In late 1972 the European director Ingmar Bergman released an ambitious feature film that caught the movie industry unawares. His third work in colour, Cries and Whispers portrayed the members of a bourgeois family confronting mortality in turn-of-the-century Sweden. To classify Bergman’s film as a period drama is to do this finely shaped production a disservice. Compared with the contemporaneous Death in Venice, Luchino Visconti’s 1971 interpretation of a Thomas Mann novella set at much the same time, it is obvious the director was not attempting an historical re-enactment. Instead, Cries and Whispers is a visually arresting production which places…