I think that the Silence is the worst. Its like Bergman has lost his way and is trying to find his voice again. He apes Fellini, not very successfully, in it; and brings in some incest to spice it up, but I don’t think that is one of his better films. Winter Light, and Through a Glass Darkly, however, are both masterpieces.
Winter Light definitely. The Silence is the weaker of the three. Winter Light is, IMO, Bergman’s best film overall. Incredible.
Kurt, why not just start a thread on Bergman in general and discuss all of these together?
I don´t know I didn´t thought about that.
What Deckard said.
The Silence is my favourite. It would be presumptuous of me to say which is the best.
I see myself in all the characters of The Silence; perhaps Bergman consciously fragmented experience that way. All three films have silent screaming, but it’s amplified in the foreign setting. Would purgatory be familiar?
Winter Light by far. While the other films address the faith issue in their own way and have much artistic merit. Winter Light deals with its subject straight on in a less stylistic, but more emotionally involving way.
The Silence goes back and forth for being my favorite Bergman overall (switching with Fanny & Alexander the 5hr cut) but right behind those? Winter Light
The creepiness of The Silence won me over.
Winter Light is credibly the most concentrated on faith in the trilogy, but my personal favorite and I believe Bergman’s best effort in his career is Through a Glass Darkly.
Have not seen Through a Glass, but at present I pledge complete allegiance to Winter Light. One of the most quietly eloquent and seamless films I’ve seen. It is also penetrating and nakedly profound and sincere about its subject matter, yet this is not unique to Bergman’s canon.
Indeed, The Silence’s atmosphere smokes off the screen, but it ultimately feels incomplete for me. Well, perhaps not incomplete. As I consider it, it does most definitely seem to have a cohesive vision and rhythm. It is perhaps more accurate to say that I merely prefer the distant beauty of Winter Light’s vision with the warping claustrophobia of The Silence.
I don’t buy the huge Winer Light affair all of you must have but I admire all 3 for different reasons but the one which is by far the more original in composition and one of the greatest in Bergman’s career is The Silence by a loooong margin ahead of the rest. The other two belong to the great Bergman films but not amidst his bona-fide achievements.
The other two belong to the great Bergman films but not amidst his bona-fide achievements.
Why not? I’m with you on Through a Glass Darkly, but I’ll defend the importance of Winter Light to the death. :)
If you let me cut 30 minutes out of it, I might be able to salvage the thing. Its just too long and boring for me to care about the stuff its wanting me to care about. The Silence is just too pretentious. There is a formula, that can help a film maker determine how much symbolism, and how much arrogance a film can contain, in relation to the length of a film, and how interesting it is.
Perhaps the worst film by a great director, The Silence is a horrible film on ALL levels. The actor’s performances were, indeed, the best part of the movie, but it does not save the film. The script is amateur at best. The dialogue, the characters, the pacing, the setting, the execution of the premise-all are bad. The camera work is not bad, but not outstanding, but the direction was a failure.
The slowness of the film is not justified by any reasoning, nor does it help emphasize the meanings of the few sequences in the film.
What possesed him to put midgets in the film? Had he just seen a Fellini movie, and thought, ‘hey, I can do that, too’ sorry Ingmar you can’t. I don’t mind odd films or difficult ones, but when a film is so slow and boring that it offends you then it has become a complete failure. Because the message of the film will not be grasped if nobody cares enough about the movie to pursue its themes.
If the film had been 60 or 70 minutes long, then perhaps it would have been palatable, but the film was so long and drawn out that it became a parody. Its like Bergman, the great screenwriter tried to make a film without words, but he lacks the visual vocabulary to do this, and it is painfully obvious here.
And again, what is with the midgets? What is the purpose of having the boy pee in the hallway? Utterly pointless film.
I’m a big Bergman fan. My favorites of his are Fanny and Alexander, Virgin Spring, Smiles of a Summer Night, Scenes from a Marriage, Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Magician; but this film is just bad. And I’’l reiterate it, Bergman is perhaps the greatest screenwriter in all of cinema, and in this film, its as though he tried to make a movie without words, even though he lacked the visual vocabulary and the editing skills to do so. In the end it was a turd.
The Silence is bad and you think Scenes from a Marriage is something worthwhile?
Your arguments are actually pretty vacant. You’re referring to sequences when the same can be said about the childish exchange of “confessions” in Scenes from a Marriage or the misogyny in Through a Glass Darkly yet you’re bothered because Bergman’s child character in Silence pees on the floor? You’re not that annoyed with the “symbolic” boy of Persona who’s experiencing (as we are) those randomly played images? Alexander’s numbed feelings in the eponymous film are also annoying but it works. You’re not bothered by emotions like that? Alexander must be one of the most annoying teenage individuals I’ve ever seen yet the film works because of that.
So you observed midgets but you ignored two of the most spectacular females in world cinema and their awkwardly portrayed relationship? Or the boy’s short encounter with the old man? So midgets for you are midgets “inspired by Fellini” (what a worthless argument) when you couldn’t realize that they’re part of Bergman’s constant references to theatre and spectacle? The same performance references occurred in Seventh Seal if you were paying attention there.
You criticize the dialogue when there’s hardly any dialogue there. It’s like trying to criticize Pasolini’s Teorema for the dialogue when the dialogue is clearly unimportant to the flow of the work. Perhaps you hate Pasolini’s Teorema too Dope Fiend Jason?
Before you spew more venom to this masterpiece, let me remind you of you incessant disdain over many “slow” masterpieces, particularly from a certain period of cinema and afterwards and not only you were sarcastic over Antonioni’s importance in another thread, now you complain about the “slowness” in one of Bergman’s most illuminating and original films and clearly one of his top 60 films before his imminent decline.
I can’t decide, not mad about Bergman at all. I am enjoying the discussion here though.
Kurt Öhrström
For me it is The silence (1963).