gizmomogwai
Ingmar Bergman made a trilogy, according to critics, later Bergman himself, and still later the Criterion Collection. The Silence (1963) is supposedly the last chapter of this trilogy which also includes Through a Glass Darkly (1961) and Winter Light (1963). They're all good films, but I question The Silence being linked with the others. It's possible to read The Silence as not having any particular relation to God, and there seems to be no direct reference to the Spider-God mentioned in the other two films and depicted on the Criterion DVD cover.Trilogy or no trilogy, The Silence is another solid film from Bergman. At first I found it kind of dull, as the two sisters Anna and Ester live with Anna's son Johan, with Ester being seriously ill. Not much seems to be happening to start with, there isn't much talking, and it seems a little strange when Johan goes into a room with several little people. At times it caught my attention with some open sexuality- the nudity (not quite as spectacular in black and white), the female masturbation, the sex in public. At any rate, the film eventually began to work for me, particularly with its conflict between the two sisters and the hints of lesbian incest. Anna is a sexual being, and her relationship with a strange man seems to be tearing Ester apart. With time, this film builds up undeniable atmosphere that ultimately wins me over. More people should see this film.
Claudio Carvalho
While traveling back home by train, Anna (Gunnel Lindblom), her son Johan (Jörgen Lindström) and her sister Ester (Ingrid Thulin) that is very ill have to stop in a foreign country in Timoka City and checking- in a hotel until Ester recovers from a crisis of her illness. Ester is a translator but she does not speak the language, therefore they need to communicate by gestures with the locals. Ester is cult and controller and Anna is still attractive and very promiscuous. They are emotionally separated and without any sibling's feelings; therefore each sister just speaks to hurt the other while Johan wanders in the empty corridors of the hotel. "Tystnaden" is a film about lack of connection and communication that in certain moments seems to be a silent movie. There are very few, but sharp and ambiguous, dialogs between the two sisters and it is not clear whether they had an incestuous relationship in the past and the weird way that Anna treats her son, sleeping naked in the bed with him or asking him to soap her back (at least, for non-Swedish viewer). The performances are awesome as usual in a Bergman's film, with wonderful black-and-white cinematography, use of shadows and camera work. My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): "O Silêncio" ("The Silence")
Cosmoeticadotcom
The last film of Ingmar Bergman's Spider Trilogy, The Silence (Tystnaden), is not as good as the film which directly preceded it, Winter Light, but is closer to it, in quality, than the trilogy's comparatively weak first film, Through A Glass Darkly. This is because the weak link in Bergman's filmic repertoire is his ability to handle sexuality. Through A Glass Darkly has the most of it, Winter Light is nearly void of it, and The Silence has a bit of it, although not nearly as much as the lurid American trailer for the film would suggest. That trailer, available on the DVD, would have one believe that the two thirtysomething sisters in the film, Ester (Ingrid Thulin) and Anna (Gunnel Lindblom) were engaging in explicit lesbian sex, of the variety one might see in a 1990s porno film.This is not so, and this film, in essence, is substantially different- both in tone and in substance- from the two other films, which lends credence to Bergman's claims that these films never formed a formal trilogy because not only is the spider God imagery almost absent from this film, but almost all references to religion are gone, as well. It seems that there has been a fatuous critical shoehorning of this film to make it part of a de facto trilogy, but one simply cannot support that claim if all three films are viewed in a row. In reality, this film can be seen as the first half of a duplex of films that ends with Persona, and the Spider Trilogy is really a Spider Duplex, too. It's not really about 'the absence of God', as some critics claim, but rather an almost The Twilight Zone-like film dealing with the absurdities and cruelties of life, regardless of a God or not.Ingrid Thulin, as Ester, is very good as the repressed sister, and Gunnel Lindblom radiates an almost sleazy sex appeal as the horny Anna- which is perhaps the most oft-used name for a Bergman female character, who wishes her sister dead. Seeing the film now, however, it seems laughable to think that this film was Bergman's most controversial to that point, since the sexuality is so tame, even the scene of ester masturbating is really nothing to get excited over (pun intended), even though we see- in an upside down shot of Thulin's magnificently structured facial cheekbones, that Ester is enjoying herself. This eroticism, and the censorship battles over the film upon its release in country after country, made it Bergman's biggest grossing film in his career.The cinematography in this film is more daring than in the two other film's of the trilogy- both in camera movements, the usage of light and shade- especially in the scene where Anna is forced to watch a man and a woman have sex at the dwarfs' cabaret, and in his use of subjective shots from the points of view of the lead characters, mostly Johan. The musical interludes consist mostly of Bach's music, especially The Goldberg Variations, and are deployed well. Musical taste seems to be the only thing the two sisters can agree on, re-emphasizing the old adage of it being the universal language.The Silence is the longest of the three Spider Trilogy films, at 95 minutes, but it seems the shortest, for it is the most quickly paced, with the shortest scenes, and is largely shorn of the long monologues its two predecessors have. It does, however, have the most symbolism of the three films, which again undercuts the mistaken critical consensus that Bergman had abandoned such techniques when he started this sequence of films. And the schismatic sisters in this film prefigure the more melodramatic personality sharing of the actress and nurse in Persona, only in a more dramatically believable and realistic way. Anna is free, sexually wild, and her body's none too subtle motions bespeak this while Ester's hair is pulled back, and she looks a typically Bergmanian severe and sexually repressed, as almost all of Thulin's Bergman characters are. This character goes to the extreme of even declaring she hates the fish-like smell of semen, although to compensate for the character's misanthropy, she looks far more sexually appealing in this film than in Winter Light.Yet, through it all, I could not get the idea that this film was in some way influenced by Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone television series, which was in its heyday when this film was made. It has all the psychological and sociological hallmarks- weirdness in the nonsense language of the foreigners (reminiscent of such Twilight Zone episodes as the one where beautiful people are considered ugly), a child's point of view, tension, deeper issues masquing under the obvious- save for the sexuality and paranormal, that Serling specialized in, and seems far more akin to it than the two other films in the Spider Trilogy. Regardless, it is an excellent film that touches on some quintessential Bergmanian obsessions, and, for doing so, it grabs hard at the human.
