Cries and Whispers

Cries and Whispers (1972) is about two sisters and a servant gathered around a dying woman. The sisters cannot touch each other; the servant carries death in her lap. The film speaks almost entirely through faces and colour. The red is not incidental. Bergman conceived the film from an image of four women in white in a red room. By his own account it came from how he had imagined the soul as a child: a being black on the outside, meaning shame, and red within. Financing it was difficult. Bergman put in 750,000 Swedish kronor of his own savings, borrowed another 200,000, and asked the Swedish Film Institute for help with the 1.5 million budget. To hold costs down the lead actresses and the cinematographer returned their salaries as loans and became nominal co producers. Bergman turned down the Institute's new studios and shot in the decayed interiors of Taxinge-Näsby Castle near Mariefred, between 9 September and 30 October 1971. Sven Nykvist won the Academy Award for Cinematography. Despite being in Swedish the film was nominated for Best Picture, only the fourth foreign language film to be. It runs 95 minutes. Good for: Bergman, films about death and family, and cinema that speaks through colour. Less good for: the film does not soften the pain and offers no consolation. The self harm and the death scenes are heavy. The narrative is not linear; scenes step in and out of individual characters, and that structure shuts some viewers out.