The Criterion Collection advertises itself as “a series of important contemporary and classic films.” That is an understatement. Criterion gathers the best film scholars, historians, critics, producers, and the very writers and directors of the films themselves and they collaborate to produce the best possible version of the film. Criterion is a move-able museum, of sorts, containing films from all over the world on DVD and Blu-Ray preserved in gorgeous packaging and containing essays written by film scholars in little booklets. The folks at Criterion have gathered a community of like-minded individuals who believe that film is art and should be treated as such. All quotes come from the Criterion Edition of the film itself, unless otherwise noted.

The following is part two of my series on the Criterion Collection. The film is Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence (1963), the final film of his Trilogy about humankind’s relationship to the Divine, the first two films being Through a Glass Darkly and Winter Light. Criterion says of the trilogy, “Each film employs minimal dialogue, eerily isolated settings, and searing performances from such Bergman regulars as Max von Sydow, Harriet Andersson, Gunnar Bjornstrand, Ingrid Thulin, and Gunnel Lindblom in their evocation of a desperate world confronted with God’s desertion. Drawing on Bergman’s own severely religious upbringing and ensuing spiritual crisis, the films in the Trilogy are deeply personal, challenging, and enriching works that exhibit the filmmaker’s peerless formal mastery and fierce intelligence.”

The Silence, like many of Bergman’s films, is a study in faces. And what beautiful faces he employs! Bergman had a knack for working with some of the most stunning and little known European actresses of his time. As Peter Cowie tells us in the Criterion Supplements, Bergman believed, much like Antonioni, that by the 1960’s men had reached the limit of what they were capable of. Bergman and Antonioni both employed the use of women in pivotal, prominent roles throughout their work. The hauntingly beautiful faces of Bergman veteran Ingrid Thulin and new-comer Gunnel Lindblom fill the screen with a sense of eerie anxiety blended and subtle eroticism. Sven Nykvist, Bergman’s cinematographer, does in this film with the faces of Thulin and Lindblom what Dreyer did in The Passion of Joan of Arc with Maria Falconetti. Granted, Dreyer was an inspiration for both Bergman and Nykvist.

The Silence is my favorite of Bergman’s films because it demonstrates, profoundly, that less is more and Bergman’s grasp of the feminine presence is both nurturing and terrifying in its presentation. Thulin plays the role of Ester and Lindblom is Anna, Ester’s younger sister. Ester is a beautiful, tightly wound, and closely guarded translator, wearing her hair in a tight little bun, who is traveling with Anna and Anna’s young, impressionable son Johan to a distant country. We are lead to believe that Ester is traveling for work, but neither the name of the country nor the language that its natives speak is revealed to us. It is fitting that we, the audience, are just as foreign to this country as Ester, Anna, and Johan. Bergman has made space for us to join the sisters and Johan in their spiritual isolation, both emotionally and physically. Anna is the opposite of her tightly wound sister Ester. She is curvy, wears her hair down, and is sexually active. Ester, Anna, and Johan are staying in an old hotel, where the majority of the film’s action takes place.

Each character has their own individual narrative of isolation. The first piece of isolation is, by far, the most troubling. Bergman introduces the haunting and desperate isolation of incest into the narrative. Ester and Anna have, clearly, been lovers. If I had a guess, I would say their sexual relationship began after their parents died. Ester and Anna clung to each for dear life for many years. In the wake of their love-making, Anna has become frustrated and resentful of Ester’s assumed power over her. Ester, unfortunately, got the shit end of the stick. Ester fell in love with her younger, more voluptuous sister, and longs for her touch. The tragedy of it all is that Ester has a rather advanced lung disease that has kept her bed-ridden and at her typewriter since they moved in to the hotel.

While Anna wanders the streets of the foreign country, looking for sexual stimulation and excitement, Ester is trapped in her “ivory tower” of type-written words. Bergman and Nykvist capture her deep longing for Anna’s touch in the most painful ways. The look of silent agony that creeps over Ester’s face is almost unbearable to behold. She looks as if she could break down weeping at any point. The tragedy is, she doesn’t. Perhaps she can’t. She drinks and smokes excessively, types her translations, and stares out the window, all the while trying to be more of a mother to Johan than her sister. The best scene in the film happens as Ester is suffering through some of her final moments before death. We can’t tell if her suffering is greater because of her bleeding lungs or because Anna has rejected her. The gentle, nameless hotel waiter, played by Hakan Jahnberg, attentively sits by Ester’s bedside even though he cannot understand a word she says. As the waiter looks on, Ester writhes on the bed and then suddenly bolts upright in bed. She stares into the distance and, in a chilling monologue, explains why she despises having sex with men. “Erections and secretions” disgust her. Ester is a lesbian, in love with her sister, and she is dying, loveless in a foreign country. The reality of her hopelessness became tangible as I watched this scene for the first time. Ester’s isolation is a tragedy, make no mistake.

Anna’s isolation is another matter. While Ester’s lungs rot in the hotel, Anna wanders the streets of this unknown country in a new dress, looking for sexual satisfaction. Anna sits in a local cafe, smoking her cigarettes and staring at the waiter with lust in her eyes. They never speak, but the young waiter boldly touches her inner thigh as a sign that he is interested. Instead of running off with him to fuck, Anna stays in town and goes to the nearby movie theater. She is not there to catch a flick. She is there to, hopefully, find couples in moments of public intimacy. We experience a voyeurism that puts Hitchcock’s Rear Window to shame as Anna watches a couple aggressively strip down and fuck in the back of the theater. There is a reason this film, in 1963, was advertised as “Bergman at his most POWERFUL! SHOCKING! BOLD!” The sex is graphic and what makes it unsettling, is that Anna is watching, sadly, in the dark corners of the theater. Anna’s isolation is just as palpable as Ester’s. Ester embraces and acknowledges the pain of her isolation. Anna does not appear to. Eventually, Anna will lead the young waiter from the cafe back to the hotel and they will fuck until Ester finds out and weeps outside their door, heartbroken and devastated.

Johan’s isolation is the stuff Kubrick’s The Shining is based on. Nykvist’s camera follows Johan around the strangely vacant halls of the old hotel as he curiously wanders, looking for some kind of companionship, which he finds, temporarily, in the company of a traveling theatre company of vaudevillian dwarves. Before The Silence, Bergman preferred the still shots of faces. With Johan, however, Bergman and Nykvist construct beautiful tracking shots that capture the sense of loss and quarantine that Johan must feel. Johan is, in a certain sense, a younger incarnation of Bergman’s spiritual misery. Bergman was raised the son of a pious Swedish Lutheran pastor and suffered from tremendous doubt and a sense that God had deserted him from a very young age. This sense of desertion, doubt, and spiritual isolation manifests itself in different ways in each film of Bergman’s Trilogy. In the first film, Through a Glass Darkly, the question is, where is God when mental illness strikes and reality is so horrifically distorted that all of life is suffering? In the second film, Winter Light, the question is, what happens when a devout and dedicated clergyperson loses their faith and has nothing to offer their dwindling congregation? In The Silence, Bergman portrays the perfect sense of spiritual isolation. It is the perfect film to wrap up the Trilogy because God isn’t mentioned once. There is no sense of belief in the film. The film was originally titled God’s Silence. There, literally, is no God in the world Bergman creates in his final film of the Trilogy. The little boy, Johan, is the perfect embodiment of this wandering spirit in a Godless world. The question is, where do I find love if there is no God?

Peter Cowie calls Ester and Anna two sides of the same person. Anna is the seductive, physical type and Ester is the “intellectual, ailing” type. It is Johan’s experience that provides the foundation of the film. How isolating would it be, as a small child, to watch your mother and your aunt fall out of love with one another in a foreign country? If there is an embodiment of God in this film, it would be the hotel waiter. We get the sense that Bergman wishes there was more love and genuine, tender compassion from someone like the waiter in his own life. The waiter, without speaking, silently sits by Ester’s bedside and cares for her as Anna wanders the streets and Johan wanders the hotel halls. The waiter is also present for Johan after he is rejected by the theatrical dwarves. He sits in his room and waits for Johan to sneak up on him with a toy pistol, pretending to be surprised.

Ingmar Bergman called The Silence “a rendering of hell on earth — my hell.” There are moments where the film feels like dream-like and I wonder if this was an interpretation of Bergman’s own dreams. von Trier’s Antichrist is the most graphic and viscerally terrifying of “hell” movies I have ever seen, but, Bergman’s is a different kind of hell. It’s more personal this time and that is the worst kind of hell.

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