After "Faces", Ingmar Bergman's views on artists gradually changed. If the image of the artist in "Clown Night" and "Face" has been heroic in many ways in the spirit of romanticism and individualism, then Bergman's films shot in the 1960s show some A kind of self-contempt, a kind of exposure to the artist's anti-humanity and indifference. The characteristics of Jesus Christ have disappeared in subsequent films. The sacrifice is no longer the artist himself, but the recipient of the art. In an interview, Bergman even talked about the "cannibalism" of artists: "They were thrown into a crisis, or they saw friends and people around them being stirred up by various conflicts. Uneasy, but the cannibal cells in their bodies are often very active, and they also talk about'what an interesting theme this is.' I believe that I can make a difference in this area..."
The "Silent Trilogy" composed of "Still in the Mirror" (1961), "Winter Light" (1962) and "Silence" expresses the artist's sense of crisis in Bergman's mind and reflects his The so-called "conflict between internal and external violence" means that the external threatening society is opposed to the internal personal realm, making the latter often feel the threat of collapse under the pressure of powerful destructive forces.
On the surface, the film "The Silence" is really unremarkable: the sisters live in a foreign country, they cannot communicate with each other, and because they do not understand the local language, they cannot communicate with the locals; the sister indulges and can even communicate with each other. The bartender who met for the first time and had a vulgar demeanor had sex and ignored his dying sister; the sister advocated rationality, but had a perverse personality. She had a ambivalent feeling of compassion and jealousy towards her sister, and finally died a lonely guest in his hometown; John maintained the relationship between them. His only bond, often looking at the strange and malicious outside world with innocent childish eyes, only got a little warmth from the sick aunt, but even he could not fully understand the last words she left to him. .
However, this film is not in the plot structure, but in the use of symbolic film language to express the philosophical thinking of the film author and attracts attention. From the endless long queue of tanks passing by the car windows at the beginning of the film, to the giant tanks that suddenly appeared in the deserted square in the middle of the film; from the weird life habits and stage performances of dwarfs resembling aliens, to language The unbearable heat and unbearable "silence" in an unfamiliar and unfamiliar country; all of this reveals a sense of threat, strangeness, and indifference, and gives the audience an indescribable depression.
Bergman’s clues to the film "The Silence" can be traced back to the 1940s. In 1946, he stayed in Hamburg for a few weeks, when tanks were still patrolling the streets at night; soon, in the summer heat, he stayed in a "dirty little hotel" in Grenob, France for some time. The view from the room where Anna was dating the waiter was obviously the same as Bergman's memory of another hotel on the Avenue Saint-Anne in Paris, where he was having a tryst with a woman. Some of the film's material is also taken from Bergman's radio drama "City".
Those familiar with Bergman's life experience know that from an early age, Bergman was quite disgusted with the strict discipline of his father, who was a pastor, and the question of "whether God exists" has always been the subject of many of his works. In "The Silence", East, who is both the representative of reason and the incarnation of the "father" or "God", has actually become a walking dead, but she still tries in vain to control her sister. It was a perfect irony for Anna to boldly admit that she had sex with a strange waiter on the church floor in front of East. Bergman believes that her love is a kind of "tyrant love." He once said to the film critic Prouss: "Love must be open. Otherwise, love is the beginning of death. This is what I want to say." In his view, the death of "father" is God-faith- -The death of love.
Another reason why "Silence" is so eye-catching is that the film demonstrates the unprecedented smoothness of Bergman's work. The labyrinth of corridors in the hotel, the interiors of the suites, the secret rooms of the bars and cafes, all of which have been explored by Bergman’s cameras, as if he was familiar with every hidden and remote corner of these hostile environments. .
The symbols used in the film arouse people's curiosity but are unpredictable: Why does the tank roll at night and then stop outside the East window? What does the giant replica of Rubens’s famous painting in the hotel mean? Why do the gnomes dress John in women's clothes? The film’s narrative form is integrated, and the context seems reasonable, so these signs and symbols are not as arbitrary as some critics have said.
East, played by Ingrid Doolin, is pale, cautious and worried. She embodies bitterness and self-loathing. And Anna, played by Gunel Lindblom, is the opposite of East. She is healthy, beautiful and sexy, longing for life and freedom, and unwilling to be restrained. She exudes a lazy lust. She took off the bracelet from her hand, put the bracelet on the bedside table, and swiftly opened the lipstick and applied lipstick to her lips.
Bergman’s film is not a cultural isolation. In the early 1960s, many major Western directors had similar works. For example, Antonioni is in the indifferent modern world to detect people's mentally insatiable tendencies. In "Last year in Marion Made", Renai chose a villa with a corridor that looked like an inaccessible corridor in the Timoka Hotel as his narrative location. Rob-Grillet and Beckett, as two famous writers for the time, have the same impression as Bergman: people are in the most goalless stage in the development process. The economic prosperity of the post-war period in the West caused a sense of boredom among the bourgeoisie. Material abundance comes at the cost of moral imbalance. The goals of the society are ambiguous; the individual feels that he is subject to careless domination; the self is in a state of dullness and embarrassment, rejecting the outside world and curling up in oneself, unable to communicate with people and things around him. The "Silence" filmed in the remote Nordic lands quite accurately recorded the echoes of this common existentialism that permeated the continental European bourgeois intellectuals.
Like the above-mentioned directors, Bergman did not pay much attention to the literary foundation of the film and did not pay much attention to the dialogue, but he emphasized the emotion and sentiment expressed in the film. If "Winter Light" is a literary film, "The Silence" is not at all.
Compared with some Western films since the 1970s, certain sexual scenes in "The Silence" can be said to be insignificant. But the strong reaction and heated debate it caused may have been unexpected by Bergman. First, the Swedish Film Censorship Agency requested that the scene of a bar be deleted. Later, a campaign launched by the free press prompted the authorities to make some amendments to certain regulations, that is, if the artistic quality of a film is beyond reproach, it should not be deleted. This new regulation came into effect exactly three days before the "Silence" was issued a license. However, Swedish audiences and authorities at the time were still deeply disturbed by the sexual performance in the film, and their reaction was extremely strong. Certain newspapers have opened columns for several weeks in a row to publish disagreements for and against. In the first 7 weeks of the film’s release in Sweden, only 27 theaters received more than 600,000 viewers. In France, the inspection agency initially refused to issue a permit for the film. The person in charge asked to delete the bar scene and the hotel tryst scene. In West Germany, the controversy about the film has been submitted to Congress; millions of viewers flooded into the cinema, making the distributor Atlas Films a huge fortune. "Soviet Screen" fiercely attacked Bergman, saying that his film showed "latent fascism and hatred of mankind." The film was a huge success in the United Kingdom and the United States. Even so, most people were attracted to the cinema out of curiosity. On the eve of the film’s release, Bergman quoted a reputable academician of the Swedish Academy of Sciences about "Madame Chatterley's Lover": "This novel will have many redundant readers." Bergman added: " I think there will be a lot of redundant viewers in this film!"
The evaluation of the film by the American film critics seems to be fair. For example, Bosley Crosser praised the performance in the film in the New York Times, but complained that Bergman did not give the audience enough to extend and find the hidden meaning in the film and get emotional satisfaction. Dwight MacDonald criticized its lack of internal basis, making the sisters' behavior seem arbitrary and annoying. He deeply regretted Bergman's claim to be a philosopher in several films shot at the same time, thinking that his talents are more suitable for concrete things than abstract things. Even John Simon, who later became one of Bergman’s most loyal supporters, expressed his disappointment with "The Silence" in the "New Republic" magazine. He felt that the film lacked a kind of "forward momentum" and "Human content".
Although this film has caused many controversies, the Swedish Film Institute awarded the "Silence" a grand prize-the Golden Beetle Award in the awards that year.
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