Word: bergmans
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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INSIDE THE MOVIE KINGDOM (NBC, 9:30-11 p.m.). A look at today's top screen stars at work and at play, in a series of vignettes filmed on location. Among them: Ingrid Bergman, Gregory Peck, Richard Burton, Paul Newman and Claudia Cardinale...
...prime example is The Silence, Bergman's latest failure. Looking only at the composition, and hearing only the natural sound effects, Bergman's virtuosity is awe-inspiring. The man plans every single element which enters the camera's field: nothing is superfluous. A horse cart moves slowly down a street and white-roofed cars pass it regularly, creating a subtle montage. Scene after scene of such frame making constitutes a first-class lesson in cinema as graphic...
...content, that's another story. Bergman fails because he requires his audience to analyze the welter of symbols; yet being the sum of the parts, the whole film comes close to being one big metaphor. Unfortunately, this string of symbols does not form an organic work. A tank rumbles through the empty streets at no time in particular. Does it suggest the militaristic, secular power which has supplanted the absolute comfort of religion? Or perhaps it represents the phallic preoccupation of the woman who watches. Either way, its indiscriminate placement seems to reflect the work of a Waring Blender rather...
Leaving everyone uninvolved, The Silence degenerates into a game, a sophisticated version of hide-and-go-seek. Because the experience is the opposite of. aesthetic, Bergman's talents seem much better after leaving the theatre. Once settled in his favorite coffee shop, the new critic will have fun exploring the film's cornucopian symbolism. Two sisters, Ester (Ingrid Thulin) and Anna (Gunnel Lindbloom), and Anna's little boy, Johan (Jorgen Lindstrom), interrupt their railroad trip in a strange country where a strange language is spoken, because of Ester's strange coughing fits. They rent a room in a hotel with...
Perhaps more significant than the film's preoccupation with the problems of communication and concomitant alienation is the step it may mark in Bergman's intellectual development. For amidst all the silent anguish, there is no search for God, no solace in Bergman-style pseudo religion, as in Through a Glass Darkly and Winter Light. Instead, Bergman now seems to suggest that man must stand alone, without the crutch of a religious vocabulary. It is unfortunate that neither this encouraging thematic advance nor Bergman's filmic mastery can hush the grating content which disrupts The Silence...