You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
To make a film is to plunge again by its deepest roots down to the world of childhood.
In The Silence , Johan, a boy of ten, waits outside a hotel room into which his mother and a man have just disappeared. The boy “hears his mother's voice, softly whispering, the rustle of bedclothes, the man's whisperings. She laughs, but her laugh is strange and ends in a stifled cry. Johan takes a few steps backwards.”2 These “cries and whispers” that have haunted Bergman's work long before they were to crystallize into a 1972 film title claim our most careful attention. In his major films, the unraveling of the primal scene—the mysterious act of parental sexuality that impinges on every child's developing mind—may resolve the riddle of God's absence, or enable man and woman to approach integral sexual love, or, above all, deliver individual consciousness from its terrible, anguished isolation.
The world of The Silence is almost totally secular and almost totally incomprehensible. The ten-year-old boy, Johan, on a trainride home with his mother, Anna, and his aunt, Ester, is forced to spend a day in a foreign country in a strange hotel where the only other occupants are a troupe of performing dwarfs and an ancient butler who speaks in an unknown tongue. When the boy looks out the window below, he sees “swarms of people who move swiftly and silently,” and later in the night, he discerns an army tank which “stands motionless. Expectant. Threatening.” A foreign