How Ingmar Bergman Filmed Edvard Munch

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 thematic and aesthetic concerns above period accuracy: the world it portrays is symbolic, not naturalistic.

At the time Ingmar Bergman’s future was under a question mark. Unable to get sufficient backing due to dwindling confidence in his work, Cries and Whispers had been shot on a shoestring budget. The actors agreed to delayed payment of their fees until the director was financial again. International distributors were hesitant to touch a new Bergman film, and the American rights were purchased by a company that mostly handled soft pornography and thrillers. When production was completed there were hassles getting a cinema for an opening season. Bergman, who was resigned to moving into television (he had agreed to develop Scenes from a Marriage for Swedish television), remained in Stockholm over Christmas and did not travel to New York for the film’s premiere. Then came an excited telephone call from the USA.[1]

American audiences and critics greeted Cries and Whispers as an instant classic. Calling it “not an easy film to describe or to endure”, Vincent Canby of the New York Times finished a rapturous review with the judgment: “It stands alone and it reduces almost everything else you’re likely to see this season to the size of a small cinder.”[2] Within a day patrons were reputedly queuing outside the cinema; and the film subsequently performed well across American up-market and arthouse cinemas. Attendances were so strong that the film was rushed into release in Europe, where the press reception was radiant. Over the following months Bergman’s production was feted at film festivals, being nominated for prizes at Cannes and Venice. Then it was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Film, one the few instances Hollywood allowed a foreign language production to compete under the category. Bergman’s cameraman Sven Nykvist took the Oscar for best cinematography.

Cries and Whispers remains a major achievement by one of postwar cinema’s most prolific auteurs. But film historians’ custom of sealing off Bergman’s films from much else, and viewing each new work as the next segment in his growing oeuvre, hinders its interpretation. Reading commentary on the Swedish director’s autumnal masterpiece, a series of critical questions seem not so much unanswered, as unasked. Because what is obvious from the first reel is that far from being a free-standing work, Ingmar Bergman had presented a lovingly crafted homage.

Cries and Whispers manifestly emulates the style of the Norwegian modern painter Edvard Munch. The drama employs scenes and figures recalling the artist’s evocative paintings, and uses a cast of predominantly female characters who act out an allegorical story seemingly modelled on Munch’s ominous symbolism. In keeping with this creative source, Bergman’s cinematography not only uses a suggestive palette of white, red and black for sets and costumes throughout, but even his film’s title alludes to the painter’s famed image of fin de siècle despair The Scream. So the question raised by this film is how did Ingmar Bergman translate Edvard Munch?

The dominant father, the outwardly confident woman, the loyal housekeeper, the troubled son, the indifferent mother—Bergman had long been structuring his films around schematic casts. The character types would be assembled, a theme introduced (religious doubts, relationship stresses, coping with illness), and the drama would emerge from the interaction of these figures as they confronted—or avoided—the issue. In some films the selected roles carried considerable cultural weight, with Bergman’s cast appearing to stand as symbolic or archetypal characters.

Given the permutations that could be played out with his figures, the creative possibilities were manifold. Bergman might try a theme, add or remove a character type, and try anew. Which is how in the early 1960s the director coined the term “chamber films” to describe what he was doing.[3] Citing as the inspiration for his form those musically structured “chamber plays” of the nineteenth-century dramatist August Strindberg, Bergman had explained that:

The film is chamber music—music in which, with an extremely limited number of voices and figures, one explores the essence of a number of motifs. The backgrounds are extrapolated, put in a sort of fog. The rest is a distillation.[4]

The aim was to move beyond plot-driven conventional cinema. In its place Bergman aspired to have films perform in a more rhythmic sense, using the editing process to organise the elements of drama—the order of scenes, the design of interiors, the interplay of shots—in gathering emotional and visual rhythms which flow through the entire composition, and so give it an overarching psychological and aesthetic coherence.

Cries and Whispers was a variation on two of Bergman’s previous 1960s chamber films, The Silence and Persona. These pieces had used a contrast between two female characters: one woman was healthy, sociable and privately sensual, while the other woman was cultured, intellectual and suffering a debilitating illness.[5] In each work the audience is drawn into a pressure-cooker atmosphere arising from the characters being set in physical and psychological confinement. The desperate loneliness of the sick person spills out. An overt debt to Strindberg’s plays was also evident in a power game taking place: one of the characters seems sure of herself, and the drama involves her stable matter-of-fact outlook crumbling.

The Silence of 1963 revolves around two sisters, the intellectual Ester (Ingrid Thulin) and the feminine Anna (Gunnel Lindblom), and the latter’s child, Johan. It is the present day and the trio are travelling across Europe, but they break their train trip because Ester is ill. They take a suite, comprising two rooms and a bathroom, in a large old hotel. This is in an unidentified city behind the Iron Curtain, during a heatwave, and as a political crisis is under way. Refugees pass by, jet fighters fly overhead, tanks patrol the streets at night. No one speaks a language the three know, leading to mounting isolation and anxiety.

All three characters are at a loose end. Ester, who coughs blood at the start of the film, and is racked by pain throughout, mostly lies in her hotel bed smoking and drinking heavily. When she is not feeling suffocated, frightened and angry, she listens to Bach’s Goldberg Variations on a radio and toys with translating a text, seeking a purpose. Ester won’t see a doctor; instead she repeatedly calls the hotel’s old porter, who starts to dote on her. In the meantime Anna makes herself up, then slips outside for diversion. Wearing a summer frock, she stands out in streets jammed only with shuffling men, continuing into a sultry café, again crammed with men, many in dark glasses. Then it is aimless wandering for her in the stylised city, culminating in a sleazy dark club where a couple in the audience unashamedly have sex. A waiter follows Anna back to the hotel where he subjects her to controlling, then punishing sex.

For his part, Johan plays in the hotel’s labyrinthine corridors. He befriends the hotel’s porter, fools with a vaudevillian troupe of dwarfs staying in another room, and gazes without understanding at a Rubens painting of a mythological rape scene hanging by the stairs.[6] Actually, this child repeatedly prompts the appearance of symbolic images. When he draws for Ester, the boy gives her vampire’s teeth. And when the porter shows Johan old family photographs, they depict him as a boy standing over coffins at funerals.

The next day Anna and Johan resume their journey, leaving Ester in the care of the hotel’s porter. Notably, the film begins and ends on a train, although there has been a reversal: where Anna perspired and was agitated at the start, and Ester was cool and composed, now the women have exchanged states. Rains break the heatwave as mother and son depart the city.

What happens in The Silence? A look through assorted essays on Bergman’s work shows that few have heeded the early advice of the American critic Susan Sontag: “the temptation to invent more story should be resisted”.[7] Among the points commonly made about this film are that Anna is promiscuous due to parental rejection in childhood; that Ester is a lesbian; that Ester lusts after Anna; and that Ester dies (of suffocation) at the end of the film.[8] None of this is borne out when viewing The Silence.

Yes, the sisters lash out at each other repeatedly. There certainly is sexual tension between them, but it boils into a mixture of disapproval, disgust and self-loathing for both. We learn that Anna is in a loveless marriage, her husband busy with work. It emerges that Anna believes as a teenager Ester was manipulative, playing her sister and father off against each other; and Ester exaggerated the role of grieving daughter when their father died. Later, when Anna and Johan are away at lunch, Ester confesses in a bitter soliloquy in her hotel room that she consciously did not marry when she had the opportunity. And there has been a cost: “I wouldn’t accept my wretched role,” Ester says to herself, “now it’s too damn lonely.”

Barely ten minutes into Bergman’s 1966 film Persona, a psychiatrist tells the character Elisabet that her predicament is she doesn’t wish to play the available roles. That this film would likewise dwell on “role” was forecast in the title, which refers to the mask worn by an actor in Roman theatre. The title also refers to the individual subject, and psychological theories of identity.[9] The film historian Peter Cowies has even suggested that Bergman used the main characters to portray a Jungian dichotomy of the “persona” (the character we show the world) and the “alma” (our inner image of ourselves).[10]

The film’s premise was modelled on August Strindberg’s 1889 chamber play The Stronger, a single-act piece for a cast of two, Mrs X and Miss Y, only one of whom speaks. In Bergman’s cinematic variation it is the mid-1960s and a famous actress, Elisabet (Liv Ullmann), has had a nervous collapse on stage in which she lost the power of speech, becoming lethargic. Admitted to a clinic, she does not respond to treatment, tearing up her husband’s letters and a photograph of their child. After three months with no change in her condition, Elisabet is sent in the company of a young nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson), to rest in a beach cottage lent by her psychiatrist. The two women are alone, and Alma has to do all speaking for both. This one-sided conversation leads the nurse to reach progressively deeper into herself, revealing her emotional life. She speaks frankly about her fiancé, prior sexual liaisons and an abortion. The lack of feedback—and a deceitful letter she is tricked into reading—sees Alma become insecure, confused, then distraught. The film ends without resolving Elisabet’s condition. Alma puts on her nurse’s uniform, tidies the cottage, and departs alone on a bus.

Persona stands as not just one of Bergman’s most accomplished films; it is also critically renowned as a key work of 1960s cinema. It is elliptical, abstract and complex. For example, what are we to make of Elisabet performing in the classical drama Electra when she had her collapse? Which role did she perform, Clytemnestra the unscrupulous mother or Electra the vengeful daughter? Might Electra’s yearning to kill-the-mother be relevant?[11] And is there a significance to Elisabet being sent on the isolating “rest cure”, a treatment devised in the nineteenth century to remedy the adverse affects of education on women?[12] What of its debilitating effect upon the nurse, who is weakening? The relationship becomes vampire-like as one figure gains strength, absorbing the other’s character.

Persona’s difficult and disturbing mood is induced by Bergman’s design, camerawork and editing. The settings are Scandinavian modern with the camera accentuating textures, while the film’s overall style is cool, geometric and spare. Making much of the black-and-white format, the director uses stark bright rooms, inter-cutting with shaded interiors and near-black scenes. The emptiness of this world is stressed by cropping out other characters, and having Alma speak at the static camera. Frequent use of intimate facial close-ups also amplifies the emotional intensity, adding to the aesthetic elegance of what is a handsome film in pictorial terms. There is an austere beauty to the cinematography.

At times Bergman visually “quotes” silent cinema. Figures will be posed like screen vamps in both The Silence and Persona, in fact, a hallucinatory bedroom scene in Persona echoes early vampire films. Later the lighting and composition evoke shadowy images of femmes fatales from silent cinema.[13] Then there is Bergman’s use of montage. Persona begins with close-ups and sounds of a projector powered up, film being spooled into it, then a reel running through. Next comes a disorienting montage of disconnected sequences, including old animation and silent movies. This sets a tone of abrupt, somewhat hallucinatory shifts in narrative. (At one point the film itself appears to tear, then jam and melt in the projector.)

Soon after Persona’s release in 1966, Susan Sontag pointed that the difficulty of his films often “stems from the fact Bergman withholds the kind of clear signals for sorting out fantasies from reality”.[14] Late in the film Elisabet enters her nurse’s bedroom and caresses Alma. Afterward the patient claims no memory of the event, and Alma wonders if she dreamed it. Sontag elaborated on these moments:

Actions and dialogue are given which the viewer is bound to find puzzling, being unable to decipher whether certain scenes take place in the past, present, or future; and whether certain images and episodes belong to reality or fantasy.[15]

This may account for the older man wearing sunglasses who appears midway through, and pesters Alma, calling her “Elisabet”. Many critics assume he is Elisabet’s husband, one even claiming he is blind. There is nothing in Persona to support this. Instead we should ask if the man existed, or whether this was a fancy in Elisabet’s, or Alma’s, stressed mind.

As the disorienting film nears the end, the two women sit facing each other across a table, similarly dressed in black clothing, and Alma delivers a monologue on Elisabet’s maternity and relationship to her son. The camera shows Elisabet’s face as she listens. The monologue is repeated in its entirety, this time with the camera turned on Alma’s speaking face. Then, Bergman fills the screen with a composite face: left side Alma, right side Elisabet. Matters are scrambled further as Alma randomly switches between the pronouns “you” and “I” in her monologue, and adopts Elisabet’s clothing and hair style.[16] Some reviewers interpreted this as Alma and Elisabet merging identities, or else exchanging mental states, one recovering and the other becoming ill.[17] This is not established on viewing the film.

If audiences were well aware of Ingmar Bergman’s use of schematic casts, in the wake of Persona the evolving discipline of film criticism fixed on his attitudes to women. Prompted by the rise of feminist theory, the late 1960s saw academics suggesting his female character types represented intellect and bodily impulse as being divided and at war; they held, in particular, that a least one woman who unifies intelligence and vitality was nowhere present in his films. This contention intensified in the 1970s, with the Scandinavian feminist Maria Bergom-Larsson going so far as to pronounce that “Woman in Bergman almost without exception constitutes ‘nature.’ She is confined within the sphere of reproduction. She is ‘sex’.”[18] If there is some truth to the former observations, the latter is just not correct, with The Silence, Persona and Cries and Whispers proving the director rejected such a trite chauvinist view of woman. After all, these three films progressively examine the causes and motives for the actions taken by his women (whereas the behaviour of males is not explored, and can appear instinctive).

That Bergman’s work was affected by a conservative, at moments mythic image of women was not discounted by the director, who in interview would state his main interest was kvinnosläktet (the race/family of women), and that “The world of women is my universe.”[19] Then again, Ingmar Bergman never embraced the extremist views of August Strindberg, one of his main stated influences.[20] If he had several times directed on stage Strindberg’s plays, and a debt to the drama, fiction and visual art produced within the Strindberg milieu is evident in his cinema, Bergman seems to have felt a growing affinity for the paintings of Edvard Munch. The end result of this interest would be Cries and Whispers.

It is hard to disentangle the interpretation of Munch’s art from speculation about his emotional life. And no wonder. At only five years of age, he lost his mother to tuberculosis. His father, Dr Christian Munch, a district physician, never got over her death and struggled with black depression. Sofie, the eldest daughter, also contracted tuberculosis and wasted away, succumbing to the infection in her fifteenth year. Young Edvard, the next in line, was always sickly, rheumatic and feverish. And there were health problems with his younger siblings, as well as with an aunt who took over care of the children. The artist recalled her often spitting blood. So even the bare facts of Munch’s early life suggest abundant parallels and sources linking personal tragedy with imaginative struggle; to be sure, the artist self-dramatised his childhood with the words, “Disease, madness and death were the black angels surrounding my cradle.”[21]

The name Munch nowadays sets art enthusiasts talking of elemental cycles, hermetic secrets and archetypal imagery mated with a post-impressionist stylisation of forms and handling of colour. His symbolically charged canvases depicted a moral world of mystical powers and animal urges where love struggles with sickness and sex ushers in death. This was painting with a semi-religious message, explaining human relations in pre-Freudian terms.

Popular perceptions of Munch’s art assumes that its imagery and symbolism directly mirrors a troubled life; and also that this is uniquely his vision we are confronting. True, his recurring image of a family gathered around a dying girl is based on personal experience; however, the artist did invent motifs and allegorical stories. The thematic influence of a circle of Symbolists close to him is frequently evident and, at times, he responded to their suggestions.

All revolves around Munch’s portrayal of women, who are often held to be vampires and harbingers of death. It is risky to assume these sinister meanings. Take Munch’s painting on the theme of unrequited passion, Love and Pain. It shows a young woman with long red hair, who is surrounded by a pool of darkness, hugging a man against her chest and tenderly pressing a kiss to his neck. With his head lying on a table, he curls his body into hers, sheltering in her embrace. Violence is neither shown nor suggested, let alone any indication of struggle: there are no fangs, no blood. Instead, the couple are close, gentle and loving.

But the symbolists in the artist’s circle nagged him to rename this composition after its first exhibition in 1894. Henceforth the picture was known as Vampire.^[22] The change reconfigured his picture’s emphasis, recasting the female as dangerous with her cascading tresses now doubling as flowing blood, and her kiss becoming a bite. This prompted a passage on the work published by the dramatist Strindberg in the Symbolist journal La Review Blanche:

Golden rain falls on the unfortunate kneeling creature who craves of his evil genius the boon of death by the prick of a needle. Golden fibres which bind to earth and to suffering. A rain of blood flows in torrents over the accursed head of him who seeks the misery, the divine misery of being loved, that is of loving.[23]

Instead of comforting the man, the female figure now preyed upon him—so an interpretation which ran counter to Munch’s original meaning was established.

Edvard Munch moved broadly in European symbolist circles, but in the 1890s he was in the thrall of a single man. Scandinavian bohemians were then intellectually indebted to two progressives, Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, both outspoken critics of bourgeois hypocrisy and convention. Yet on one matter they were opposed. The elderly Ibsen, a principled enemy of insular chauvinism, was sympathetic to women’s rights. Strindberg, for all his social radicalness, was a manipulative egotist who preyed upon women, casually discarding them after sexual conquest. Munch admired and knew Ibsen (who visited Munch’s exhibits), designing the Berlin productions for Hedda Gabler and Ghosts.[24] But Strindberg was more attuned to the slightly younger painter, becoming a close friend for a time.[25] And it is Strindberg’s opinions—he treated the assertive ‘New Woman’ as a femme fatale, an alluring threat to his masculinity—which have skewed understanding of Munch’s subtle paintings.^[26]

Surveying the artist’s work, Munch never does show women as Strindbergian predators. There are no signs of cruelty or malevolence—not once do his figures possess claws, fangs, fierce or monstrous attributes.[27] Instead, the facial expressions on Munch’s female figures are often calm, serene, even gentle, as also are their poses and body language. Likewise with his portraits of female acquaintances who are depicted with affection, respect, intellectual regard. (At a time when life models could be treated poorly, those employed by Munch commended him for being ‘exceedingly correct and friendly’.^[28]) And there are sentimental, evocative and elegant paintings of women—far from the poisonous femmes fatale of the Symbolists.

This approach was in keeping with Ingmar Bergman’s outlook, although in the case of his Cries and Whispers two schematic compositions by Munch are evident sources. If the film’s main set evokes Death in the Sick Room and By the Deathbed, Munch’s 1895 pictures of his consumptive sister Sofie dying at home, the prevailing imagery and symbols used by the director stem from Three Stages of Woman of 1895 (called Sphinx by the symbolists) and The Dance of Life of 1899.[29] Both present mythic images for aspects of the feminine.[30]

Three Stages of Woman shows three female figures before an abbreviated landscape. These women visibly symbolise a pattern to human nature.[31] The figure to the left, in a floating white gown, turns left as her blonde hair catches the breeze. Lacking facial features – no eyes, no mouth – she stands upon an open shore, clasping a garland of yellow flowers. The central red-haired woman is an assertive Amazon. Smiling wantonly at the viewer, she stands before a rigid tree in a defiant frontal pose, flaunting her Olympian nudity with legs braced and arms grasped behind her neck. The right raven-haired figure wears a black dress of mourning and stands in a shady forest. With hands behind her back and face ghostly pale, her eyes are dark cavities staring outward.[32] (In a lithographic version her gaunt face has no mouth.)

The Dance of Life again suggests a rhythmic cycle, this time Munch showing couples celebrating the mid-summer solstice. The schematic setting is an outdoor dance before a shore with a brilliant orb hanging over the horizon. Whether moon or sun, it recalls a pagan deity as it casts a pillar-like reflection on the waters and sets an ominous mood.[33] Once more attention falls on three female figures. A solitary blonde in randomly patterned white dress stands on the left and what appears the same blonde, now in black, stands at far right.[34] Between these framing figures, a cadaverous red-haired woman in a fluid red gown dances before a throng of waltzing couples. The left figure has her hands reaching forward in an accepting gesture, a pink flower springing up at her feet, whereas the mirroring woman at right looks on with a frown, hands clasped before her pelvis. And the deathly central dancer, her crimson dress recalling flowing blood (it pools at her feet), embraces a male partner who himself resembles a desiccated corpse.[35] The three aspects of woman—blithe freedom (white), sexual compulsion (red), ashen repression (black)—represent Munch’s perception of women’s options in the dance of life, a point underscored by the leering tubby man in right midfield who overwhelms his waltz partner.[36]

These symbolically charged paintings, with their abbreviated settings, evocative red-white-black palettes, and figures which embody different aspects of ‘woman’, supplied a pictorial style Ingmar Bergman would adapt for his next chamber film on the feminine theme.

Cries and Whispers opens with a Munch signature motif: Death in the Sickroom. To the sound of ticking clocks, the film’s director leads his principal characters into an uncomfortable domestic scene. It is the turn of the century. A woman is dying. More women enter the scene but seemingly shrink from the others, looking away, even from the camera—except for one. The servant. She stares, then, after a pause, breaks off and the spell is broken. In this way Bergman gathers in a glance that emotional turmoil repeatedly painted by Edvard Munch, the brooding fears, the sense of isolation.

Agnes (Harriet Andersson), a sickly woman in her thirties who has never married, is dying in great pain. She is being nursed at her country estate by three women. There is Karin (Ingrid Thulin), the older sister, who is in a loveless marriage. And their younger sister Maria (Liv Ullmann), an admired beauty, who has known domestic troubles, too. Then Anna (Kari Sylwan), a young near-silent servant who lost her only child, a daughter, not long before, and now devotedly attends the failing Agnes.

The film, which is structured around a sequence of flashbacks or fantasies, reveals these women’s strained relations over three anguished days. They individually reflect on the past, recalling moments of personal upset. The interior of the mansion sets the mood, for there is something suffocating about the rooms as if these women are trapped. That home presses memories upon them: the characters are surrounded by their histories.

Through this grim tale will also pass four men, partly to act as counterfoils, partly to personify the worst aspects of masculinity.^[37] There is the doctor, a repugnant womaniser, who eats noisily and vulgarly at table, and paws his patient in a medical examination (she moves his wandering hand up from her groin[38]). There is a rigidly formal minister who lacks any warmth or compassion towards the bereaved. There is Karin’s hard older husband, who inflicts sex on her as a weapon of control. And there is Maria’s spineless and ineffectual husband, whose seeming response to her past infidelity is to attempt to take his own life. In their relations with men, we find, these women have endured manipulation, belittlement, abuse and grief.

The women take turns waiting for Agnes to die. They wash her, change her nightgown, read to her. When she groans in pain, Anna gets into her bed, bares a breast, caresses and nurses her. Within hours Agnes expires in writhing agony. Light fades from the room and Maria sobs. Women arrive to lay out the body, and the funeral formalities commence.

Later, the prone corpse calls from her death chamber, begging her sisters to hold her a last time. This once solitary child now craves the loving tenderness of her sisters. Karin refuses on the grounds it is repugnant, then Maria runs shrieking from the room. The devout Anna gets into the death bed, and cradles her mistress’s corpse tightly in a pose deliberately recalling the pieta. It is only then that, in what we realise is a hallucinatory scene, Agnes gives up the ghost.

The film ends with the two surviving sisters and their husbands discussing the disposal of Agnes’s belongings as the domestic servant mutely awaits her dismissal. Then Anna goes to her room, and idealises a remembered outing with her mistress.

Nearly all critical analysis of Cries and Whispers is indebted to one agenda-setting essay penned in 1973 by the British feminist Joan Mellem. Her assessments have been paraphrased and recycled in book upon book, what was initially an inspired and pioneering approach hardening into orthodoxy.[39] Fixing on feminist concerns, it disregards links with other Bergman works, his evident influences, and the stylised cinematography. Especially questionable has been the assumption that Agnes has ‘cancer of the womb’, Mellem placing symbolic emphasis on this—a point much repeated by others. But, watching the film, the viewer doesn’t know what Agnes is dying of at all. Sometimes she grips her chest in acute pain, sometimes her stomach, sometimes it is an agony to breathe, sometimes her upper body is contorted and she writhes about. Her illness is not identified.

Cries and Whispers is a more intricate and nuanced work than prevailing plot-centred discussions suggest. This complexity is established with the scene where, lost in thought, Maria reclines upon a bed with a china doll. The camera roams over the rooms of a fastidiously furnished doll’s house in which, among other items, we see an empty birdcage.

The immediate allusions are to the drama of Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg. False domestic harmony had famously been symbolised as a doll’s house by Ibsen in his play of the same name, and by Strindberg as a bird cage in his play Miss Julie.[40] But more is taking place here as, to the sound of a child’s music box, the camera inspects those miniature rooms: there is a couple in a drawing room, the woman seated and uniformed man standing; a butler in the dining room with empty table set for four; a woman in a nursery with two vacant cribs; a servant at the kitchen stove.

Inter-cutting with Maria’s face, the camera offers more details: the same kitchen doll turned toward camera; the doll-woman now bending over the empty crib; we see a playerless piano, an empty birdcage; then it is back to the first motif, the doll-couple now with arms joined. Shot by shot, Bergman spins a quick cryptic drama with that doll’s house showing Maria becoming distressed by her thoughts, frowning and biting her thumb. This single scene serves to indicate how cleverly crafted Cries and Whispers is. Much later, when Karin says over and over, ‘its all a tissue of lies,’ the meaning of the doll’s house is illuminated. Those dolls were separate figures, not a family.

Nothing seems incidental, nothing left to chance. Take casting where Liv Ullmann plays Maria, a spoilt child and now a selfish negligent parent, as well as the capricious mother in flashbacks. And a subtle point is pressed by having as the healthy sisters, Karin and Maria, the actresses who performed the ill roles in The Silence (Ingrid Thulin) and Persona (Liv Ullmann).

Bergman doesn’t miss a beat. He conveys the characters’ psychology in a scene where they sit: the repressed Karin adopts a firm upright posture, the sensual Maria strikes a pose, and the artless Anna spreads inelegantly upon her chair. Then there is the director’s use of sound. The opening credits are accompanied by the gentle ring of wind chimes randomly struck, then we hear a distant village clock soon after dawn, next the ticking of several mantle clocks, all ringing four o’clock, followed by a moment of silence before the labored breathing of the slumbering Agnes eases in. This establishes an overarching motif of time counting down, life being measured. Clocks will chime and be shown in ornate close-up frequently through the film, as if they are marking vitality slipping away.[41] Unbroken silence will only be achieved when the film finishes and the credits roll.

Life will also be measured through seasons.[42] The drama takes place nearly entirely indoors, although the few references to the grounds outside chart Agnes’s doom. They are green and fertile in flashbacks.[43] A grey and misty autumnal garden shows through the sickroom window when she is bedridden, the bare trees reduced to black shafts. Then winter snows set in upon her death.

The most striking quality of Cries and Whispers is its use of colour and visual composition. Edvard Munch’s recurring subjects of death and love, lust and betrayal, loneliness and grief are likewise the themes driving Bergman’s story, and he also places a symbolic importance on three contrasting feminine ‘types’. Yet it is in pictorial terms that a debt to the artist is overwhelmingly insistent, because the cinematography bears such weight. Style and imagery carry this film.

Bergman realises his fin de siècle scenes and characters employing a haunting palette of red and white, with black, in the first part of the film; then, after the death, a palette of red and black, with white. Historical costumes and décor are arranged using this contemporaneous Munchian schema. The white roses and daisies in crystal vases have blackened foliage, for instance, and carved timber furnishings will be coloured white, black or red.

The four women are shown dressed either in black, white, blue-grey or red—colours which give an emotive stress to the actress’s performances. Bergman’s women are psychological and social types shaped by their histories, not mythic figures. They do not embody cosmic forces. All the same, costume is used to confer upon the characters allegorical overtones directly emulating Munch’s white-, red- and black-clad feminine archetypes.

Likewise, bourgeois males may then have worn dark suits by social custom, yet the severe black clothing of all four men is used within the film to convey a sense of negative strength. These black figures are implacable and self-regarding. Black also dominates upon Agnes’s death. The women who lay out her body wear it, all in the mansion now dress in it, and darkness is invoked by the minister when he performs rites over the lifeless body: ‘pray for us who have been left in this dark and dirty earth,’ he recites.

And there is a relentless use of white where stark plaster mouldings, nightgowns, lacework, bedclothes, flowers, bowls, and clock faces act to emphasise Agnes’s sickly pallor. Her skin lacks the colour of the living.

The insistent colour in the film is a saturated red which is lavishly used throughout, giving the entire work a pronounced visceral quality. Most rooms in the mansion are decorated in red, with walls, rugs, fabrics and blankets varying from a rich plum to crimson. The film will also fade to scarlet between scenes, often to the sound of unclear liquid whispers, while the credits use white type against a cherry red. Even the verbal recollection of one childhood experience is suggestively tinted: ‘I hid behind the curtain, watching in secret, [mother] was in the red drawing room in her white dress…,’ recalls Agnes.

Cinema historians account for this dominant colour by referring solely to a remark of Bergman’s that he had ‘had a vision of a large red room with three women in white whispering together. This picture came back again and again to me.’^[44] Some also add a story the director once told that in childhood he ‘pictured the inside of the soul as a moist membrane in shades of red’—an evocative uterine image that surely links with the film.^[45]

Nevertheless, there are undeniable symbolist connections. Besides the pervasive red in Munch’s paintings of women, Strindberg’s first novel, a satirical exposé of Scandinavian society, was entitled The Red Room, and the dramatist had even named his home in Stockholm The Red House. Bergman had moved into an apartment at the same address weeks before shooting commenced.^[46]

Red usually has sanguine connotations in symbolist art and poetry, although Bergman highlights blood only once in the film. It is linked not with Agnes’s mortality or when Maria’s husband feebly stabs himself (blood is barely visible), but with sexuality and vampirism. Suggestions of women feeding on blood had previously appeared in The Silence and Persona. Anna deliberately kisses the bleeding scratches on the waiter’s shoulder after rough sex mid-way through The Silence; Alma becomes so upset and angry she scratches her own wrist late in Persona, Elisabet diving on the arm and sucking the thickly oozing blood. Both scenes were disturbing, yet neither prepares the viewer for the shocking late moment in Cries and Whispers when Karin, who has broken a wine glass, sexually mutilates herself with a shard. Then, before her husband (wearing black), she sits on the stark white sheets of their bed and, lifting her white nightgown, reaches between her open legs then smears the vivid red blood on her face, licking it while taunting him.

Much relies on uncluttered sets. The rooms of the house are free of needless furnishings and bric-á-brac, thereby eliminating potential distractions as the camera fixes on the women. As in Persona, there is also a geometric approach to cropping and composition which is enhanced by the clean design of those interiors. This geometric format and the stylised palette is matched with subdued lighting and orchestrated shadows to build psychological emphasises, especially in close-ups of women’s heads. At moments the shade falling across faces staring directly at camera conveys visually that these sisters don’t like each other, or themselves.

What is most pronounced in the cinematography is how the facial close-ups will be positioned within the frame in a layout taken from Munch—textured close-ups that came to be regarded as Bergman’s visual trademark.[47] This ‘Munchian Frontal Pose’, as it is termed, sets a face close-up and looking out of the picture while to the side appears a scene with figures further back (in film the main figure faces camera, with his or her back to the scene). Beginning with Wild Strawberries (1957), which consciously adapted designs and imagery from the paintings of Edvard Munch and Carl Larsson, the film director had employed this pictorial format in several films including The Silence and Persona.[48] To be sure, nearing the climax of his Hour of the Wolf (1968) the distorted artist’s face looks out at the viewer in desperation and shrieks (a paraphrase of Munch’s The Scream) as he is tormented behind by a nude female demon.

The measured rhythm of the editing for Cries and Whispers repeatedly uses this static ‘Munchian’ pose, and subtle variants, as a unifying visual melody. At carefully paced intervals the viewer will be presented with a woman’s face against a stark deep red wall and staring nakedly at the lingering camera, to the poignant sound of thought-like whispers. This is cinema that knowingly uses Munch’s symbolist paintings.

Cries and Whispers is a remarkable achievement. It not only represents the final component in a trilogy of complex films dwelling upon mortality, identity and the feminine. Nor is it just one of the few instances where the demanding style of a major modern painter has been successfully adapted into coherent cinema. Cries and Whispers is one of the great films of the twentieth century. It is a pity, then, that the standard works on Ingmar Bergman do not notice the manifest visual and thematic connections with the art of Edvard Munch.