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.

Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)

I have seen movies about filmmaking and I have seen movies about movies themselves, but Ingmar Bergman's Persona is something altogether different: a movie that reminds you it's a movie. Now, I don't mean fourth-wall breaking winks to the audience or asides, but a systematic reminder through daring and unexpected shots that make sure we are always aware that the film isn't "real." In that respect it follows more in line with the cinema of the French New Wave, but even then it doesn't quite fit; New Wave directors expressed their joy of filmmaking in their work, but Persona uses self-reference and breaking narrative to make the grandest of all meta-statements on both the cinema and human life.

The film opens on a purely black screen. Slowly, blinding white fills the screen as eerie music blares. Random shots of everything from covered corpses to a few frames of an erect penis flash briefly amidst the white light. Short scenes of old silent films pop up on screen. We then cut to stark and unsettling images of faces, that Bergman trademark close-up, before settling briefly on a boy who tries to reach out to a distorted image of a woman. At last, nearly five minutes in, the title cards appear.

Then we shift to a nurse, Sister Alma, who arrives at the hospital to learn that she has been placed in charge of Elisabet Volger, a famous actress who stopped speaking in the middle of a performance one day and never started again. For three months she's stayed in bed, awake by unmoving. The head nurse suggest Alma return the actress to her summer home and to stay with her there for possible recuperation, and the two move in together for a few months.

At first Alma speaks only of herself. She gives up expecting her charge to speak to her, so she fills the void. At first she prattles about minor things, but slowly she comes to see Elisabet almost as a wall, or a diary. She does not respond; therefore she she cannot pass judgment. One night, Elisabet sits so still she seems almost a painting as Alma recounts her infidelity and how, as a teenager, she and a friend engaged in an orgy with two boys they'd never met. She describes the sexual bliss of it all, only to remember with grief that she had to later get an abortion because of it. Elisabet takes this all in and comforts the now-sobbing girl.

Then something strange happens; Alma stumbles upon a letter from Elisabet to her husband, and reads it only to discover that the actress told him of all the "sins" she confessed. Suddenly, Bergman pulls more chicanery, making it look like frames got stuck in the projector a caught fire, then sending us back to the silent clowns. The film kicks back in, but something has drastically changed...

Elisabet's husband arrives, but he speaks to Alma, not his wife. Yet he speaks to her as Elisabet; at first she points out the error, then she finds herself replying as Elisabet. It leads to an existential crisis, as Alma seems to lose herself before she finally can take no more and begins to slap Elisabet repeatedly. Then Bergman throws up one of the most shocking images I've ever seen: he superimposes the faces of the two actresses over each other where half of their faces make up one whole, and we finally learn the truth: Alma is Elisabet. I hope Chuck Palahniuk sent in a royalty check when he wrote Fight Club.

A persona is defined as "a social role or character played by an actor," and Alma is a role played by the actress, only within her mind. This revelation sheds Bergman's visual tricks in a whole new light: he's using meta-cinema to move the movie outside of the confines of film. It's the old Shakespearean nugget "all the world's a stage" pushed to its most perverse and cynical extent: in the end, everyone plays a role, and we wear masks not over our true selves, but over nothingness. Man can never know himself, and it's futile to try.

That futility may have led Elisabet to her crisis; we don't know what caused her silence for sure, but later we see her watching news reports of the war in Vietnam and monks immolating themselves, and she cannot even voice her horror. At another point she gazes at photos of Jewish families led out of their homes by German guards, and the feeling returns. She turned to silence in an attempt to cut herself off from the world and to gaze within herself, and when she found nothing she created Alma.

Her story also works on the metaphorical level: Bergman funneled his fears and incomprehension of nuclear war and the Holocaust into the spiritual despair of Through a Glass Darkly, and here the artist expresses his feelings of impotence and inadequacy when it comes to dealing with such subjects. Bergman never was a political filmmaker, so he looks for the answers in the faces of his actors. He, along with cinematographer Sven Nykvist, really took the idea of the close-up far beyond anything ever seen before, and he pours over their starkly contrasted faces for answers he knows he cannot get. Rarely does he move away from their faces, capturing only the rocky landscape that symbolizes the desolation of the human condition. Even his beautiful tracking shot across the beach pauses for some close-ups.

I cannot possibly claim to understand everything Persona has to offer on the basis of a single viewing. Hell, I don't think I could ever know everything there is to get about it. I don't even think Bergman could possibly have conceived of all the psychological quandaries presented in the film's 83 minutes. What I can say is this is without a doubt one of the ten most perfectly crafted films I've ever seen. If Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris took man to the end of the universe to confront himself, Bergman was waiting to tell him not to bother.

Bergman later said of this film and Cries and Whispers, "I had gone as far as I could go. And that in these two instances when working in total freedom, I touched wordless secrets that only the cinema can discover." I submit that he not only went as far as he could go, but he took cinema to its brink with him. After making an expressionist masterpiece on the subject of God's absence (The Seventh Seal) and an entire trilogy on the matter, he finally realized that Man is his own God, as the final shots of the film are of Bergman himself zooming in on his actress. Plenty of people have used cinema to teach us lessons on real life, but Bergman used the crushing cynicism of reality to break cinema in two.