Product Details

• Actors: Ingrid Thulin, Gunnel Lindblom, Birger Malmsten, Håkan Jahnberg, Jörgen Lindström
• Directors: Ingmar Bergman
• Format: Black & White, NTSC
• Language: English, French, German, Swedish
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Homevision
• VHS Release Date: June 16, 2000
• Run Time: 95 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 6302783348
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #280,719 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Between 1961 and 1963, Ingmar Bergman released a remarkable trilogy of so-called chamber dramas, each one concerned with the futility of sustaining faith in God, family, love, or much else. The series proved transitional for the internationally renowned Swedish filmmaker, securing his crucial collaboration with cinematographer Sven Nykvist (with whom Bergman would go on to make his many masterpieces--including Persona and Cries and Whispers--of the '60s, '70s, and early '80s), and underscoring a new preference for intimate, relationship-driven stories, austere settings, and haunting tones of emotional isolation and despair.

Following Through a Glass Darkly and Winter Light, The Silence is the most abstract entry in the trilogy, a somewhat eerie story of two sisters, Esther (Ingrid Thulin) and Anna (Gunnel Lindblom), and the latter's son (Jörgen Lindström), all traveling by train to Sweden but forced to stay in a foreign country when Esther's chronic bronchial problems require her to rest. A stifling atmosphere, a desolate hotel, encounters with a troupe of carnival dwarves, Anna's anchoring illness, and an empty sexual encounter for Esther underscore the unnerving feeling that God has abandoned these characters to dubious salvation in their own connection. A highly memorable film. --Tom Keogh

Product Description

The Silence, the third film of Bergman's religious trilogy (Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light), depicts a world in which God is silent, a world of despair. United since childhood in a love-hate relationship of lesbian incest, two sisters struggle and part as the younger seeks her freedom in a heterosexual affair. Bergman expresses their conflict in visual terms, with little dialogue, as he probes deeply into loneliness, love, and sexual obsession. His somber view of modern man's condition, wherein human relations are grotesquely egocentric and perversely sexual, is shattering.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Darkness made visible, January 21, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: The Silence [VHS] (VHS Tape)

With its scenes of illicit sex and masturbation, descriptions of couplings in churches and the strongly implied lesbianism of one of the protagonists, _The Silence_ caused something of a scandal in Sweden upon its release (Bergman reportedly received a wad of used toilet paper in the mail from an outraged viewer). Those hoping to be titillated, however, should look elsewhere, for this is an unremittingly bleak film about the perversion of love in a god-forsaken world and every sexual contact in the film is joyless and empty. The plot concerns two sisters returning from vacation who must stop in a menacing hotel in an unidentified country on the brink of war when one sister, who we quickly realize is mortally ill, becomes too sick to travel. As in _Persona_, which this film somewhat prefigures, the two female leads represent in some sense fragments of the same divided self--Anna, played by the voluptuous Gunnel Lindblom, is all heedless concupiscence, while Ester, portrayed by Ingrid Thulin in a fearless performance (perhaps her greatest on screen), is the coldly remote intellectual, puritanical and moralistic. The fragmentation, it becomes clear, is complete and irreparable--the film suggests that no self can be whole in a godless, monstrous world. Yet love is not totally extinct, as we learn in the scene (perhaps _The Silence's_ emotional core) in which the desperately ill Ester, a professional translator, passes on to Anna's young son Johan the few words of the country's strange language she has managed to learn (her ignorance of the language underscores the failure to communicate that is one of the film's themes). But the quietly devastating conclusion leaves the viewer wondering whether their message can have any lasting effect. No film I have seen of Bergman's is more nightmarishly dark and despairing than _The Silence_.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More Nordic Blues..., April 30, 2000

By 

Wesley Moynihan (Cork, Republic of Ireland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Silence [VHS] (VHS Tape)

Along with Cries and Whispers and The Seventh Seal , Ingmar Bergman's The Silence is his best work, a film mesmerising in its still potent power to disturb. The film charts the deterioration of the relationship between two sisters who book into a vast hotel in a nameless foreign region. Tensions mount and hostilities soon arise as both sisters can only find futility in their search for a warm, compassionate and tender relationship. Anna ( Gunnel Lindblom ) has a compulsive sexuality, which prompts her to have sex with strangers, while Ester ( Ingrid Thulin ), a cold repressed and alcoholic intellectual agonises over her lesbian feelings for her sister...

The Silence is a strange film fuelled by strange passions and emotions. It's rather minimalist in style, for Bergman rarely ventures outside the empty hotel, which is peopled only with a ghostly elderly porter and a troupe of circus dwarfs. With Sven Nykvist's camera exploring the space of the vast hotel corridors, it may for some recall Last Year at Marienbad but I think the film has more significant parallels with David Lynch's enigmatically bleak Eraserhead , both films sharing similar themes and a dark ambience. Symbolically, the film is not a difficult as other Bergman dramas. The sense of decay is omnipresent throughout the film - the sisters' relationship, Ester who is suffering with a terminal cancer, and the region itself with its streets patrolled by tanks, suggesting the whole damn thing is about to slip into war. And Bergman's superb use of the hotel, which the characters seemingly can't escape from, takes on almost Kafkaesque proportions. Made in 1963 The Silence still remains strong, with scenes of sex, nudity, ...and alcoholism. The film ended an extraordinary trilogy that began with Through a Glass Darkly and Winter Light ; a series Bergman made which addressed his evaporating religious faith.

Incidentally, look out for the funny scene in Woody Allen's Manhattan where Allen is horrified by Diane Keaton's merciless criticism of the film...

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Cries and Whispers of Silence, December 17, 2006

By 

Galina (Virginia, USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Silence [VHS] (VHS Tape)

The title of a dark and erotic final chapter of "faith" trilogy may sum up Bergman's own philosophy regarding religion and God - "God has never spoken because He does not exist". Bergman mentioned that he wanted to make a film with as little dialog as possible because "he had made many films with a lot of talking". He wanted "The Silence" to be a pure cinematographic experience where the images do all the talking. The films centers on two sisters, Ester (Ingrid Thulin) and Anna, (Gunnel Lindblom) to whom Ester is physically attracted. Esther, Anna and her 10-year-old son travel together and had to stop in a hotel located in an unnamed European country due to Esther's serious illness.

The film may be viewed on several levels -as the story of two sisters who apparently used to be close but are not able to communicate and understand one another anymore. Or it can be interpreted as a parable of Sensuality, Intellect, and Innocence, that cannot coexist in the world where God does not exist. As with every great and intelligent work of art, "The Silence" has so much to offer to its viewer, it's got so many questions to ask and it does not provide the easy answers.

Complex, suffocating, screaming through the silence, poignant, passionate, harrowing yet strangely hopeful and even funny sometimes - this is an unforgettable film, a masterpiece, a hidden treasure that has to be rediscovered and to receive as much praise and admiration as "Persona" and "Cries and Whispers" - for both of which "The Silence" was an inspiration. The acting by two Bergman's actresses is a miracle (as usual) as well as Sven Nykvist's camera work in creating the claustrophobic world where silence cries, whispers, and kills...