. MIT Press. p. 375. ISBN 0262130963.
- ^ von Bagh, Peter; Per Olov Qvist (2000). Guide to the Cinema of Sweden and Finland. Greenwood Press. p. 16. ISBN 0313303770.
- ^ Vermilye, Jerry (2002). Ingmar Bergman: His Life and Films. McFarland & Company. p. 28. ISBN 0786411600.
External links
