Film Review
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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Next Ingmar Bergman film:
All These Women (1964)