The silence (1963) - Ingmar Bergman

Originally titled 'God's silence'.
Criterion collection essay by Leo Braudy

Ester: Where's the doctor? Must I die all alone?

"My original idea was to make a film that should obey musical laws, instead of dramaturgical ones. A film acting by association—rhythmically, with themes and counter-themes. As I was putting it together, I thought much more in musical terms than I'd done before. All that's left of Bartók is the very beginning. It follows Bartók's music rather closely—the dull continuous note, then the sudden explosion."
— Ingmar Bergman, Bergman on Bergman

"Ester loves her sister; she finds her beautiful and feels a tremendous responsibility for her, but she would be the first to be horrified if it were pointed out that her feelings were incestuous. Her mistake lies in the fact that she wants to control her sister—as her father had controlled her by his love. Love must be open. Otherwise Love is the beginning of Death. That is what I am trying to say."
— Ingmar Bergman (1964)

"For me the important thing is that Ester sends a secret message to the boy. That's the important thing: the message he spells out to himself. To me Ester in all her misery represents a distillation of something indestructibly human, which the boy inherits from her."
— Ingmar Bergman, Bergman on Bergman (1969)

"The Silence is the great watershed movie of Bergman's career, perhaps of Sixties art cinema: the work of a filmmaker no longer able to contain the creatures and archetypes surging in the playroom of his imagination. These include a troop of dwarfs (out of Tod Browning by Velazquez), an eldritch rag-and-bone man and his horse, several tortured sex scenes, a boy urinating in the hotel corridor, and the choric grind and roar of war machinery—tanks, planes—outside the hotel's windows. Late Bergman meets early Buñuel blended with mid-period Fellini. But The Silence isn't L'Age d'or with angst or 8½ with religious guilt. Bergman's discovery of free association—because it comes from a mind so austere and hermetic—is more nightmarish and far more powerful in its cosmic disgust. The outrage that greeted The Silence—howls of bishops, scissorings of censors, even feces-smeared toilet paper sent to the director—denoted public horror at a morally serious moviemaker surrendering (it seemed) to a libertine, Dadaist nihilism. But The Silence is a massively serious movie. Its deconstruction of the unconscious in a world drifting toward secularity opened the way to modern directors like Kieslowski and Lars von Trier, for whom cinema is a glorious trapdoor art. Linear storytelling is at worst impossible, at best a matter of negotiating ground that can open up beneath you without notice."
— Harlan Kennedy, "Whatever happened to Ingmar Bergman?"
Film Comment (July-August 1998)

Bergmanorama on Silence