221 - The Silence, 1963, Sweden. Dir. Ingmar Bergman.

Wednesday, August 9, 2017

221 - The Silence, 1963, Sweden.  Dir. Ingmar Bergman.

A large old hotel in a strange place.

The camera moving down the hallways.

The young son watching the strange goings on and haunted by what he sees.

No, this is not The Shining (1977).  This is The Silence (1963), made fourteen years earlier.  And beyond that, it has little in common with it.

And beyond that, it also has little in common with Through a Glass Darkly (1961) and Winter Light (1963) as well.

When the three films came out people started talking about how they might form a trilogy.  Bergman himself bought into it and wrote about how they formed a trilogy.  What he said does not really make sense, and you can tell that people do not understand it by the way they dutifully quote him without further comment.

Bergman later retracted his statement.  He decided these three films do not form a trilogy.

And people quote that too--as they thoughtlessly continue to treat the films as a trilogy.

Roger Ebert repeated the mantra in his review.

The Criterion Collection even sells the films in a box set.

But let us consider the topics of the films.

Through a Glass Darkly is about four family members vacationing on an island.  The father has devoted his life to his art to the neglect of his children.  The daughter suffers from mental illness that causes her to see hallucinations.  The son longs for his father's attention.  This is a chamber drama, and the focus is on the relationships of the family members.  The theme is more about the demands of art and the ravages of mental illness than it is on anything theological.  Because Karin in her hallucinations sees God as a spider trying to penetrate her, people have done mental gymnastics to come up with explanations.  Here is the explanation: Karin is mentally ill and she is having hallucinations.

Winter Light is about a pastor of a small church who loses his faith, a parishioner who commits suicide due to his anxieties over nuclear annihilation, and a woman who loves the pastor and influences his loss of faith but whom he rejects.  This is the one film of the three that addresses theological concerns.  But it does not really discuss the "silence of God" as much as it addresses people's individual choices about what they are willing to believe and how they are willing to treat one another.

The Silence is a character study featuring two sisters and the son of one of them, who are staying in a strange hotel in a strange city with a strange language, where one sister embodies the intellectual side of man and the other embodies the sensual side.  Theology is not discussed.  The world around them is not fully real.  The film itself is almost like a dream.  Bergman also explored new camera techniques with his tracking shots in the hotel.

One can gather any three films together and find enough line running through them to call them a trilogy.

But in this case, I would suggest that The Silence stands on its own.

It is quite different from any of the many films Bergman has made before.  And besides Smiles of a Summer Night, it may be the most entertaining so far--insofar as you can call it entertaining.

The sisters and the son travel on a train.

Tanks pass by.  Is the town on the brink of war?  Occupation?

An emaciated mule pulls a wagon down the street as the cars whiz past.

Where are we?

The threesome stay in a large, old, luxurious hotel.

Ester is a translator.  She works at a typewriter translating texts from one language to another (though she cannot understand the strange language of the place).

Well, mostly she drinks and smokes and self-stimulates and watches her sister as she grows sicker unto death.

But her job is to translate.  And she does do it some of the time.

Anna takes a bath and takes a nap.  Her son Johan scrubs her back and takes a nap with her.

Until he wakes up and roams the hallways.

He looks at the paintings, watches the handyman, carries his cap gun, and looks for things to do.

He discovers a troupe of dwarfs in one of the rooms.

They invite him in.  They play with him.  They dress him up.  He has opened up and found some friends.

Anna will see the dwarfs perform on stage.  She goes to the theater and sits in a box where a man and a woman in the box make love.  In front of her.  She excuses herself.

But she goes to a cafe and gets picked up by a man and brings him home to the hotel.

Johan sees them kiss and go into the room.  He tells Ester and she attempts to comfort him.

The film feels open even though the characters' lives are closed.

Anna's sensuality adds a new element to Bergman's work, and it helped the film in the box office.