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CRIES AND WHISPERS
(1972)
Ingmar Bergman's dream play is set in a manor house at the turn of the century where a spinster in her late 30s (Harriet Andersson) is dying. Her two sisters (Ingrid Thulin and
Liv Ullmann) have come to attend her, and they watch and wait, along with a peasant servant (Kari Sylwan). The movie is built out of a series of emotionally charged images that express inner stress, and Bergman handles them with the fluidity of a master. Superbly photographed by Sven Nykvist in a style suggesting Edvard Munch, and with blood-red backgrounds, the film is smooth and hypnotic; it has oracular power and the pull of a dream. Yet there's a 19th-century dullness at the heart of it. Each sister represents a different aspect of woman�woman viewed as the Other�and the film mingles didacticism with erotic mystery. (Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies)
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| Original title: |
Viskningar och rop ["Whispers and cries"] |
| Production: |
Cinematograph AB / Svenska Filminstitutet |
| Distribution: |
Svensk Filmindustri |
| Premiere: |
21 December 1972 (Cinema I Theatre, New York) |
| Running time: |
91 minutes |
| Colour: |
Eastmancolor |
| Language: |
Swedish |
| Filmed: |
on location at Taxinge-Näsby estate, Mariefred, Sweden; from 7 September to 29 October 1971. |
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| CREDITS |
| Producer: |
Lars-Owe Carlberg |
| Director: |
Ingmar Bergman |
| Screenplay: |
Ingmar Bergman |
| Cinematography: |
Sven Nykvist |
| Art Direction: |
Marik Vos |
| Music: |
Chopin, Mazurka in A minor, no. 4, opus 17, played by Käbi Laretei; Bach, Sarabande no. 5 in D minor, played by Pierre Fournier |
| Editor: |
Siv Lundgren |
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| REVIEWS |
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"Ingmar Bergman's magnificent, moving and very mysterious new film, Cries and Whispers...[has] a focus so sharp that it seems to have the clarity of something seen through the medium of fever. Every sense has been heightened to a supernatural degree. Fears, wishes and suspicions never spoken occasionally rustle through the house like wind. We can even hear the newly dead talk, distantly and somewhat reproachfully, mindless of the rapidity with which physical decay sets in....
"Nothing that Bergman has done before is likely to prepare you for Cries and Whispers except in a comparatively superficial sense. Like all of his recent works, it's ever-aware of what I hesitate to call its filmicness. Sequences begin and end with close-up portraits of the character being considered. The colour program of the film is designed to call attention to itself�the red interiors, a fondness for white costumes that is so insistent that the appearance of a gray dress seems to be a terrible omen, the periodic dissolves to the blank red screen.
"All of these things are simply the methods by which Bergman dramatizes states of mind that have seldom been attempted, much less achieved, outside of written fiction. A lot, I'm afraid, will be made of the fact that Cries and Whispers moves, like Persona, in and out of reality and fantasy without easily defining either, though it must now be apparent that everything we see in Bergman is "real" to the extent that we see it and that it is meaningful to the characters and to us....
"Cries and Whispers�is not an easy film to describe or to endure. It stands alone and it reduces almost everything else you're likely to see this season to the size of a small cinder."
� Vincent Canby, The New York Times (22 December 1972)
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"You can interpret Cries and Whispers through a whole religious metaphysic, and no doubt Bergman himself would; but latterly this has been something of a red herring for a director whose talent lies more in straight psychodrama. None of the films immediately preceding have been more visually seductive than Cries, so much so that form, repeatedly, gets the better of content. Mostly Bergman is able to regain control, which is where the scenes that make the film come in: for instance, the short sequence where
Thulin, in period costume, is undressed by her maid, which says all there is to say about clothes, disguise, repression. Cries is about bodies, female bodies, in extremity of pain, isolation or neglect (the cards are heavily stacked). Karin (Thulin) mutilates her cunt with a piece of broken glass and, stretched out on her marital bed, smiles through the blood she's smeared across her mouth at her husband in a celebration of a marriage that's a 'tissue of lies.' Maria (Ullmann) finds herself lacking a thread that would tie her irreversibly to life. Bergman's hour remains resolutely that of the wolf."
� Verina Glaessner, Time Out
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| COMMENTARY |
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"I believe that the film�or whatever it is�consists of this poem: a human being dies but, as in a nightmare, gets stuck halfway through and pleads for tenderness, mercy, deliverance, something. Two other human beings are there, and their actions, their thoughts are in relation to the dead, not-dead, dead. The third person saves her by gently rocking, so she can find peace, by going with her part of the way."
� Ingmar Bergman, from his workbook for Cries and Whispers (22 April 1971)
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"All my films can be thought in black and white, except for Cries and Whispers. In the screenplay, I say that I have thought of the colour red as the interior of the soul. When I was a child, I saw the soul as a shadowy dragon, blue as smoke, hovering like an enormous winged creature, half bird, half fish. But inside the dragon everything was red."
� Ingmar Bergman, Images: My Life in Film (1990)
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"Today I feel that in Persona�and later in Cries and Whispers�I had gone as far as I could go. And that in these two instances, when working in total freedom, I touched wordless secrets that only the cinema can discover."
� Ingmar Bergman, Images: My Life in Film (1990)
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"It begins like Chekhov's Three Sisters and ends like The Cherry Orchard and in between it's more like Strindberg."
� François Truffaut (1973)
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"Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers was a worldwide success though it had all the elements of failure, including the sight of the slow torture of a woman dying of cancer�everything the public refuses to look at. But the film's formal perfection, especially the use of red in the decor of the house, constituted the element of exaltation�I would even say the element of pleasure�so that the public immediately sensed that it was watching a masterpiece. And it made up its mind to look at it with an artistic complicity and admiration that balanced and compensated for the trauma of
Harriet Andersson's cries and her groans of agony."
� François Truffaut, "What do critics dream about?" (1975)
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| AWARDS |
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 1972 National Society of Film Critics Awards for Best Script and Best Photography (US)
1972 New York Critics' Awards for Best Film, Best Script, Best Director, and Best Actress (Liv Ullmann)
1973 Academy Award for Best Cinematography (Sven Nykvist); nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Costume Design (Marik Vos) (US)
1973 Belgian Film Association Award for Artistic Excellence
1973 Films and Filming Award for Best Colour Photography (Sven Nykvist) (UK)
1973 National Board of Review Award for Best Direction (US)
1973 Swedish Guldbagge, Best Actress (Harriet Andersson)
1973 Syrena Warszawska (Polish film critics' award) for Best Foreign Film
1974 Centro culturale San Fedele Award, Milan (Jesuit Film Centre) as Best Film of the Year
1974 National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Film and Best Actress (Liv Ullmann) (US)
1974 Prix Femina (annual Belgian film prize) for "depth of psychological analysis"
1974 Yugoslav Film Critics' Award
1975 Jussi Statue (Finland)
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| BIBLIOGRAPHY |
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REVIEWS
Amis du film et de télévision, no. 209 (October 1973), p. 8-9.
Chaplin, no. 122 (1973), p. 84-85.
Commentary, no. 55 (May 1973), p. 81-84.
Écran, no. 15 (May 1973), p. 9.
Filmfacts 15, no. 241 (1972), p. 601-606.
Japanese Film Journal 19, no. 4 (1975), p. 243-245.
Kosmorama, no. 20 (December 1973), p. 56-57.
Listener, 15 February 1973, p. 223.
Los Angeles Herald Examiner, 17 January 1973, p. B1.
Monthly Film Bulletin, March 1973, p. 61-62.
Nation, no. 3 (January 1973), p. 93-94.
New Leader, 22 January 1973, p. 22-24.
New Republic, 3 February 1973, p. 24.
New York, 1 January 1973, p. 64-65.
New York Review of Books, no. 20 (8 March 1973), p. 3-4.
New York Times, 22 December 1972, p. 16.
New York Times, 27 May 1973, sec. 2, p. D11.
New Yorker, 6 January 1973, p. 50-54.
Revue du cinéma, no. 278 (November 1973), p. 102-104.
Sketch (Beirut), 29 March 1974, n.p.
Spectator (London), 10 February 1973, p. 176.
Der Spiegel, 4 March 1974, p. 10.
Time, 8 January 1973, p. 53.
Times (London), 9 February 1973, p. 13.
Variety, 20 December 1972, p. 18.
Village Voice, 29 March 1973, p. 70.
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ARTICLES & ESSAYS
Aftonbladet, 10 September 1971. (interview with Bergman)
Aftonbladet, 27 September 1972. (interview with Bergman)
Aftonbladet, 20 May 1973, p. 1.
Anderson, Ernie. Philadelphia Sunday Bulletin, 11 February 1973, p. 3.
Bergman, Ingmar. "Cries and Whispers" [script], The New Yorker, 21 October 1972, p. 46+.
Bobker, Lee. Elements of Film (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1974), passim.
Cinéma que, v. 3, no. 1 (September 1973), p. 13-15.
Cue, 2 July 1973, p. 2.
Ericsson, I. and S. Skagen, Dagens nyheter, 6 April 1973. Reprinted in Ingmar Bergman og hans tid and excerpted in Fant, no. 26 (Winter 1974), p. 44.
Ericsson, I. and S. Skagen, Dagens nyheter, 12 May 1973.
von Essen, E. Aftonbladet, 23 April 1973. (interview with Bergman)
L'Express, 14 August 1973, p. 79-86.
Expressen, 27 April 1973, p. 4.
Film a doba, no. 8 (August 1973), p. 432-434.
Filmmakers News, v. 6, no. 12 (October 1973), p. 14-18.
Foss, O. "Viskningar och rop: film og samfunn" [Cries and Whispers: Film and society], Fant (Norway), no. 26 (Winter 1974), p.46-53.
Hayber, Joyce. Los Angeles Times, 27 October 1971, sec. 4, p. 14.
Hjertén. Dagens nyheter, 6 March 1973.
Image et son, no. 278 (November 1973), p. 7.
Janzon. Svenska dagbladet, 6 March 1973.
Japanese Fantasy Film Journal, no. 4 (1975), p. 243-245.
Kinder, M. Dreamworks, v. 1, no. 1 (Spring 1980), p. 54-67.
Kosmorama, v. 24, no. 137 (Spring 1978), p. 66-67.
Landberg, Bo. "Ingmar Bergmans Viskningar och rop: Ett drama om ensamhet�gemenskap�trygghet" [Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers: A drama of loneliness�togetherness�security] (Göteborg: St. Lukasstiftelsen), 38 p.
leFanu, Mark. "Cries and Whispers," Monogram [formerly Brighton Film Journal], no. 5 [1974?], p. 10-13.
Löthwall, L.-O. "Excerpts from a Diary about Ingmar Bergman's filming of Viskningar och rop Outside Stockholm 1971," Film in Sweden, no. 2 (1972), p. 3-13. (English and French versions) Originally published in Chaplin, no. 114 (March 1972), p. 88-89.
Lundgren, L. and A. Munkesjö. Filmrutan, v. 16, no. 1 (1973), p. 26-30.
Mellen, Joan. "Bergman and Women: Cries and Whispers," Film Quarterly, v. 27, no. 1 (Fall 1973), p. 2-11. Reprinted in Women and Their Sexuality in the New Film (New York: Horizon Press, 1974), p. 106-127, and in Ingmar Bergman: Essays in Criticism, p. 297-312.
New York Times, 17 February 1974, p. 11.
Rice, Julian. "Cries and Whispers: The Complete Bergman," Massachusetts Review, v. 16, no. 1 (Winter 1975), p. 147-158.
Sarris, Andrew. Village Voice, 7 June 1973, p. 79-80.
Schein, Harry. "Bergmans pengar" [Bergman's money], Expressen, 20 October 1971, p. 4.
Sellermark, A. Femina, 9 July 1972, p. 18-20, 65.
Sima, J. Expressen, 5 March 1972, p. 16.
Sima, J. Expressen, 6 March 1972, p. 8.
Sjöstrand, I. Dagens nyheter, 17 April 1973, p. 6.
Skagen. Fant, no. 27 (Spring 1974), p. 26-34.
Steene, B. Bohusläningen, 15 January 1972, p. 4.
Sundgren, N.-P. "Bergmans pengar" [Bergman's money], Expressen, 17 October 1971, p. 4.
Sydsvenska dagbladet snällposten (Malmö), 20 May 1973, p. 10.
Télé-Ciné, no. 214 (January 1977), p. 13.
Variety, 9 May 1973, p. 197.
Variety, 30 May 1973, p. 2, 71.
Village Voice, 11 January 1973, p. 65, 70.
Vinberg, Björn. "Alla tjänar en hacka på Bergmans succéfilm" [Everyone earns a penny on Bergman's successful film], Expressen, 14 March 1973, p. 32.
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