The Silence (1963 film)
Encyclopedia
The Silence is a 1963 Swedish film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman
Ingmar Bergman
Ernst Ingmar Bergman was a Swedish director, writer and producer for film, stage and television. Described by Woody Allen as "probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera", he is recognized as one of the most accomplished and...

 and starring Ingrid Thulin
Ingrid Thulin
Ingrid Lilian Thulin was a Swedish film actress.-Biography:Thulin was born in Sollefteå, Ångermanland, northern Sweden, the daughter of Nanna and Adam Thulin, a fisherman...

 and Gunnel Lindblom
Gunnel Lindblom
Gunnel Lindblom , is a Swedish film actress and director. As an actor she has been particularly associated with the work of Ingmar Bergman, though in 1965 she performed the lead role in Miss Julie for BBC Television...

. The plot focuses on two sisters – the younger a sensuous woman with a young son, the elder more intellectually orientated and seriously ill — and their tense relationship as they travel toward home through a fictional Central European country on the brink of war.

Plot

Two emotionally estranged sisters, Ester (Ingrid Thulin) and Anna (Gunnel Lindblom), and Anna's son, Johan (Jörgen Lindström), a boy of 10, are on a night train journey back home. Ester (Ingrid Thulin), the older sister and a literary translator, is seriously ill. Anna coldly assists her, seemingly resenting the burden. They decide to interrupt the journey in the next town called "Timoka", settled in a fictious Central European country with an incomprehensible language and on the brink of war.

The sisters rent a two-room-apartment in a once-grandiose hotel. Ester suffers in her room, self-medicating with vodka and cigarettes while trying to work. Anna ventures into the city and is openly advanced by a waiter in a cafe. Later, she watches a show in an uncrowded theatre, and is both repelled and fascinated when a young couple begin to have sex in a seat nearby. Anna returns to the cafe and picks up the waiter, with whom she has sex in an empty church.

Left with Johan while his mother is out, Ester attempts to form a more intimate bond with him, but Johan avoids her attempts to stroke his hair and face. On Anna's return, Ester is angered when she guesses what her sister has done after seeing her soiled dress. Provoked, Anna spitefully reveals all of the details of the encounter to her sister. Anna also reveals her intention to meet the man again that evening, which Ester, not wanting to be left alone, begs her not to do. Meanwhile, Anna's son Johan wanders around the hotel's hallways, encountering the elderly hotel porter and a group of Spanish midgets who are part of a traveling show.

Anna meets the man in their hotel, and Johan witnesses them kissing and entering a room down an adjacent hall. Upon returning to the room, he asks Ester, why his mother dislikes being with them, as she always departs as soon as she gets the chance. Ester tells him that she has learned a few words of the local language, and she promises to write them down for him. Johan, instinctively knowing Ester is seriously ill, embraces her in a show of concern and compassion.

After Johan has fallen asleep, Ester sobs at the door of Anna and her lover, asking to come in. Anna lets her in and turns on the lights so that Ester can fully see the two of them in bed together. Anna tells Ester that she once aspired to be like her, morally elevated, but realized that her apparent goodness was actually a reflection of Ester's hatred of Anna and all that belonged to her. Ester insists that she loves her and that Anna is wrong. Anna gets furious and asks her to leave the room. On leaving, Ester says "poor Anna", enraging her even more. Anna's lover advances her again; Anna is laughing hysterically, but it turns into sobs.

The next morning, Anna announces that she and Johan are going to leave the hotel after breakfast. Ester deteriorates while they are gone, having painful spasms of suffocation. She is helped by the elderly porter, who attempts to comfort her; she reveals her fear of death and loneliness but also her loathing for sexual contact. When Johan returns to say good-bye, Ester gives him a note. After he and Anna have boarded the train, Johan reads the title: "To Johan – words in a foreign language". Uninterested, Anna opens the window and cools herself with the outside rain.

Interpretation

After Bergman's death, Woody Allen
Woody Allen
Woody Allen is an American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, jazz musician, author, and playwright. Allen's films draw heavily on literature, sexuality, philosophy, psychology, Jewish identity, and the history of cinema...

, in the New York Times observed the film opens up when you realize that the two women represent different aspects of people.

In a scene, Johan stares out of the window as a lone tank rolls down the street at night; in Against Interpretation
Against Interpretation
Against Interpretation and Other Essays is a collection of essays by Susan Sontag which was published in 1966. It includes some of Sontag's best-known works, including "On Style", "Notes on 'Camp'", and the titular essay "Against Interpretation"...

, Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag was an American author, literary theorist, feminist and political activist whose works include On Photography and Against Interpretation.-Life:...

 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
Alain Resnais
Alain Resnais is a French film director whose career has extended over more than six decades. After training as a film editor in the mid-1940s, he went on to direct a number of short films which included Nuit et Brouillard , an influential documentary about the Nazi concentration camps.He began...

' Last Year at Marienbad
Last Year at Marienbad
L'Année dernière à Marienbad is a 1961 French film directed by Alain Resnais from a screenplay by Alain Robbe-Grillet....

(1961), Michelangelo Antonioni
Michelangelo Antonioni
Michelangelo Antonioni, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI was an Italian modernist film director, screenwriter, editor and short story writer.- Personal life :...

's L'avventura
L'avventura
L'Avventura is a 1960 Italian film directed by Michelangelo Antonioni and developed from a story he created. Monica Vitti and Gabriele Ferzetti star. It is noted for its careful pacing, which puts a focus on visual composition and character development, as well as for its unusual narrative structure...

(1960), and Luis Buñuel
Luis Buñuel
Luis Buñuel Portolés was a Spanish-born filmmaker — later a naturalized citizen of Mexico — who worked in Spain, Mexico, France and the US..-Early years:...

's Belle de Jour (1967). 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..." The film was selected as the Swedish entry for the Best Foreign Language Film
Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film
The Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film is one of the Academy Awards of Merit, popularly known as the Oscars, handed out annually by the U.S.-based Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences...

 at the 36th Academy Awards
36th Academy Awards
The 36th Academy Awards, honoring the best in film for 1963, were held on April 13, 1964 at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in Santa Monica, California. They were hosted by Jack Lemmon....

, but was not accepted as a nominee.

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."

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, 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
Vilgot Sjöman
David Harald Vilgot Sjöman was a Swedish writer and film director. His films deal with controversial issues of social class, morality, and sexual taboos, combining the emotionally-tortured characters of Ingmar Bergman with the avant garde style of the French New Wave...

's 491
491 (film)
491 is a 1964 Swedish black-and-white drama film directed by Vilgot Sjöman, based on a novel by Lars Görling. The story is about a group of youth criminals who are chosen to participate in a social experiment, where they are assigned to live together in an apartment while being supervised by two...

, I Am Curious (Blue)
I Am Curious (Blue)
I Am Curious is a 1968 Swedish film directed by Vilgot Sjöman and starring Lena Nyman as a character named after herself. It is a companion film to 1967's I Am Curious ; the two were initially intended to be one 3½ hour film...

and I Am Curious (Yellow)
I Am Curious (Yellow)
I Am Curious is a 1967 Swedish drama film written and directed by Vilgot Sjöman and starring Sjöman and Lena Nyman. It is a companion film to 1968's I Am Curious ; the two were initially intended to be one 3½ hour film...

, and Stefan Jarl
Stefan Jarl
Stefan Jarl is a Swedish film director best known for his documentaries. He made the Mods Trilogy, three films which follow a group of alienated people in Stockholm from the 1960s to the 1990s, They Call Us Misfits , A Respectable Life and Det sociala arvet...

's They Call Us Misfits
They Call Us Misfits
They Call Us Misfits is a 1968 Swedish documentary film directed, produced and written by Stefan Jarl and Jan Lindqvist. The film is an uncompromising account of the life of two alienated teenagers, Kenneth "Kenta" Gustafsson and Gustav "Stoffe" Svensson...

). 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
Sven Nykvist
Sven Vilhem Nykvist was a Swedish cinematographer. He worked on over 120 films, but is known especially for his work with director Ingmar Bergman...

'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
The Seventh Seal
The Seventh Seal is a 1957 Swedish film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. Set during the Black Death, it tells of the journey of a medieval knight and a game of chess he plays with the personification of Death , who has come to take his life. Bergman developed the film from his own play...

.

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." Due to its reputation for "pornographic sequences" the film became a financial success.

Vermilye is supported by Daniel Ekeroth, who notes in his 2011 book Swedish Sensationsfilms: A Clandestine History of Sex, Thrillers, and Kicker Cinema
Swedish Sensationsfilms: A Clandestine History of Sex, Thrillers, and Kicker Cinema
Swedish Sensationsfilms: A Clandestine History of Sex, Thrillers, and Kicker Cinema is a book by Daniel Ekeroth. The book details the history of alternative Swedish cinema, the so called sensationsfilm...

that "Tystnaden is the production, and marks the exact moment, when sex and nudity became normal in Swedish film. If an internationally acknowledged director like Ingmar Bergman could portray sex in such an explicit way, the last border had been crossed. Hordes of less serious filmmakers immediately abandoned all remaining inhibition about depicting whatever crazed and depraved ideas they thought would attract and scandalize a paying audience.".

Trilogy of Faith

The Silence is widely considered the final film in a trilogy ("Trilogy of Faith"), preceded by Through a Glass Darkly
Through a Glass Darkly (film)
Through a Glass Darkly is a 1961 Swedish film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman, and produced by Allan Ekelund. The film is a three-act "chamber film", in which four family members act as mirrors for each other. It is the first of many Bergman films to be shot on the island of Fårö...

(1961) and Winter Light
Winter Light
Winter Light is a 1962 Swedish drama film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman and starring Bergman regulars Gunnar Björnstrand, Ingrid Thulin and Max von Sydow. The film follows Tomas Ericsson , pastor of a small rural Swedish church, as he deals with existential crisis and his...

(1963). All three films focus on spiritual issues. Bergman writes, "These three films deal with reduction. Through a Glass Darkly – conquered certainty. Winter Light – penetrated certainty. The Silence – God's silence – the negative imprint. Therefore, they constitute a trilogy." In an interview in 1969 Bergman stated that these three films had originally not been intended as a trilogy, he only regarded them as such in retrospect due to their similarity.

Printed screenplay

Together with the two films preceding it, Through a Glass Darkly
Through a Glass Darkly (film)
Through a Glass Darkly is a 1961 Swedish film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman, and produced by Allan Ekelund. The film is a three-act "chamber film", in which four family members act as mirrors for each other. It is the first of many Bergman films to be shot on the island of Fårö...

(1961) and Winter Light
Winter Light
Winter Light is a 1962 Swedish drama film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman and starring Bergman regulars Gunnar Björnstrand, Ingrid Thulin and Max von Sydow. The film follows Tomas Ericsson , pastor of a small rural Swedish church, as he deals with existential crisis and his...

(1963) 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
The Seventh Seal
The Seventh Seal is a 1957 Swedish film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. Set during the Black Death, it tells of the journey of a medieval knight and a game of chess he plays with the personification of Death , who has come to take his life. Bergman developed the film from his own play...

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.

The Silence uses minimal dialogue, the entire screenplay only comprising a mere 1,710 words.

Cast

  • Ingrid Thulin
    Ingrid Thulin
    Ingrid Lilian Thulin was a Swedish film actress.-Biography:Thulin was born in Sollefteå, Ångermanland, northern Sweden, the daughter of Nanna and Adam Thulin, a fisherman...

     – Ester
  • Gunnel Lindblom
    Gunnel Lindblom
    Gunnel Lindblom , is a Swedish film actress and director. As an actor she has been particularly associated with the work of Ingmar Bergman, though in 1965 she performed the lead role in Miss Julie for BBC Television...

     – Anna
  • Birger Malmsten
    Birger Malmsten
    Birger Malmsten was a Swedish actor. He had many roles in Ingmar Bergman's movies.-Selected filmography:*It Rains on Our Love *A Ship to India *Music in Darkness *Eva...

     – The Bartender
  • Håkan Jahnberg – The Waiter
  • Jörgen Lindström – Johan

Home media

After various releases in VHS
VHS
The Video Home System is a consumer-level analog recording videocassette standard developed by Victor Company of Japan ....

 format, the film was released on DVD
DVD
A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....

 in the UK
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 in 2001, in the US
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 in 2003 (only available as part of a four-disc box set of Bergman's "Faith Trilogy"), in Sweden
Sweden
Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....

 in 2004 and in Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 in 2005. While all versions contain the film in original Swedish language (with subtitles in the language of the releasing country), the US and German versions also contain a dubbed audio track in English and German, respectively.

See also


External links

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