The Silence (1963)
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
Traveling through an unnamed European country on the brink of war, sickly, intellectual Ester, her sister Anna and Anna's young son, Johan, check into a near-empty hotel. A basic inability to communicate among the three seems only to worsen during their stay. Anna provokes her sister by enjoying a dalliance with a local man, while the boy, left to himself, has a series of enigmatic encounters that heighten the growing air of isolation.
10 connections found
View:
10 connections, in both directions
What critics compared The Silence to
It is a religious allegory (the “antichrist” of the title is nature itself), it is a horror film, it is a story of fairy tale simplicity and resonance, and it is a European art film in the Scandinavian mode of Ingmar Bergman, especially the Bergman of The Hour of the Wolf and The Silence; essentially it is a “two hander” in the manner of a Strindberg play.
Silence takes a juvenile approach to what Ingmar Bergman already explored in his Sixties “Silence of God” trilogy: Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Winter Light (1963), and The Silence (1963).
Early on, when Kowalski asks Stone what she likes best about space, she responds: "The silence."
Working from a script by Andrea Berloff ( Oscar-nominated for Straight Outta Compton), Swiss director Baran bo Odar (Who Am I, The Silence) keeps the action moving at an almost comically relentless pace.
And so its failure falls chiefly on Odar, who built his reputation on the German thrillers The Silence and Who Am I? (the latter due for its own Americanization), but simply doesn’t have the chops to make Sleepless that exciting.
As directed by Baran bo Odar (2010's "The Silence") and scripted by " World Trade Center " writer Andrea Berloff , this remake of the 2011 French film " Sleepless Night " is funny sometimes but not funny enough, exciting sometimes but never exciting enough, and inherently emotional (mainly due to the hero's anguished desire to save his son) yet never willing to run with the emotionalism and turn into a full-blown action melodrama.
Advertisement
This shocking erotic portrayal of an emotional conflict between sisters concludes on a more body functional note from the other more high-minded spiritual films in the trilogy, about the silence of God, that Ingmar Bergman began with "Through a Glass Darkly" and "Winter Light."
The trilogy Bergman began with 1961's tragically focused Through a Glass Darkly was certainly front-loaded with its best entry; 1962's Winter Light has integrity but revisits well-worn Bergman themes of religious skepticism and existential isolation, and The Silence, which debuted in 1963, barely assembles itself into a coherent remark upon anything.
The trilogy comprises Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence.
DVD Details: For this Ingmar Bergman box set, the Criterion Collection has gorgeously restored this and two other black-and-white films (Through a Glass Darkly and Winter Light) in their full-screen aspect ratios.
DVD Details: For this Ingmar Bergman box set, the Criterion Collection has gorgeously restored this and two other black-and-white films (The Silence and Winter Light) in their full-screen aspect ratios.
The film ushers in Bergman’s most austere period, and is the first of a loosely defined trilogy of films on the subject of God—the others being Winter Light (1962) and The Silence (1963).
Whether it’s a young woman grappling with the power and consequences of her burgeoning sexuality in Somersault, a police detective traumatised by an unsolved crime in the ABC telemovie The Silence, or a girl who finds the only life she’s ever known crumbling around her in Lore.
I wish that Verbinski had further explored the images supplied by the screenplay; he might have come up with something metaphysical in the mystery of the tape, resembling the patterns in Bergman's hotel in The Silence or Kubrick's in The Shining.
Then, too, there’s the uncomfortable recognition that a lawsuit is almost certainly about to drop over the distinct similarities between the screenplay and Tim Lebbon’s novel The Silence (recently filmed but not yet released) and, before you even get there, some obvious comparisons to M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs and TV’s The Walking Dead.
Advertisement
Themes of child sexual abuse belong in coruscating, properly upsetting films like The Silence (2010) or Michael (2011) or The Treatment (2014), and ought not to be utilised as mawkish plot points in whimsical tales of wunderkinds.
The film’s at times hallucinatory quality has been compared to Bergman’s previous film The Silence (1961), just as Elisabet’s name conjures up memories of Albert Vogler, the similarly tormented and purposefully mute protagonist of Bergman’s The Magician (1958), which suggests that Persona is both a synthesis of previous themes and aesthetic strategies and a culmination to which the director had been working for years, perhaps unconsciously.
Three years later, in his masterpiece Persona, Bergman would return to the idea of two women living in cramped isolation, unnamed desire passing between and around them, but Persona is a work written, filmed, and conceptualized right from the cracks in reality—a pure shot of human identity in mid-dissolve.
Instead, Bergman spent the early part of the 1960s burrowing deeper into the soul with his “God’s Silence” trilogy—1961’s Through A Glass Darkly and two in 1963, Winter Light and The Silence—and refining a stark yet often piercingly dramatic black-and-white style that married spiritual inquiry with formal asceticism.