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The Silence [DVD] [1963]
 
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The Silence [DVD] [1963]

DVD ~ Ingrid Thulin
4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
RRP: £19.99
Price: £19.59 & this item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions
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Frequently Bought Together

The Silence [DVD] [1963] + Winter Light [DVD] [1962] + Persona [1966] [DVD]
Total RRP: £59.97
Price For All Three: £34.45

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  • This item: The Silence [DVD] [1963] DVD ~ Ingrid Thulin

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  • Winter Light [DVD] [1962] DVD ~ Ingrid Thulin

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  • Persona [1966] [DVD] DVD ~ Bibi Andersson

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Product details

  • Actors: Ingrid Thulin, Gunnel Lindblom, Birger Malmsten, Håkan Jahnberg, Jörgen Lindström
  • Directors: Ingmar Bergman
  • Writers: Ingmar Bergman
  • Producers: Allan Ekelund
  • Format: Black & White, PAL
  • Language English, French, German, Swedish
  • Subtitles: English
  • Region: All Regions
  • Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
  • Number of discs: 1
  • Classification: 15
  • Studio: Palisades Tartan
  • DVD Release Date: 19 Nov 2001
  • Run Time: 91 minutes
  • Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
  • ASIN: B00005RZQJ
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 27,621 in DVD (See Bestsellers in DVD)

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Reviews

Amazon.co.uk Review
The third in Ingmar Bergman's trilogy of "chamber works" featuring characters in isolated, existentially dramatic settings, The Silence, made in 1963, is set in Timoka, a fictional Eastern European town with its own made-up language. Stylistically more sensual and maximal than its austere predecessors Through a Glass Darkly and Winter Light, it was both a success and a scandal in its day, featuring as it does scenes of masturbation, sex and even lesbian eroticism.

Jorgen Lindstrom plays Jonas, a small boy travelling with his mother Anna (Gunnel Lindblom) and aunt Ester (Ingrid Thulin). His aunt is dying of consumption, but his mother is a great deal more alive and smouldering with sexual energy. As the tension between the bedridden aunt and the frustrated mother mounts, Jonas roams the hotel corridors and chances almost surreally upon the hotels only other occupants--an elderly floor waiter and a troupe of performing dwarves. Meanwhile, his mother is picked up by a waiter in a cafe, is seduced by him in a church then engages in a traumatically miserable bout of hotel sex.

Sultry, full of incident and dreamlike cinematic spectacle (the performing dwarves, a rumbling tank, an overheated railway carriage) there's a sense of aimlessness and oblivion about The Silence, in which the godlessness of the universe, though never discussed, is implied throughout the movie. There is, however, a note of humanist hope struck in the conclusion, more convincing than the platitudinous finale of Through a Glass Darkly.

On the DVD: Bergman's notes explain how he had long nurtured the notion of setting a movie in an imaginary city where "the rules of society cease to exist", and how the young boy's curious wanderings were inspired by his first exposure to Stockholm as a child. Critic Philip Strick's notes reveal that Greta Garbo had at one point been mooted to make a return to the screen in this film and that in certain countries, censors insisted on separate screenings of The Silence for males and females. --David Stubbs

Special Features
DVD 5
Swedish
Region 0
Dolby Digital Swedish
Dolby Digital
Star And Director Filmographies
Scene Selection
Philip Strick Film Notes
Extract From Bergmans Book Images My Life In Film
The Bergman Collection Trailer
English


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7 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
4.3 out of 5 stars (7 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars a bleakly-rendered masterpiece, 29 Nov 2001
By A Customer
The Silence concludes the trilogy of films that includes Through A Glass Darkly and Winter Light. Bergman shows us two sisters, Ester and Anna (with her son, Johan), moving to a strange foreign city. With a loose narrative structure, the scenes have an intensely claustrophobic feeling about them, while the town (we don't know where it is or what language is spoken) has a distinctly Kafka-esque feel. Overall, it is an extremely dark film which views with crushing pessimism human sexuality and desire. The most sensual of the trilogy, it is dreamlike and fluid in its camera work, and, as usual with Bergman films, it contains nothing less than stunning performances. In short: a bleakly-rendered masterpiece.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars The Silence, 27 Aug 2008
By Mr. D. N. Reece (Birmingham, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
The Silence opens with a young boy asking his mother about a sign written in a foreign language. `What does this mean?' To which his mother replies that she doesn't know. And in those opening seven minutes, as the boy, his mother and his aunt travel on a train to an unknown country, Bergman expertly sets up that strange experience of being in a distant world, where everything around you is unknown and inexplicable.

The boy, Johan, is then placed outside when his aunt Ester starts to cough and choke and the door is closed on him. His curiosity takes him along the corridor for a series of brief glimpses into the other carriages, before he looks out of the window at the passing scenery and in a kind of dreamlike hallucination sees a series of tanks driving across the landscape.

The film takes place in a foreign called Timoka. There is a tremendous heat throughout the day, which lingers long into the night. The country appears to be either occupied or at war as suggested by the presence of the tanks, which add further weight to Bergman's battlefield. The elder sister, Ester is ill and takes to her bed, whereas the younger sister, Anna tries to cool down by taking a bath. This arouses the interest of her son and she asks him to wash her back.

Bergman's severity charges the film with such overt eroticism that almost everything becomes a reference to some latent sexuality, such as the boy puffing up his cheeks to make a faint screeching noise and then lying down in the soft cushions and raising his hand up into the air like a snake.

Then in a series of highly structured encounters, Bergman explores the degree of control each character has over another. These range from the comical meeting between the boy and the dwarves in one of the hotel rooms, to the formal encounter between Ester and the porter, to the sexual encounter between Anna and the couple having sex in the theatre.

Ester's intellectual ambition is one form of control, but she is scared by her sister's sensuality - the way Anna sleeps naked and picks up guys at a restaurant, but on the other hand, the only way Anna can exert some form of control is through these sexual encounters. She is also very much aware of the power she has over her sister and there is an almost incestuous attraction as Ester watches Anna undress to take another bath after dirtying her dress outside.

The boy acts as a sort of pivot between the two conflicting women. His innocent amusement guides him through the hotel, from rebellion (pissing in the corridor) to mischief (hiding the porter's photographs) to curiosity (as he watches his mother go into a room with the waiter, nonchalantly telling Ester about it later without any indication of emotion). He is not fazed by his encounter with a traveling troupe of dwarves as they dress him, he doesn't mock them or question them, but simply accepts them. In one of the few humorous moments in the film, the dwarves return from their show and pass Anna who is crying in the corridor. She stares at them in confusion and in a rather absurd, Bunuel-esque manner, each of them bows his head courteously to acknowledge her.

Human tenderness will always be coupled with human bitterness and although Johan's actions appear naïve at first, on closer inspection, it becomes apparent that even he has the capability to oscillate from one extreme to the other, liberty to repression, love to hate etc. etc. For the two women, neither of them are wholly satisfied with the life they are leading, each wanting perhaps a part of the others, but only becoming frustrated when they cannot have it and resorting to complex mind games in an attempt to dominate the other and exert some form of control.

All three display a desire to understand and their attempts (with the exception of Johan) inevitably lead to dispute. The two sisters have an especially strong desire to understand one another, except there are so many things which get in the way to prevent them. Perhaps that's the point that Bergman's trying to make - that these desires ultimately lead only to destruction... In the evening of the first day, Ester is listening to Johann Sebastian Bach to the radio while Anna dries herself in the open-doored bathroom. A few moments later the porter brings in tea. He recognises the music's composer which he mentions in passing and shuffles out of the room. This brief display of knowledge, prompts Anna, who we presume didn't know who the composer was, to spitefully relate an earlier encounter with a waiter to Ester, because she knows that is something, unlike Bach, her sister will not be able to understand.

Bergman's exploration of the unconscious was extremely shocking at the time and people reacted so strongly that the director even received death threats and worst of all a feces-smeared piece of toilet paper. But within the starkness of Bergman's images (photographed by the excellent Sven Nykvist) there is at its heart one of the most beautiful pieces of cinema of all time. The whole thing unravels like a dream and it is certainly one of the best, if not the best of Bergman's so-called Chamber pieces.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Bergman's highly charged, intensely confined nightmare, 19 Nov 2000
This review is from: The Silence [VHS] [1963] (VHS Tape)
This is the third film in Bergman's so-called "Faith" trilogy (with Through a Glass Darkly and WInter Light) and looks the best-realised of the three.

Two sisters spend time in a seedy hotel in an unspecified central European city while an unspecified military event takes place around them. Tempers fray as the frictions between the sisters come to the surface. One sister is sick and apparently a lesbian, the other is a single mother although sexually promiscuous.

Between them is her son, who goes on explorations around the hotel, encountering faintly bizarre characters.

The film is outrageously sensual and sexual, worryingly enough between the boy and his mother as much as anyone else, and also claustraphobic and sickening, as the ill sister's ailment takes hold. A foreigness takes hold of the centre of the film, with the sisters unable to communicate with each other and unable to speak the native tongue, thus adding to the claustraphobia.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Sinister sensuality
The Silence is the last film in the 1st trilogy.After the austerity of the 2 previous films
Bergman lets rip with a cinematic sensuality of Felliniesque proportions. Read more
Published 1 month ago by technoguy

1.0 out of 5 stars Tedious
Tedious and pointless, the most boring film I have ever tried to watch, even at 8 times normal speed it will induce somnolescence. Who needs sleeping tablets?
Published 13 months ago by Johannes Nagel

5.0 out of 5 stars THIS IS BERGMAN AT HIS MOST DISTURBING
"The Silence", is perhaps Bergman's most disturbing film without the shocking images of, say "Cries and Whispers" and "Fanny and Alexander". Read more
Published 21 months ago by stuart

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant Bergman
This film is the final part of Bergman's trilogy exploring the nature and existence of God. He described the trilogy as moving from "certainty achieved" (in Through A Glass... Read more
Published on 17 April 2006 by David Welsh

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