The Silence

If it achieves nothing else, The Silence, the final installment of Bergman's faith trilogy, is still impressive for making such a simple title work on so many levels. The lack of open communication, be it with God or our fellow man, has informed much of Bergman's oeuvre, from The Seventh Seal to Cries and Whispers, but here each of the layers of silence – permit me this cliché – is deafening.

Even the setup is stark: Ester (Ingrid Thulin), sickly and dying, is on a train with her younger, more attractive sister Anna (Gunnel Lindblom) and Anna's young son Johan (Jörgen Lindström). They stop in a hotel in an unidentified country on the brink of war, where Ester begins to deteriorate. The rest of The Silence is a chronicle of the interactions of these three, or lack thereof.

On one level, there is a literal silence that pervades the film: the first thing we hear is the pounding tick-tock of a clock, which only gets louder when one character cannot catch her breath. The ticking watch is a constant in the film, clearly a symbol for our limited time on this Earth but also of an inability many of us have to think about anything but that mortality. Dialogue is rare and sparse when used.

But even those tiny moments of speech reveal a great deal about these characters in a manner that highlights the importance of communication without being over-expositional. With only a few lines, backed by some of Sven Nykvist's finest photography, we begin to understand the three leads of the film: as tanks roll by in the night and shatter the quiet, we see the threat of war looming ever closer. Anna, the hedonistic one, buries her concerns in sins of the flesh, looking for carnal pleasures to at least distract from reality. Ester, intelligent and frail, looks to words as her last hope; she reads and writes and masturbates with cold, passionless automation.

Neither can find real comfort, as they cannot communicate. Anna has sex with a stranger whom she can't understand due to a language barrier, and whatever connection they have is purely physical and evaporates the moment they pause long enough to say something. Ester, long jealous of her sister's looks and promiscuity, often lurks in the background of the shots in Anna's room. She works as a translator, yet even she cannot understand the native tongue of this tumultuous land. The porter (Jörgen Lindström) brings her food and wine, though he does not understand a word she says.

In between these embittered sisters is Johan, whose equal affection for both his mother and aunt supports the notion that, as with the actress and nurse in Bergman's subsequent Persona, the two are merely reflections of the same person and not really sisters at all. In Freudian lingo, Anna is the Body, or Id, while Ester is the Mind, more specifically the Superego.

But Johan is not concerned about such things, for he is young. The other characters, building from Thomas' rejection of God in Winter Light, have abandoned Him, which accounts for their inability to connect with anyone else: if God is real and we are all connected through a higher power, then a rejection of that power isolates us from one another. In His absence, even a translator cannot understand the language of what appears to be a major European country, and why that country is on the brink of collapsing into insurrection.

In the previous installments of the trilogy, the characters prayed to God and asked to know He was there. In Winter Light, Thomas does not like the answer He gave, and so he rejects Him. In The Silence, we have angered God into leaving us, and now people can only pray for their own self-interest, empty pleas asked with full knowledge of their futility. Ester prays not for communication, nor strength, but merely to make it home to die to give her some antiquated notion of dignity.

Johan does not know that God no longer answers us, is too young to possibly comprehend this, and therefore he keeps his faith. As a result, he is the only character who can freely speak with anyone. Not only the bridge between his relatives, he befriends the porter and even stumbles across a traveling troupe of dwarfs who welcome him and dress him in their costumes. It is Johan who ends this nightmarish trip through Bergman's idea of Hell with an element of hope: he and his mother leave Ester to die – though Johan thinks they'll be back – and take another train out of the country. Ester gives him a letter that contains a message of spiritual hope. It inspires Anna to open the window to let it rain on her face (a baptism), and it gives the boy something to treasure, and hopefully something that will keep his faith alive through adulthood.

What makes The Silence so interesting to me, other than its metaphorical weight and flawless direction of course, is that it is truly the link between the theological Bergman of old and the psychological Bergman who had his greatest successes ahead of him. Perhaps this is nerdy of me, but I got genuine goosebumps watching the religious worries of the previous two films melt into the personal quandaries that would inform masterpieces like Cries and Whispers and Scenes From a Marriage. Even the idea of two characters playing contrasting foils of the same person would be fleshed out to an even greater degree with his next film and magnum opus, Persona.

For all its frightening implications, The Silence is not the most daring nor bleak of the trilogy, as the entire thing is merely the fallout from the themes of Winter Light. But it also, in a much subtler way than in Through a Glass Darkly, reaffirms the existence of God. Though Bergman identified as an atheist due to his strict upbringing under his Lutheran father, he recognizes the need for mankind to have something to answer to, even if we conjure that something from our imaginations. Bergman certainly doesn't believe in the canonical definition of God, but few directors have ever made as many films that so thoroughly (and believably) stress the importance of faith in the secular world. The fact that they're so well-acted and shot almost seems like mere icing on the cake.

Winter Light (Ingmar Bergman, 1963)

Ingmar Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly remains the weakest film I've yet seen of the director's filmography, which is less a reflection on that movie's quality than the overall brilliance of the rest of them. But that film has a lasting importance -- and a particular relevance to this film -- as the first installment of the Spider trilogy, Bergman's most intimate handling of his struggles with faith. Though there are no narrative and indeed only scant symbolic ties between the previous installment and this second act, Winter Light picks up Kårin's epiphany where it left off and moves forward in time, immersing us in a world of madness.

The first thing that you notice about this film is its stark, realistic photography. Bergman fans of course know this look all too well, but Winter Light marks the first time Bergman and Nykvist completely switched to this style. Through a Glass Darkly pushed the director away from the outright expressionism of such early masterpieces as Wild Strawberries, but there were still moments that hearkened back to the old way of shooting -- the rocky backdrop in particular calls to mind the craggy, intimidating shores of The Seventh Seal. But Winter Light lives up to its name: it's bright, but cold, unfeeling. We see extensive use of the close-ups that would form the bedrock of Nykvist's legacy, probing the characters hard exteriors for any glimpse of emotion or passion. Much of the film takes place in small rooms, only compounding the closed-in feel.

Filling the role of the wayward believer is Tomas Ericsson (Gunnar Björnstrand), a parish priest who delivers his sermons without conviction before a dwindling congregation who themselves are so bored that they only donate spare change. When a young fisherman, Jonas (Max von Sydow), meets with him after the service to discuss his growing despair, the priest dismisses him, sure that he cannot help the lad. Tomas' lover, Märta (Ingrid Thulin), arrives and criticizes his dismissal of Jonas. She gives him a letter, and departs as quickly as she came. As Tomas reads the letter, Bergman treats us to a nearly six-minute unbroken take of a close-up on Märta as she reads the contents aloud. It's practically Ozu-like, and just like Ozu, it's beautiful in its simplicity.

Jonas returns, desperate for guidance. At a loss, Tomas wings it and tells the man of his own experience with God and his time serving as a chaplain in the Spanish Civil War: the priest believed in a benevolent, loving God, but witnessing the various atrocities of wartime shattered his faith. He tells the young man that he saw God for what He really was: "A spider, a monster," echoing Kårin's mad epiphany. In the previous film, the image of God as a spider seemed little more than the hallucination of someone who had truly slipped into insanity; here, that is the cold reality, and to shy away from it, Tomas clings to his old image, the accepted image, of God to keep him together. Here, the two manifestations of Bergman's God have inverted, and the effect is even more unsettling. He then looks the boy in the eye and tells him that the only way to look upon the amorality of the human condition is to deny God, for without Him you no longer need to justify His actions. Jonas leaves dejected, and Tomas turns to face the giant crucifix in the room and declares himself "free."

But freedom offers no solace for the increasingly insular Tomas, and his relationship with Märta does not improve (though she herself is ecstatic about her lover's rejection of God). When she tries to speak to him, he launches into a verbal assault, telling her all the reasons why he does not care for her, ultimately comparing her unfavorably to his late wife. He must also drive out to Jonas' home when the man kills himself after his meeting with the priest. As uncomfortable as Bergman's unyielding close-ups can be, the long shots of Tomas driving to the scene and helping the police to cover the body are utterly chilling, an effect magnified by the near-silence.

Tomas and Märta return to the church for the next service, and find only the organist, Fredrik, and sexton, Algot. Fredrik reveals that Tomas isn't the only broken man in the church when he warns Märta to leave this desolate town before her dreams are crushed like everyone else's. Meanwhile, Algot speaks to the priest about the Passion, and wonders why so many focus on the violence inflicted upon Jesus as terrible torture and not God's silence when His son begged for Him on the cross. Tomas agrees that God's seeming rejection would be far more painful. Algot also mentions the betrayal of the disciples, subtly drawing a connection between their rejection of God and Jesus and Tomas'.

Every Bergman film seems to have, amongst the beautiful and evocative images and dialogue, one scene that sears itself into your memory forever. Usually the moment comes at the end, and here is no exception: after these revealing conversations, Tomas stands at the pulpit and begins his sermon to an empty room. The film earlier suggested a distance between the priest and his parishioners due to the orthodoxy of their practices, but that dogma has at last fully alienated the two groups instead of melding them. As Tomas has rejected God, he is now truly alone in the world.

Winter Light is the director's personal favorite of his works, and it's certainly one of the most daring films he's made short of Persona. Bergman's earlier spiritual forays ended with some sort of reaffirmation, if not necessarily of God then of the spark of the human spirit. But Winter Light ends in a flux: Tomas has flatly rejected God, and it seems to have brought him closer to despair instead of ridding him of his spiritual quandaries. The dialogue about God's silence during Jesus' suffering is particularly telling, and I don't think I deserve kudos for speculating that, just as this film extrapolated upon the imagery of God as a spider, the final installment of the trilogy -- named, wouldn't you know it, The Silence -- will likewise expand upon this. I've never seen a film take so bold a stance on religion, at least not one made by someone who isn't a borderline sociopath on YouTube. With the usual round of excellent acting, stark and beautiful imagery and endlessly layered dialogue, Winter Light stands as one of the great and boldest achievements from a director with perhaps the most daring catalogue of any major filmmaker in history.

Cries and Whispers

Ingmar Bergman's films are primarily entropic: they unfold with such precision and bleakness that, when you watch his monochromatic fare, you can't help but wonder if they started out in color and somehow the narrative absorbed the pigment. Which is odd, because few writer-directors have such a humanist streak as the Swedish genius. He likes to lose God and find Him again, though usually what we get doesn't fit the standard description of a deity. His characters like to mask their pain, but at some point their emotions flood to the surface.

Cries and Whispers, one of the director's color films, is at once everything you'd expect from one of his films and something wholly outside his comfort zone. It centers on characters who have grown distant, petty and vacant and can only reach epiphany through a terrible catharsis. It proceeds at a deliberate pace with stark photography. But it also burns with all the passion he normally denies his other films, to the point that Bergman fades to red, not black.

The film takes place, even, almost entirely in a room painted red. There, Agnes (Harriet Andersson) lies on her deathbed, ravaged by cancer. She's tended to by her two sisters, Kårin (Ingrid Thulin) and Maria (Liv Ullman), and her servant Anna (Kari Sylwan). She awakens one morning before her carers and writes in her diary: "It is Monday morning, and I am in pain." She pauses, then underlines the last word.

Naturally, Agnes' story is only the setup for a character study, not the actual focus of the film. We see how the sisters used to love each other dearly but have since drifted into ennui and aloofness. Kårin and Maria are married to husbands they don't love, and Maria (the pettiest of them all) engages in affairs to spite her husband's own philandering. Agnes never married, and used to while away the time by painting mediocre watercolors. We see their pasts in flashbacks that show happier times as well as some events that drove them to their detachment in later years.

Perhaps in an effort to recapture their youth, they all wear virgin white. It's a nice ironic touch, but there's also a bit of tragedy to it: Kårin and Maria spend their mornings preening and styling hair while Anna tends to Agnes. They doll themselves up to the point that they do actually resemble dolls: beautiful, but cold and inhuman. The house is established at the start with static shots of the outside of the manor, filmed with beautiful coldness by Bergman's right-hand man Sven Nykvist. The detached effect is even more jarring as they walk around in their giant dollhouse, which feels unwelcoming despite the passion literally painted on the walls. When an outsider like the doctor, who is also Maria's lover (Erland Jospehson)

Anna wears white too, but it seems to fit her. Bergman tells us her story as well though only in pockets of emotional, not character, advancement. She kneels in front of an empty cradle-cum-shrine and prays, revealing that she lost her son but still has faith. Clearly, that loss fuels her care of Agnes, as she cleans, dresses, even reads to her without treating them like perfunctory chores like the sisters.

Agnes' illness slowly brings the humanity out of these characters, though they don't know what to do with it. In one scene, Maria tries to appeal to Kårin, wondering why they can't have the bond they used to have. But when they even attempt an embrace, they shy from each other's touch like skittish animals. Kårin in particular looks like she's about to have a heart attack. The most iconic moment of the film is of course Anna holding Agnes to her breast: while the sisters idle with their visiting husbands, she lets down her dress and uses her breast as a pillow. It's a blatant example of Anna projecting her maternal frustrations on this dying woman, and it gives them both just a glimmer of satisfaction.

At last, Agnes dies. Her final gasps of agonized breathing are without question the most unsettling thing I've ever heard in a film. It's the kind of noise that almost makes you want to leave the room because it's so inhuman and so real. It certainly has that effect on the characters, who turn and cower except for loyal Anna. In that moment, a look crosses Andersson's face that conveys total contentment, and you know that Agnes has accepted her death. After some time, Agnes begins speaking to the women, beckoning them to come to her body and ease her into the afterlife. Kårin flees the room immediately, unwilling and unable to deal with the situation. Maria looks equally terrified, but resolves to stay. Until the body grabs her in an embrace and she too splits. Anna, the only one not blood-related, volunteers to stay before Agnes can even ask, and once again brings her charge to her bosom.

Early in the film, Maria's lover reminisces with her, mentioning that she "used to look ahead straightfowardly... open, unmasked" but now makes only calculating sideways glances. At the end, as she prepares to leave with her husband, she cannot bring herself to thank the now-jobless Anna, and she only pauses to give her material recompense. She seems like the same person, but when she hands the money to the servant, a look of gratitude and care flashes on her face.

Cries and Whispers is one of the greatest triumphs from one of the greatest directors who ever lived. It's easy to think that these characters don't go anywhere, but that's only because Bergman doesn't feel the need to make them strikingly different at the end. At one point in the film, Kårin, locked in a passive-aggressive spiral with her equally-unfeeling husband, cuts herself with broken glass simply to feel. As she toys with the glass, she repeats "It's all a tissue of lies" over and over. But in the final moments, we cut to a flashback from an excerpt from Agnes' diary, in which she describes a day she spent not long ago with her three companions out on the lawn. As they sit in a swing, the voiceover tells us what Agnes thought: "Come what may, this is happiness. I cannot wish for anything better. Now, for a few minutes, I can experience perfection." Even if for only a moment, the tissue broke, and these people knew what is was like to feel again.

Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman, 1957)

The more Bergman films I watch the more I find myself arriving at one conclusion: Ingmar Bergman makes psychoanalysis in film redundant. Anyone who even thinks of examining part or all of the human condition is at least indirectly ripping him off if not outright stealing (see: Woody Allen, though this isn't meant as a slight). Anyone who doesn't almost certainly made a terrible film. His films do not so much examine the existential quandaries of existence so much as dive head-first into the mind itself, and the results are often bleak. However, his 1957 masterpiece Wild Strawberries offers a rare and (unlike the tacked-on ending of Through a Glass Darkly) unforced nugget of hope.

Bergman uses the film to follow Professor Isak Borg (Victor Sjostrom, in a masterful performance) as he travels from Stockholm to Lund in order to receive an honorary degree from Lund University after 50 years of practicing medicine. At first he plans to take a plane, but at the start of the film suffers from a nightmarish vision of a driver-less wagon bearing his own coffin, and this prompts him to take a car instead. If this were made today we'd have to listen to the umpteenth joke about plane safety vs. car safety, but I can't say I blame him for being shaken.

Accompanying Isak is his daughter-in-law Marianne (Ingrid Thulin), who drives the car as Isak slips in and out of remembrances, dreams, and nightmares. The two speak about life and Marianne's relationship with Isak's son. Not long after, Marianne admits that she does not care for Isak very much. This moment of frankness hurts the man, and it only furthers his feelings of life wasted and depression.

Bergman presents Borg's dreams in a then-unique manner: he offers no visual clues to distinguish between reality and hallucination. "What if you could make a film about this that you just walk up in a realistic way and open a door," the director wondered, "and then you walk into your childhood, and then you open another door and come back to reality, and then you make a turn around a street corner and arrive in some other period of your existence, and everything goes on, lives." Isak interacts with figures from his childhood, bringing to light old joys and great regret.

The most prominent of these figures from his past is his cousin Sara (Bibi Andersson). The symbol of his youthful passion and vigor, Sara ultimately becomes the turning point in Isak's life when she informs him that she's marrying Isak's brother. We see the old man relive this conversation with his vision, and the pain etched on Sjostrom's face is almost unbearable. Sara ends up in the car later with two friends, and she brings with her all the freshness and exuberance of youth back into Isak's life.

Bergman never lets his metaphors and philosophical musings get too dense to be examined, but he certainly never condescends to us. After Sara and her friends join the ride, Marianne picks up a married couple after they two parties are involved in a near-fatal accident. But their vicious bickering eventually becomes too much, and Marianne dumps them out on the roadside. Near the end of the film, Isak suffers his most disturbing nightmare: he finds himself in a medical cross-examination lead by the husband. Suddenly unable to remember anything about medicine -- he even diagnoses the husband's conscious wife as deceased -- Isak is found incompetent and the husband harangues him for being passionless and crippled by regret. Where Sara and co. brought back a touch of Isak's youth, this couple only reminded him of the failures and misery of his life and marriage after Sara married another man.

Some of you might be wondering when that "hope" I mentioned shines through here. Isak and Marianne finally arrive in Lund, and Isak has a sort of epiphany. He sighs "I am dead. Although, I am alive," a reconciliation of his bright youth with the regrets of his adulthood and the fears of his twilight. It's not exactly a Hollywood ending, but it gives Isak a sense of inner peace without invalidating the dark personal quest that brought him here. It offers a sense of hope for the man, which is lighter than we normally get from the director. Bergman even throws in a joke or two this time: when Isak finally makes it to Lund after all of his visions and nightmares, a woman says to him warmly, "A nice drive is relaxing, isn't it?"