Tystnaden

Ingmar Bergman (1963)

The Silence, scheduled to screen in NFT2, was moved to NFT1, the biggest BFI theatre.   If that wasn’t a huge surprise in itself, the news that this was a location swap with a Singin’ in the Rain screening was.  It’s good anyway to know the Ingmar Bergman retrospective is getting decent audiences.  I hadn’t seen The Silence before and wouldn’t rush to see it again but it certainly holds a position of great interest in the Bergman canon.  Released in Sweden in September 1963, the film followed very hot on the heels of Winter Light  (which had opened in February of the same year) and forms the last part of the ‘Silence of God’ trilogy.  In this instance, however, God doesn’t feature as either an alarming presence (as in Through a Glass Darkly) or a dismaying absence (as in Winter Light).  Silence in this case is chiefly the result of people not speaking each other’s language, literally and metaphorically.  The visual style of The Silence is also very different from that of its two immediate predecessors.  Both in that respect and in its human silence aspect, this film seems, rather, to look forward to Persona.  Bergman himself is learning a new cinematic language.

Train journeys, into and out of the town in which the rest of the film takes place, begin and end The Silence.   Two sisters break their homeward journey, presumably to Sweden, in Timoka, a fictional location in what appears to be a Central European country[1].  Ester (Ingrid Thulin) and Anna (Gunnel Lindblom), accompanied by Anna’s son Johan (twelve-year-old Jörgen Lindström, who went on to play the boy at the start and close of Persona), book into a local hotel.  Ester, the older of the two women, is seriously ill (or, at least, running a high fever) and never goes outside.  While there’s mutual affection between Ester and Johan, Anna is coldly antipathetic towards her elder sister.  Ester is a professional translator.  Anna appears just to want to have a good time and to resent Ester’s illness, though it doesn’t prevent Anna’s going out on her own.   She goes to a cinema, then a bar, and, once back in their hotel room, gives Ester an account of an invented sexual encounter with the barman she met (Birger Malmsten).  When, later, a sexual encounter with him does take place, in another room in the hotel, Ester knocks on the door, sobbing to be let in.  After admitting her sister, Anna gets back into bed with the barman, turning on all the lights so that Ester has a clear view.  The following morning, Anna announces that she and Johan will be leaving shortly.  The news triggers a sharp decline in Ester’s condition.  While Anna and Johan are at breakfast, Ester suffers some kind of physical crisis and is terrified that she is about to die.  An elderly hotel porter (Håkan Jahnberg) tries ineffectually to help and calm her.  Earlier in the film, Ester told Johan that she had learned a few words of the local language.  When the boy returns to the hotel room to bid her goodbye, Ester gives him a note, which he doesn’t look at until he’s in the train with his mother.   The note reads ‘To Johan – words in a foreign language’.

The Silence was sexually explicit to an unusual degree – unusual for Bergman at the time and for early 1960s art cinema more generally.  (It was also a notable box-office success in Sweden:  the two things may or may not be connected.)  The film is even more sexually implicit with a current of unrequited incestuous desire running through it.  Johan washes his mother’s back while she takes a bath; Anna asked him to do this but then has to tell him enough.   While Anna is out, Ester strokes Johan’s face and hair but he pulls away.  Ester desperately needs to get into the room where Anna is having sex.  There’s a hint, in mention of the sisters’ late father, that Ester may also have (had) an Electra complex.  The ominous alien environment of Timoka is realised not only in the foreign language theme but also in repeated references to the intense heat of the town, which the Northern European visitors can hardly tolerate, and in a tank rolling down a street in darkness.  This is one of the film’s strongest images, though Sven Nykvist’s chiaroscuro lighting gives the whole piece a fascinating instability.

Yet the brew is almost too rich:  mostly empty hotel corridors; a troupe of (Spanish-speaking) dwarf entertainers staying at the hotel; the knife-edge between hysterical laughter and weeping; the apprehension of death and resulting panic.  The soundtrack includes a single prolonged, discomforting note, along with J S Bach.  The protagonists represent a dichotomy between the cerebral (Ester) and the sensual (Anna).  Perhaps God isn’t absent at all but sarcastically represented by the elderly porter, with his ticking pocketwatch and magic tricks that fail to entertain.  There are so many Bergman tropes (or Bergmanesque touches) that The Silence, in long retrospect, sometimes has the quality of self-parody.  The narrative is a series of charged images that lack the mysterious coherence of those in Persona. The result feels, again in long retrospect, like a draft for the later film.  The acting, almost needless to say, is very good.  There are passages in which, even though the details of the tensions between the sisters remain opaque, Ingrid Thulin and Gunnel Lindblom seem to be expressing the very soul of conflict.  Ester’s help-I-can’t-breathe-I-think-I’m-dying monologue, powerfully delivered by Thulin, is all the more remarkable thanks to the upside-down image of her  face that fills the screen at this point.

30 January 2018

[1]  There actually is a river Timok, which flows mainly through Serbia and into western Bulgaria.