The Silence (1963) - film review

Whilst travelling by train in a foreign country, a young woman named Ester suddenly falls ill.  With her companions – sister Anna and young nephew Johan – she stops at a hotel.  Whilst Esther is bed-ridden, Anna goes out to explore the town and indulge her carnal appetites, leaving Johan to roam about the hotel.  When she learns what her sister has been up to, Esther is devastated.  Since childhood, Anna has been her entire life...

The Silence is easily one of Ingmar Bergman’s darkest, most disturbing and most ambiguous films.  It was also one of his biggest commercial successes – on account of its explicit sex scenes which, at the time, were rather daring, although by today’s standards they are pretty tame.  The film is usually considered as the third part in a trilogy of films which includes Through a Glass Darkly and Winter Light.  The connection between the three films is tenuous, although they are stylistically very similar.  The first film shows a world in which God is revealed, the second a world in which God is hidden.  The third film, The Silence, shows us a world without God – a world in which human beings appear to have lost their soul and are driven by selfish desires that ultimately lead them to Hell or extinction.

Bergman himself was not happy with the trilogy notion.  It probably makes more sense to consider The Silence alongside his later film Persona .  The two films are strikingly similar, both dealing with a complex intimate relationship between two physically similar female characters.  In Persona , these two women ultimately appear to merge into a single identity, whereas in The Silence, the women seem to be in a process of divergence, in the end becoming totally separated.  In the two films, the two women are two contrasting aspects of the same individual – the spiritual and the earthy, the soul and the flesh.  The dichotomy is emphasised by Sven Nykvist’s high contrast photography – light and shade as clearly delineated as the characters in the film, representing the two essential components of our universe, the good and the bad.

The problem of communication lies at the heart of many of Bergman’s films, but in The Silence it is fundamental.  Not only do the two principal characters find it increasingly difficult to talk to one another (their erstwhile incestuous affair having turned to mutual loathing), but they seem completely cut off from the world around them.  They are in a strange country whose language they do not recognise, with whose people they cannot communicate.  They are alone, in the truest sense of the world – beings without purpose in a Godless cosmos.

The only character who can bridge the gap between the two women, and also between them and the outside world, is the small boy Johan.  He has a knack of empathising with everyone he encounters.  Johan is wise beyond his years, being aware of the angst that not being able to communicate causes, as he shows in the poignant Punch and Judy scene.  Without communication, there is no understanding.  Without understanding, there is fear.  And fear leads to war – a point that is driven home in the sequence where Johan witnesses a seemingly endless line of tanks from a train window at the start of the film.  Interestingly, the actor who plays Johan, Jörgen Lindström, would appear in the opening sequence to Persona – an indication, perhaps, that Bergman intended us to make a connection between these two films.

The symmetry between The Silence and Persona is far from perfect – it is broken most visibly by the absence of an intermediary (or translator)  in the latter film.   The Johan of The Silence becomes the memory of a dead child in Persona.  Just as Winter Light is the antithesis of Through a Glass Darkly, Persona and The Silence also form a pair, showing us two distinct sides of human experience – love beginning, love ending; an identity repaired, an identity fractured;  unity and separation.

© James Travers 2007

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