Product Description

Screen Formats:B&W Sound:Dolby Digital Mono Aspect Ratio:1.33:1 Features: New high-definition digital transfer of the original, uncensored Swedish version, with restored image and sound Exploring the Film: video discussion with Ingmar Bergman biographer Peter Cowie Poster gallery for the trilogy films Essay by film scholar Leo Braudy Original U.S. theatrical trailer Optional English-dubbed soundtrack New and improved English subtitle translation Optional image quality: RSDL dual-layer edition. ----------- Synopsis: The third entry in Ingmar Bergman's trilogy about faith and redemption (with Through A Glass Darkly and Winter Light) is a stark and enigmatic allegory fueled by subtle performances from Ingrid Thulin and Gunnel Lindblom. Thulin plays Ester, a translator and intellectual, who is traveling back to Sweden on a train with her younger sister Anna (Linblom) and Anna's son Johan (Jorgen Lindstrom). They stop in the town of Timuku and check into an old hotel in a foreign land where the language cannot be understood by the three travelers. Ester, who suffers from a terminal lung disease, is very protective towards Anna; but Anna resents being tied down by her sickly sister, and she leaves the hotel room, picking up a waiter (Birger Malmsten in a nearby café. Returning to the hotel room, Anna tells Ester about her sexual encounter with the waiter, and Ester becomes sexually aroused. Anna leaves for another room in the hotel to continue making love with the waiter. Johan helps Ester track Anna down Anna, and Anna and the waiter proceed to make love a third time. This provokes a violent and biter argument between the two sisters. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #91300 in DVD
• Brand: Criterion Collection
• Published on: 2003
• Rating: Unrated
• Formats: Criterion Collection, Black & White, Subtitled, Dubbed
• Subtitled in: English
• Running time: 95 minutes

Customer Reviews

INGMAR BERGMAN, OPUS 25
***** 1963. Written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. Three Swedish Academy awards (Best Film, Best Director and Best Actress). Two sisters argue in an hotel room while Johan, a 10 years old kid, is discovering the corridors and the strange guests of the hotel. The train compartment, the hotel room and the town, three claustrophobic places that Ester and Anna can't leave while Johan seems to be the only one able to open doors and communicate. THE SILENCE is a huge film which, like some books, can be enjoyed again and again. In my opinion, one of the most beautiful films ever made and one of my most intense experiences in a theatre, ever. Masterpiece.

Baptism in Silence
Originally titled God's Silence. This is a film of loneliness and despair. It is a film where there is great pain in existence. Three primary characters: Anna, Ester and Johan (Ester's son). The film opens on a train. This snapshot is telling - Anna coughing up blood and emotional, Ester comforting her son yet shooing him away minutes later, Johan the acute observer noting happenings in each cabin, noting the tanks careening by. They get stuck in a village where a language is spoken that they do not understand. They get stuck in a very old hotel where it appears that other than a troop of little people, they are the only one's in the place. Three auxillary players come into play - the maintenance man, the bartender and the hotel waiter. Most of the film is silent - except for some ambient music in the bar; and a very critical scene where Bach's Brandenburg Concerto is featured on the radio. While this is a piece representing Bach's highest achievement - the people we are exposed to in The Silence are all at their lowest. Seeking comfort in base desires. For Ester it is within that she seeks comfort from loneliness, sickness and despair. She turns to cigarettes, liquor, her intellect and her work translating great literature, and she brings pleasure to herself sexually. Anna, on the other hand, seeks to ease the pain of loneliness through others. Through the attentions and affections of her son; and when that doesn't work through the company of a stranger - in this case a bartender. Her efforts fail to ease her pain as well. Ultimately there is no relief. It is worth noting here Francis Schaeffer's comments on this film in "The God Who Is There." He points out that: this film is a statement of utter nihilism. Man, in this picture, does not even have the hope of authenticating himself by an act of the will. The Silence is a series of snapshots with immoral and pornographic themes. The camera just takes them without comment...That is all there is. Life is like that: unrelated, having no meaning as well as no morals." Is there any hope in this film. I'd like to say that the waiter has some redeeming qualities to him. But he too is but a charicature of who he once was. The film ends back on the train with just Ester and Johan as they travel there is a storm raging outside. Ester opens the window to feel the rain on her face. Maybe the rain is God. Cleansing. Baptising. What she needs. The answer to her despair.

The long loneliness
I can think of no better portrait of alienation and loneliness than Bergman's "The Silence," which I think is one of his three best films. Everything about the film suggests silence, emptiness, aloneness: the huge, baroque, but strangely empty hotel; the silent lonely crowd that fills the streets; the ominous preparations for war; the inability of Anna and Ester to speak the language of the country in which they're stranded; the loveless, desperate coupling of Anna and the waiter she picks up; the frigid, despairing masturbation of Ester; the hotel porter's nostalgic but sad fondness for photographs of his past.

The essential thing is that the sisters Anna and Ester, for all their estrangement from one another, really are kindred. Bergman seems to be suggesting that they represent two irreducible aspects of personality, sensuality and intellect, and that individuals suffer from an inner sense of fragmentation if the two are unreconciled. (In this regard, the message of "The Silence" is not unlike Hermann Hesse's in Narcissus and Goldmund.) So the exterior loneliness in his film is mirrored by the interior loneliness personified by the sisters' feud.

At the end of the film, the silence is broken by Ester's final note to her nephew, Johan, a "translation of words in a foreign language." Words are what create communities. They bind humans together. As such, the end of the film offers a possibility that the long loneliness can be ameliorated by a human invention. In the last analysis, that's all there.

The acting in "The Silence" is superb, from beginning to end. Ingrid Thulin's Ester is frozen, emotionally blocked, but yearning for connection. Gunnel Lindblom's Anna is a sullen carnality that occasionally breaks out in despairing loneliness. Jorgen Lindstrom's Johan is inquisitive, innocently absorbing the world around him. And Hakan Jahnberg's porter, while silent for most of the film, masterfully and poignantly expresses all he needs to in his gestures and face.