Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #162807 in DVD
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: PAL
• Original language: English, French, German, Swedish
• Subtitled in: English
• Running time: 96 minutes

Amazon.com
Between 1961 and 1963, Ingmar Bergman released a remarkable trilogy of so-called chamber dramas, each one concerned with the futility of sustaining faith in God, family, love, or much else. The series proved transitional for the internationally renowned Swedish filmmaker, securing his crucial collaboration with cinematographer Sven Nykvist (with whom Bergman would go on to make his many masterpieces--including Persona and Cries and Whispers--of the '60s, '70s, and early '80s), and underscoring a new preference for intimate, relationship-driven stories, austere settings, and haunting tones of emotional isolation and despair.

Following Through a Glass Darkly and Winter Light, The Silence is the most abstract entry in the trilogy, a somewhat eerie story of two sisters, Esther (Ingrid Thulin) and Anna (Gunnel Lindblom), and the latter's son (Jörgen Lindström), all traveling by train to Sweden but forced to stay in a foreign country when Esther's chronic bronchial problems require her to rest. A stifling atmosphere, a desolate hotel, encounters with a troupe of carnival dwarves, Anna's anchoring illness, and an empty sexual encounter for Esther underscore the unnerving feeling that God has abandoned these characters to dubious salvation in their own connection. A highly memorable film. --Tom Keogh

Customer Reviews

Darkness made visible
With its scenes of illicit sex and masturbation, descriptions of couplings in churches and the strongly implied lesbianism of one of the protagonists, _The Silence_ caused something of a scandal in Sweden upon its release (Bergman reportedly received a wad of used toilet paper in the mail from an outraged viewer). Those hoping to be titillated, however, should look elsewhere, for this is an unremittingly bleak film about the perversion of love in a god-forsaken world and every sexual contact in the film is joyless and empty. The plot concerns two sisters returning from vacation who must stop in a menacing hotel in an unidentified country on the brink of war when one sister, who we quickly realize is mortally ill, becomes too sick to travel. As in _Persona_, which this film somewhat prefigures, the two female leads represent in some sense fragments of the same divided self--Anna, played by the voluptuous Gunnel Lindblom, is all heedless concupiscence, while Ester, portrayed by Ingrid Thulin in a fearless performance (perhaps her greatest on screen), is the coldly remote intellectual, puritanical and moralistic. The fragmentation, it becomes clear, is complete and irreparable--the film suggests that no self can be whole in a godless, monstrous world. Yet love is not totally extinct, as we learn in the scene (perhaps _The Silence's_ emotional core) in which the desperately ill Ester, a professional translator, passes on to Anna's young son Johan the few words of the country's strange language she has managed to learn (her ignorance of the language underscores the failure to communicate that is one of the film's themes). But the quietly devastating conclusion leaves the viewer wondering whether their message can have any lasting effect. No film I have seen of Bergman's is more nightmarishly dark and despairing than _The Silence_.

More Nordic Blues...
Along with Cries and Whispers and The Seventh Seal , Ingmar Bergman's The Silence is his best work, a film mesmerising in its still potent power to disturb. The film charts the deterioration of the relationship between two sisters who book into a vast hotel in a nameless foreign region. Tensions mount and hostilities soon arise as both sisters can only find futility in their search for a warm, compassionate and tender relationship. Anna ( Gunnel Lindblom ) has a compulsive sexuality, which prompts her to have sex with strangers, while Ester ( Ingrid Thulin ), a cold repressed and alcoholic intellectual agonises over her lesbian feelings for her sister...

The Silence is a strange film fuelled by strange passions and emotions. It's rather minimalist in style, for Bergman rarely ventures outside the empty hotel, which is peopled only with a ghostly elderly porter and a troupe of circus dwarfs. With Sven Nykvist's camera exploring the space of the vast hotel corridors, it may for some recall Last Year at Marienbad but I think the film has more significant parallels with David Lynch's enigmatically bleak Eraserhead , both films sharing similar themes and a dark ambience. Symbolically, the film is not a difficult as other Bergman dramas. The sense of decay is omnipresent throughout the film - the sisters' relationship, Ester who is suffering with a terminal cancer, and the region itself with its streets patrolled by tanks, suggesting the whole damn thing is about to slip into war. And Bergman's superb use of the hotel, which the characters seemingly can't escape from, takes on almost Kafkaesque proportions. Made in 1963 The Silence still remains strong, with scenes of sex, nudity, ...and alcoholism. The film ended an extraordinary trilogy that began with Through a Glass Darkly and Winter Light ; a series Bergman made which addressed his evaporating religious faith.

Incidentally, look out for the funny scene in Woody Allen's Manhattan where Allen is horrified by Diane Keaton's merciless criticism of the film...

enigmatic
I'm an Ingmar Bergman neophyte and have seen about ten of his films to date, and I think this one haunted me the most. It couldn't leave my mind for a few days. It's crammed with hopelessness and emptiness, and to put it bluntly, is quite depressing. I was able to put up with Persona, Cries and Whispers, The Seventh Seal, and a few others with a fierce motivation to assess and analyze, but this one left me quite deflated. I think it was because of the way the little boy was used; he is left to roam the hotel occupied by weird hotelkeepers and dwarves that like to dress him up in girl clothes while his mother is out all day on sexual rampages with complete strangers, while his dying aunt spends her last days in a room upstairs. The pain displayed is so raw and unflinching that one is inclined to feel uncomfortable and wondering. I think the capper was the ending of this film on the train: mother and son leave the country and leaves the aunt alone to die, and the son, who has openly worshipped his mother all along, looks up at her with such open contempt that she visibly reacts, putting her hand to her throat. And then he looks down at this picture that aunt has given him. It ends on such an enigmatic note that one has no choice but to feel depressed for some time.