The Silence

Our first glance at this film suggests incomprehensibility: two blonde women in their thirties and a small, equally blond boy are training to parts unknown from parts unknown; the heat is unbearable in the compartment; outside, a single file of tanks parallels the train's progress; and on the compartment door sits a sign in a language that no one, including the viewer, has ever seen before. Soon one of the women will get violently ill, the three of them will disembark, and our action – if that is really the right word – will be moved to a hotel in a very foreign city, a subdued metropolis from every indication on the brink of war.   

We learn in time that the two women, Ester (Ingrid Thulin) and Anna (Gunnel Lindblom), are sisters; the boy, Johan, is Anna's, although from how Johan interacts with his aunt, it is clear that she exerts considerable influence upon him. Like many siblings, Ester and Anna go out of their way to emphasize their differences. While the older Ester is lonely, cultured, and intellectual (she works as a literary translator), a raging alcoholic, and probably a manic depressive to boot, Anna is decidedly none of the above. In fact, what Anna is and is not made The Silence, at the time of its release, a revelatory picture, even if the revelations seem tepid and stale in hindsight – but first we must return to that train. An internet search for "Nitsel stantnjon palik," the train door sign, yields links exclusively on The Silence, which means that we are dealing with invention.  (An educated guess might be "no smoking when in the station" since palić is "to smoke" in Polish, the middle word resembles a misbegotten calque of "station," and the first word could be a Slavic homophone of "incomplete" – "smoking [is allowed] not having reached the station.") Two later words – and words will be very important in a film that underscores soundlessness – kasi ("hand") and naigo ("face") appear to be Estonian. So when, in a fabulous scene, Anna opens up a newspaper knowing full well she'll only be able to look at the pictures, all the words seem familiar in a sense that they might be words from various European tongues. Someone more politically sensitive than I would avouch that this means all of Europe is at war, Babel as a metaphor for battle, but I refrain. What the language isolate does imply, however, is the need for non-verbal communication, gestures, looks, and, of course, the other senses: smells, tastes, and whatever can be deemed tactile. During the course of the film, both Ester and Anna will maintain a relationship with a male waiter – Ester with the hotel's old and attentive servant, Anna with a libidinous young man from a street café – with whom she does not share a language. Nevertheless, both women are convinced of the significance of each relationship and are pleased at the distance the lack of language permits them ("How nice that we don't understand one another," says Anna to her partner).                    

Why do they need that distance? That is the mystery of The Silence, one of the few first-rate films that become more obfuscated, not clearer, upon re-viewing. This ambiguity, I fear, is predominantly caused by modern minds who are hell-bent on seeing things in the worst or, rather, most sinful or crooked way possible (an inevitability Bergman appears to anticipate). Thus the most popular and incorrect explanation of The Silence is provoked by Anna's brief visit to a movie theater in which she happens to catch a man and woman coupling vigorously and obliviously. As if, one might venture, Anna were not there at all – the very act of cinematography. Other scenes seem to point in the same, bawdy direction, but actually do no such thing: a bathing scene in which Anna asks Johan to lather her back –  there is no other person to ask but Ester, who is both incapacitated and, as we will learn, unwilling; Anna's decision to sleep topless next to her ten-year-old son, who has seen her thus since, well, the very beginning of their relationship; Anna's sessions with the waiter, who craved her the moment he saw her open that local newspaper and understand absolutely nothing; in one amazing scene, Anna's walking through the streets for almost a minute and being surrounded only by men; and the rather weighty dialogue towards the film's middle, when Anna and Ester bicker like jealous lovers. The sexual undercurrent seems even more important given its notoriety as the first major Swedish film to feature a gamut of risqué scenes, but such silliness need not concern us here. What we can say about these vignettes is that they are in line with the plot: they are neither gratuitous nor somehow stylized to invoke greater meaning (when there exists nothing of the sort). In point of fact, if we accept ten-year-old Johan as the film's true protagonist, then these discoveries abate drastically in sensation, because, of course, all such moments are sensational to a budding adolescent.

Accept Johan as the protagonist? Most certainly: Bergman has been labeled the most autobiographical of directors for good reason, as his stories are about individual doubts, not wars of ideas in which individuals are conscripted. His heroes struggle with faith like the Romantic poets struggled with love: in each case this represented the most elusive and vital element of life. And like the Romantic poets approached love in myriad ways, with poem after poem dedicated to one or another princesse lointaine, so did Bergman address the serious questions about his Christianity by examining it through individual perspectives that all funneled back into him. As a ten-year-old, Johan's faith begins and perhaps ends with his mother and aunt, and he is hopeful to "return home" to his grandmother (some mention is made of his father, but the latter is clearly not much involved); yet something inside him does allow for the contemplation of a large and fleshy painting in the style of this artist. Walking the halls of the surprisingly grand, if empty, hotel, he comes upon a troupe of dwarfs, who do not imbue him with the same feelings of awkwardness as they would an adult. The titular silence then becomes what is never said to a child, what is withheld, omitted, censored, or distorted, all in the name of protecting him, of maintaining his innocence in a world racked by war, pornography, alcoholism, and hatred. He gazes through the window one evening to see a tank occupying the entire street, like the tanks he spotted from the train, a little boy's dream and a father's nightmare. It is through Johan's eyes that we notice the different ways in which his mother and aunt comb their hair and regard themselves in mirrors; it is also of little coincidence that Johan is reading this book in Swedish translation. After all, little boys love adventures about much bigger boys who get in and out of danger. But who, sooner or later, make it back home to grandma's house.          

The Seventh Seal

To believe is to suffer.  It is like loving someone in the dark that never answers.

                                                                                                                           Antonius Block

Diversion once meant, and still means in many Latinate languages, something that amuses not simply distracts or wards off the ills of the world; it has since been replaced by a terse and ambiguous word that has so many uses as to obliterate its primary purpose – that of diversion.  Fun is what moments and memories we enjoy of life, and we wish ourselves as many of these occurrences as possible.  But what fun exactly entails will have to remain a personal matter.  For some, fun is the obverse side of what they are obligated to do – work, clean, educate, obey human laws and regulations; a font of amusement for others is the mockery of people and things that do not please them; and for a few of us, fun is achieving our creative potential, competing with no one but future versions of ourselves, and hoping that life will permit a single, brazen mind to reconcile its duties with its ambitions.  Some people, of course, think that life is most entertaining when neither duty nor ambition binds them to their days.  Which brings us to this famous film.

We begin with a knight and his squire, the former just returned from ten years in the Holy Land on the errands of God.  That decade away from his native shores has done much to embitter and crush the soul of our knight, the noble but hesitant Antonius Block (Max von Sydow).  His doubts are not stifled by the petulant skepticism of his squire Jöns (Gunnar Björnstrand), who claims to love life and all its hedonistic opportunities and has neither patience for nor interest in the spiritual side of existence.  But Block's homecoming is marred by the appearance of Death (Bengt Ekerot, in an iconic role) on the otherwise clement beaches that he has not seen in so long.  Is it unfair for Death, whom he eluded time and again in battle against the Muslim faithful, to come for him so near to his family and childhood memories?  It is, but Block has witnessed so much injustice that it matters little.  He challenges Death to a game of chess with the usual Satanic provisions: as long as they play, Death will demit his office as annihilator of worlds; and should Block win, he will be allowed to live longer.  And Death, Block, and we all know that Death has never lost.   

We then drift away from the quixotic knight and his sidekick to an almost normal family composed of the actor and juggler Jof, his wife Mia, and their toddler son.  Jof is prone to visions, the beautiful and irrational visions that accost an artist his whole life; early on he sees a queen and her child, an allegorical representation of his own lovely spouse.  What is remarkable is how individual the film begins and how ensemble it becomes.  Such a wide variety of characters intrudes that Block, an obvious hero and a man who oozes gentility and honor, slips into the background as simply one of the cast.  We meet Plog, an alcoholic blacksmith, his harlot of a wife, Lisa, the lecherous actor and fraud Skat, a young deaf-mute country lass, the seminarist Ravel accused of persuading Block to join the Crusades, and another young woman about to be burned at the stake for witchcraft.  All of them are duly aware that the Black Death will be upon them soon, and their reactions convey the range of human emotion when confronted with adversity.  Plog doubles his liquid rations; Lisa and Skat find each other's embrace; Ravel decides that a deaf-mute lass cannot scream, especially in an isolated farmhouse; and the witch, in appearance an odd parody of Joan of Arc, claims to reflect the Devil in her eyes.  As the epicenter of the film, Block wanders through the countryside and finds both despair and joy, lethargy and militant resistance, ridicule and pious disgust; but more than anything else, he wants to believe.  When he talks to the witch, he asks her whether she knows Satan.  Why?  "So I can ask him about God," says Block, "he must know."  The same thirst for truth is inflicted upon Death, from whom he attempts to extract a promise when his time comes.  "And you will reveal your secrets?" he asks Death, who responds: "I have no secrets."  "So you know nothing, nothing?" he cries in despair, to which Death almost pauses before answering that he is "unknowing."  Corporal extinction may indeed yield some insight into a more elevated experience, yet even Death himself is but a ferryman to that distant shore.   

The film was apparently inspired in part by a painting from this church, and despite its numerous historical inaccuracies and general unevenness (Bergman's own assessment) it is enthralling as a medieval tale of sin with at least a dozen brilliant vignettes.  Perhaps the most magnificent scene of all is Block's confession to a priest whose face is shrouded by his cowl as he turns to hide his profile from Block but not from us.  Notably, we are not given any background to the petty conflicts that arise between the villagers because if Death were to come to any village and choose his prey, he would not be able to discern why people have disliked one another for years; in fact those involved probably could not say, either.  The small pleasures of life – love, family, friendship, fresh air, and food – these are what sustains us before Death arrives, be it in a tidal wave that swallows up all but a few survivors or at the end of our natural lives when we are wizened and weary.  Block probably had these pleasures in his daily routine when he departed to war ten years ago, and it is no exaggeration to state that he can barely enjoy any of them now.  After all, there's no risk in gaming Death if you are already dead.

Autumn Sonata

We go away from our parents in youth and then we gradually come back to them; and in that moment, we have grown up.   

                                                                                                                     Ingmar Bergman

The choice between art and real life conflicts the true artist until his grave. If he only experiences art, he will gradually withdraw into a windowless library or studio where every glance up is reflected in the works and lives that are not his own. If he eschews a knowledge of the history of creative thought, of its development and patterns, he will only wander, to paraphrase this author, into the backyard of primitive art. In an ideal situation both streams would converge into a larger, more bountiful basin, perhaps even a mountain lake wreathed by the cleanest winds. The water drawn would be a perfect blend of what has been lived and what has been created, of our days and dreams. An introduction unfortunately inapplicable to the protagonist in this film.

The arc of our film is simple, because in reality it comprises a straight line. Charlotte Andergast, (Ingrid Bergman), a relatively famous Swedish concert pianist returns after seven years to Norway to visit her two grown daughters, Eva (Liv Ullmann) and Elena (Lena Nyman, known predominantly for this notorious two-part film). I say relatively famous (many reviews claim she is world-renowned, but our only witness to her fame is Charlotte herself) because compared to her relatives, Charlotte might as well be royalty: so is she treated and so does she behave – at least at first. The sisters' residence is simple and plain like its inhabitants, which also includes Eva's soft-spoken husband Viktor (Halvar Björk), the local pastor, but it holds more than three dreary souls. Eva's four-year-old son Erik recently drowned, a tragedy which prompts Eva's letter to her mother asking her to break from her allegedly whirlwind schedule and tend to family grief. The conceit is complete and Charlotte arrives somewhat appalled at the rusticity of the living conditions even though Norwegian villages have rarely seemed so radiant. 

We already perceive the conflict ahead, yet Charlotte begins by discussing the equally recent passing of her longtime companion, an Italian cellist by the name of  Leonardo. It is more than implied that Charlotte has always had admirers and perhaps even married some of them. Her watch was a gift from such a gentleman; a novel she reads to get to sleep was authored by another. We are given scenes in cascading autumn hues, especially a gorgeous bright orange, as Charlotte recollects Leonardo's final tormented hours in hospice care. Are we shown anything of Erik's tragic death? Towards the film's conclusion, when Charlotte has already made a rather unfortunate decision, we see Eva at her son's tombstone as she narrates a few thoughts on her family's future. The excuse for this omission – as well as all other excuses for all other wrongdoings – is provided indirectly by Charlotte, who notes that she had been friends with Leonardo for eighteen years, a nice round adult number. Viktor, who is clearly attracted to his mother-in-law in the way one cannot but admire a fine-looking member of the opposite sex, buttonholes Charlotte in a feckless discussion about what Erik's death meant to his wife. He almost goes so far as to say that it was as significant an event to Eva as Charlotte's career was to Charlotte, but stops and gnaws on his pipe instead. Erik contained what can be loosely understood as the family's hope to escape the prior generation, which we now know may never be possible.

The middle act transitions from Charlotte's boundless vanity to a possible confrontation of mother and daughter. I should rephrase that: we have seen enough of Bergman's chamber plays to know that such a confrontation is inevitable and will probably be, considering the enormous resentment harbored by Eva, a rather nasty affair. Appropriately enough, the "prelude" to such a conflict comes during Eva's attempt to play this masterpiece on the piano. I cannot report that she is successful; but the camera, and by extension the viewer, cares little for what Eva can or cannot play. It focuses on her now-engrossed mother whose face droops so noticeably during the performance that Viktor finds it more comfortable to leave the room (a telling move since Viktor had verbally encouraged his hesitating wife with the words, "You said you wanted to have her hear you play"). At the end of the modest recital, Charlotte is complimentary if salaciously aware that she now has an opportunity to show off. She prods Eva into asking her to play by declaring her daughter's "interpretation" to be befuddled, even with regard to finger placement. "Chopin was not a sentimental old woman," says Charlotte, who is also speaking about herself. She then proceeds to play a magnificent rendition while Charlotte stares at her, both faces held closely together by the camera. In those faces we see a precursor to another wonderful scene, this one re-enacted from Eva's miserable childhood. A large music room is closed off by a series of folding doors. Outside those doors waits a little blonde girl in a pretty dress, waiting, we learn for her mother "to take her coffee." Inside the doors we hear a faint melody, and the moment it stops, the girl rushes in, if only to sit at her mother's feet and gaze upon her as she drinks. But what is she told? "Mama wants to be alone now. It's such a lovely day, why don't you go play in the garden?" From these two scenes we know everything we need to know, which is why the dénouement, correct yet bitter, comes as no surprise. As for Elena's mental illness, a somewhat unnecessary addition to what really could be a two-woman show with Viktor floating about where needed, the less said about it the better.         

A personal aside: As a child, I remember my mother's copy of Ullmann's autobiography sitting around the house, progressively more dog-eared, and then finally retired to a happy place on one of our shelves. Her first name was odd, although Scandinavian names were bandied about quite a bit in my youth (I also made the common error of assuming that Ingrid and Ingmar Bergman were blood relatives). Ullmann, internet sources now assure me, has always been known for "her intelligence and beauty," although I must respectfully disagree. In her late thirties during the filming of Autumn Sonata, Ullmann had by this time appeared in several Bergman films starting with this much-acclaimed work and was never very physically appealing. Her lips were always too heavy, her eyes always too meek – but I digress. That Ingrid Bergman at sixty-four was arguably more attractive than as a young woman only adds to the widening gap between the two actresses, as well as underscores the realization by Eva that she will never approach her mother in two things: good looks and musical ability. The rest and best of life – her soul, her passion, her sympathy, her kindness, her curiosity – all that she has covered. Even if her mother's return means that Eva is now the only adult in the family.