Cries and Whispers

Ingrid Thulin's dress as Karin. White dresses against a red background were a key colour motif in the film.

According to Bergman, he conceived the story during a lonely, unhappy time on Fårö when he wrote constantly.[8] He described a recurring dream of four women in white clothing in a red room, whispering to each other. He said that this symbolised his childhood view of the soul as a faceless person who was black on the outside, representing shame, and red on the inside.[9] The persistence of the vision indicated to Bergman that it could be a film, he said,[8] and he planned a "portrait of my mother ... the great beloved of my childhood".[9] Karin has the same name as Bergman's mother,[10] but all four female protagonists are intended to represent aspects of her personality.[11]

A childhood memory of the Sophiahemmet mortuary also influenced the director:

The young girl who had just been treated lay on a wooden table in the middle of the floor. I pulled back the sheet and exposed her. She was quite naked apart from a plaster that ran from throat to pudenda. I lifted a hand and touched her shoulder. I had heard about the chill of death, but the girl's skin was not cold but hot. I moved my hand to her breast, which was small and slack with an erect black nipple. There was dark down on her abdomen. She was breathing.[12]

Since Bergman's films were difficult to market, foreign capital was unavailable to finance the film. He decided to shoot Cries and Whispers in Swedish rather than English (as his previous film, The Touch, had been) and finance it through his production company, Cinematograph. Although he used 750,000 SEK of his savings and borrowed 200,000 SEK, he also asked the Swedish Film Institute for help with the film's 1.5-million SEK budget. This attracted some criticism, since Bergman was not an up-and-coming director in the greatest need of subsidy.[13][14] To save money, the main actresses and Nykvist returned their salaries as loans and were nominal co-producers.[15]

In his book, Images, Bergman wrote: "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".[16] In an essay included with the DVD, critic Peter Cowie quoted the director: "All of my films can be thought of in terms of black and white, except Cries and Whispers".[17]

When Bergman wrote the screenplay, he intended from the start to cast Liv Ullmann and Ingrid Thulin. He explained his choice of Harriet Andersson of Agnes: "I would very much like to have Harriet, too, since she belongs to this breed of enigmatic women".[13] Andersson had not worked with Bergman for years, and he sent her notes rather than a complete screenplay.[19] Ullmann described receiving a 50-page "personal letter" from Bergman describing the story which began, "Dear Friends: We're now going to make a film together. It is a sort of a vision that I have and I will try to describe it".[20][lower-alpha 2] Andersson did not receive a backstory about Agnes; Agnes' sisters were married with children, but Andersson was uncertain whether Agnes had ever married or became ill at an early age and lived with her mother.[19]

Bergman and Ullmann were in a romantic relationship, and their daughter Linn Ullmann appears as both Maria's daughter and Anna's daughter in the photograph.[23] Another of Bergman's daughters, Lena, also appears as young Maria.[13]

The director initially said that he hoped Mia Farrow would be in the film: "Let's see if that works out. It probably will; why shouldn't it?" However, Farrow was never cast.[13] Kari Sylwan, a novice in Bergman's films, had what would have been Farrow's role.[24]

Few of Bergman's previous films were shot in colour. Red was particularly sensitive, and cinematographer Sven Nykvist made many photography tests to capture balanced combinations of reds, whites and skin colours.[8] To the disappointment of Swedish Film Institute members, Bergman refused to shoot in their new, expensive studios and filmed on location at Taxinge-Näsby Castle.[24][25] Since the mansion's interior was dilapidated, the crew was free to paint and decorate as they saw fit.[24]

Cries and Whispers was filmed at Taxinge-Näsby Castle, outside Mariefred.

Principal photography took place from 9 September to 30 October 1971.[24] Nykvist used Eastmancolor film, which reduced graininess and would be the most sensitive to colours.[26] The final, outdoor swing scene was shot early in production so the filmmakers could have sunlight before the darker season set in.[24] Ullmann said that every scene was shot in natural light, using large windows for indoor scenes.[20]

Andersson described the on-set mood as light, an antidote to the film's heavy subject matter. She said that although she usually read the screenplay and went to bed early during a production, the filmmakers kept her awake late to enhance her tired, ill appearance.[19] The actress modeled her death scene on the death of her father, and Bergman directed her deep, violent inhalations.[19]

Illustration of "Hansel and Gretel" by Ludwig Richter; like Cries and Whispers, the fairy tale suggests familial abandonment.

Professor Egil Törnqvist examined the film's title. The young Maria whispers to her mother, and Karin and Maria whisper to each other as they bond. According to Törnqvist, "The cries relate to the opposite emotions: anguish, impotence, loneliness".[29][lower-alpha 3] Professor Emma Wilson described the family's predicament, with Karin feeling endangered by touch and Maria seeking an "erotic" touch. However, Maria is repelled by Agnes' decay and her dead body.[31] Rueschmann explained Karin's repulsion to touch as a result of her degree of isolation and restraint.[32] The scene where Anna cradles Agnes suggests that touch and sensation are soothing, despite the "opaque" question of their relationship, which may be comparable to sisterhood.[31]

The magic lantern show the sisters enjoy is "Hansel and Gretel", which reveals Agnes' feelings of abandonment and her mother's favouring of Maria; according to Rueschmann, the Brothers Grimm story of sibling unity contrasts the sisters' estrangement.[33][lower-alpha 4] Cinema historian P. Adams Sitney wrote that Hansel and Gretel's parents abandoned them in the forest (symbolism), and Agnes' cancer is the equivalent of the witch in the Brothers Grimm tale.[36] Karin's cutting of her vulva means that her husband will not have sex with her, and the red wine symbolises blood from the womb. Törnqvist wrote that Karin's transfer of blood from her vulva to her mouth means that she will neither have sex nor speak, and preventing communication reinforces loneliness.[37] Sitney wrote that the family is most united when reading Charles Dickens' The Pickwick Papers, which describes "male solidarity and chicanery, threatened by female plots for marriage".[38] According to Frank Gado, detachment returns after Agnes' funeral. Anna is dismissed without warmth or sympathy, and the men deny her monetary rewards despite years of service. Maria also rejects "sentimental appeals" from Karin.[39]

Film scholar Marc Gervais wrote that Cries and Whispers has no definitive solution of whether suffering and death have any meaning, citing the pastor who expresses his own doubts and fears when he eulogises Agnes. Gervais likened this to the protagonist of Bergman's earlier Winter Light, Bergman's own conflicted feelings and his relationship to his father, Erik, a minister of the Church of Sweden.[40][lower-alpha 5] According to Gervais, the ending presents Bergman's solution: a touch, on certain occasions, can make life worthwhile.[42] Törnqvist compared the ending to that of Bergman's 1957 Wild Strawberries; it "points to the past, to a paradisaic existence in this life, to the communion inherent in childhood that has later been lost".[29]

Critic Marco Lanzagorta wrote, "Undeniably, Cries and Whispers is a film about the world of women, and is very open in terms of the gender and sexual politics that it portrays".[43] The story fits Bergman's motif of "warring women", seen earlier in The Silence and Persona and later in Autumn Sonata (1978).[44] The film inspired essays about Bergman's view of women.[45] Patricia Erens wrote, "Bergman's women in such films as Persona and Cries and Whispers are not simply objects of abuse, but creatures through whom Bergman can express his own subjective fears, his many frustrations and failures at preserving autonomy of self and control of reality".[46]

Feminists critiqued the film.[45] In Film Quarterly, Joan Mellen acknowledged that Bergman used his female characters as mouthpieces and his women signify "the dilemma of alienated, suffering human beings".[47] In Bergman's films, women and men fail to find answers to their dilemmas; according to Mellen, the men are unanswered or cannot care for anyone but themselves. However, she wrote that Bergman's women fail because of their biology and an inability to move past their sexuality: "Bergman insists that because of their physiology, women are trapped in dry and empty lives within which they wither as the lines begin to appear on their faces".[47] Critic Molly Haskell assigned Cries and Whispers to Bergman's later filmography, which differed from his earlier works in their view of women. Women in his early films lived in harmony with each other and had more-complete lives; Bergman used the women in Cries and Whispers and his later films as "projections of his soul", revealing his "sexual vanity".[48] According to Haskell, Bergman attacked his female characters for the attributes he gave them: Karin's repression and Maria's sexuality.[48]

Academic Laura Hubner agreed with CineAction essayist Varda Burstyn's view that Cries and Whispers depicts the suppression of women, but it does not endorse the suppression and the film opposes patriarchy.[49][50] Rueschmann traced the emotional estrangement to the women's mother, who reacts to the era's gender roles with "boredom, anger and frustration". According to Rueschmann, her daughters assume (or reject) her position and harm themselves in the process.[51] Agnes' confinement to bed may reflect gender roles and expectations for women about sex, childbirth and death.[52] Author Birgitta Steene disputed what she called Mellen's Marxist feminist analysis, cross-referencing Bergman's realistic and metaphorical films to say that they are not the product of a sexist outlook.[45]

Rueschmann quoted Bergman as saying his "ceaseless fascination with the whole race of women is one of [his] mainsprings. Obviously such an obsession implies ambivalence; it has something compulsive about it".[28] However, he doubted that there was much difference between men and women: "I think that if I had made Cries and Whispers with four men in the leading roles, the story would have been largely the same".[53]

Michelangelo's Pietà; Agnes' death is reminiscent of Jesus' Passion.

Although Agnes' apparent resurrection may reflect Anna's fear (or desire), Emma Wilson wrote that it blurred the line between life and dream and might involve supernatural activity.[54] Bergman explained the scene:

Death is the ultimate loneliness; that is what is so important. Agnes's death has been caught up halfway out into the void. I can't see that there's anything odd about that. Yes, by Christ there is! This situation has never been known, either in reality or at the movies.[37]

Törnqvist advised against a literal reading of Agnes rising from the dead, relating it to the sisters' guilt.[55]

According to Sitney, the statue in the prologue may be Apollo or Orpheus. If the artistic, doomed Agnes matches Orpheus as well as Bergman, Agnes' mother may correspond to Eurydice (representing "the green world").[56] P. Adams Sitney concluded that Cries and Whispers tells of an "Orphic transformation of terror into art, of the loss of the mother into the musical richness of autumnal color".[57]

The sisters' Aunt Olga uses the magic lantern to narrate "Hansel and Gretel", and Sitney connected this with "the gift of fairy tales—and thereby the psychic-defense machinery for exteriorising infantile and Oedipal terrors".[35] In the folk tale "Cinderella", the wicked stepsisters' bleeding feet as a metaphor for menstruation is magnified by Karin's cutting of her vulva.[58] Her laugh is reminiscent of the wicked witch in "Hansel and Gretel", as she reacts to the damage her sexuality has done.[58]

Törnqvist, seeing that Anna prays for her dead daughter while eating an apple, wrote: "The eating of the apple links Anna, whose dead daughter was undoubtedly an illegitimate child, with the Eve of the Fall, with Original Sin".[59] According to editor Raphael Shargel, Anna seems oblivious to the sacrilege of snacking immediately after worship and that her choice of food is the forbidden fruit.[60]

Törnqvist wrote that Agnes' prolonged pain and death resemble the Passion of Jesus,[61] and Wilson compared the position of Agnes' arms and legs to Jesus' body after his Passion.[54] Gado also saw parallels to the crucifixion of Jesus and flashbacks to Good Friday and a mention of Twelfth Night at the end of the film (which he considered ironic, since Twelfth Night is associated with revelation).[39] The magic-lantern show takes place on Twelfth Night.[33] Sitney, Rueschmann, and Irving Singer described the scene where Anna cradles Agnes as reminiscent of Pietà,[62] with Lanzagorta specifying Michelangelo's Pietà.[43] According to academic Arthur Gibson, the Pietà rite becomes redemption: "Anna is holding in her arms the pain and loneliness and sin of the world caught up in the innocent Divine Sufferer".[63]

Before the film's release, estimations of Bergman were lowered by The Rite (1969) and The Touch (1971).[79] In Sweden, Svenska Dagbladet critic Åke Janzon and Dagens Nyheter critic Hanserik Hjerten assessed Cries and Whispers as a poetically-rendered psychological study.[80] Critic O. Foss wrote a less-positive review in Fant, calling it "a rhapsody of petrified Bergman themes".[80]

The film was generally praised in the United States.[80] In The New York Times, Vincent Canby called it a "magnificent, moving, and very mysterious new film".[81] Roger Ebert gave Cries and Whispers four stars (out of four) in his initial review: "We slip lower in our seats, feeling claustrophobia and sexual disquiet, realizing that we have been surrounded by the vision of a film maker who has absolute mastery of his art".[82] Variety staff praised the direction for "a hypnotic impact".[64] In New York, Judith Crist called it "a work of genius— certainly the most complex, the most perceptive and the most humane of Bergman's works to date".[83] François Truffaut made a theatrical comparison, saying that the film "begins like Chekhov's Three Sisters and ends like The Cherry Orchard and in between it's more like Strindberg".[84]

Empire critic David Parkinson gave Cries and Whispers five stars in 2000, writing that the film fit a subset of "character study" at which Bergman was adept.[79] Reviewing the DVD in The New Yorker, Richard Brody said that despite its period setting, the emotional drama resonated with modern audiences.[65] Ebert added it to his "Great Movies" list in 2002, writing that to watch the film "is to touch the extremes of human feeling. It is so personal, so penetrating of privacy, we almost want to look away".[17] That year, James Berardinelli praised Andersson's performance as "so powerful that we feel like intruders watching it. She screams, whimpers, begs, and cries. She craves death and fears it". Berardinelli considered Bergman's use of crimson effective in creating mood; the "natural associations one makes with this color, especially in a story like this, are of sin and blood".[85] Zendry Svärdkrona's 2003 Aftonbladet review called it a masterpiece with wonderful aesthetics but unpleasant subject matter, citing Nykvist and Andersson.[86] Emanuel Levy praised the film's cinematography and the performances of the female leads, calling the result a masterpiece in 2008.[87] Cries and Whispers ranked 154th in the British Film Institute's 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll of the greatest films ever made.[88] Leonard Maltin gave the film three stars in his 2014 Movie Guide, praising its visuals but cautioning viewers about the large amount of dialogue.[89] Reviewing the Blu-ray in 2015, SF Gate critic Mick LaSalle called Cries and Whispers a "masterpiece" in which the colour red had an important effect.[90] Los Angeles Times critic Andy Klein placed the film "solidly in the existential/emotional angst mode of [Bergman's] best work", called it a triumphant comeback from The Touch, and joked about the resurrection scene: "Yes, technically this is a zombie film".[91]

Don Druker wrote a negative review in the Chicago Reader, criticising a lack of substance,[92] and Time Out's review called the film a "red herring" compared to Bergman's purer psychological dramas.[93] In a 2015 Slant Magazine review, Clayton Dillard expressed disappointment in Agnes' cancer not being depicted as such (with her expressing passion-like pain instead) and Karin's self-harm not being clearly explained.[94]

Cries and Whispers won three categories at the 9th Guldbagge Awards in Sweden, including Best Film.[95] At Cannes, it won the Technical Grand Prize.[96] It was the fourth foreign-language film ever nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture,[lower-alpha 7] in addition to four other nominations at the 46th Academy Awards; Sven Nykvist won for Best Cinematography.[98]

The film was nominated for, and won, several other awards from critics' associations and festivals. At the 27th British Academy Film Awards, Sven Nykvist was nominated for Best Cinematography and Ingrid Thulin for Best Supporting Actress;[99] at the 30th Golden Globe Awards, it was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film.[100]