ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT Enigmatic And Lonely Silence

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31005, 10 March 1966, Page 12

ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT Enigmatic And Lonely Silence

Practically any film by Ingmar Bergman is subtantial enough to merit re - viewing. Certainly “The Silence,” whether you like the film or not, demands closer study than is permitted by a single viewing; and one’s first impressions of it are likely to be tentative and superficial. Superficially it is a singularly unlikeable film; and one feels that Bergman is at an advanced stage of his acknowledged process of audience medication: “Of course, we have to educate the audience. It is our duty. First you give the audience a pill that tastes good. And then you give them some more pills with vitamins, but with some poison, too. Very slowly you give them stronger and stronger doses.” This dose could hardly be more bitter. The anecdote is of Ester and Anna, two sisters who are travelling home to Sweden, with Anna’s small son Johan. Ester is in the last stages of an unspecified but ugly lung complaint; and the party has to break its journey in an alien town where the people move silently through the streets. It becomes clear, as they settle into their hotel suite, that some former strong incestuous attraction between the sisters has soured into an uncomfortable hatred and jealousy. The nymphomaniac Anna, even excited by the physical presence of her own tiny son, enjoys taunting Ester with jealousy and with the failure of her influence over her.

While Ester lies alone drinking, coughing, choking and masturbating (Bergman is quite precise), and Johan roams the empty corridors of the hotel, meeting only erotic paintings, a troupe of performing midgets and a nice old doddering waiter who seems to be the child’s only contact with normality, Anna wanders the streets.

Titillated by the spectacle of two strangers in the throes of love-making, she picks up a glum barman and takes him back to the hotel. There their love-making is watched first by little Johan; then by the angry, excited jealous Ester.

Ester’s physical state deteriorates rapidly after this and she collapses. Next morning Anna quite

coolly abandons her sister and continues her journey home. RELATIONSHIP Bergman regards this disagreeable tale as the third part of the trilogy that began with “Through a Glass Darkly” and “Winter Light” and its principal similarity with these two films seems to be concerned with the torment of dead relationships and with the ultimate eccentricities of erotic passion. “The Silence” is by no means the first of Bergman’s films which clearly does not set out to entertain or to please: which does not aim to tell a simple story; which does not even describe and illuminate human relationships in any conventional way. Bergman is perhaps the first film-maker consistently to use the cinema as a means to worry out philosophical and metaphysical preoccupations: and with such a film as this it is perfectly legitimate to ask, frankly, what the film is about. Most of Bergman’s earlier works have seemed to be concerned with man’s relationship with God, his efforts to come to some definition of what, or who, God is. Here God or any idea of Him is notably absent: and this is probably the very key to the film. Bergman, as he is inclined to do, has offered a deceptively direct explanation of his picture. “Ester loves her sister. She finds her beautiful and feels a tremendous responsibility for her, but she would be the first to be horrified if it were pointed out that her feeling were incestuous. Her mistake lies in the fact that she wants to control her sister as her father had controlled her by his love. Hers is a despotic love. Love must be open,

otherwise love is the beginning of death. That is what I am trying to say.”

In fact the film seems to be about lonliness rather than love; “The Silence” is the silence of people who are no longer able to communicate; and everything around them seems to reflect and symbolise the end of communication between the two sisters.

The dying Bister is a translator by profession; but she cannot translate the language of the country in which she is stranded (the language is in fact a gibberish of Bergman’s own invention). Anna cannot speak to her lover; nor Ester to the kindly old waiter who alone befriends her and with whom she shares the dominant memory of a loved, dead father. SYMBOLIC WORLD

The film is powerful in its effect: and quite as strange as any description could suggest. The setting is a world

of symbols, some clear, some elusive —the great hotel, quite different from Fellini’s or Resnais’s yet like theirs creating an enclosed, fantastic world: the dwarfs who dress up and dress the child in women’s clothes: the incoherent language; the tank in the street. But at the centre of this fantasy world, caught in a fantastic relationship, are people of complete reality. Ingrid Thulin’s lister is wonderfullj’ observed; a crisp, hard, masculine exterior cracked by a terrible vulnerability. Gunnel Lindblom’s Anna perfectly complements Ester; her animal weakness proves a greater strength than Ester’s intellectual power. The film is in every technical respect immaculate. The dialogue (nine-tenths of its total significance probably elude a first viewing and the sub-titles) is sparse; natural sounds —airplanes overhead.

the tanks, even the sound of hair being brushed —brilliantly supplement it.

THE TWO VIEWS The action is constantly viewed from two parallel points of vision: the camera and the little boy both wander the hotel, sometimes meeting, sometimes separating, the one observing with our eyes, the other with an innocence which seems likely in these conditions soon to be lost.

inevitably as one alternately admires and takes fright (only Bergman could be so graphic over the scene of onanism or the less agreeable symptoms of Elster’s disease) the question arises why Bergman’s giant talent is always deployed to pain us and to pain himself (or are these films purgatives for his own pain?). The news of Bergman’s film after this being a comedy in colour is uncertain consolation.