© 2018 by James Clark
We’re off and running with another breathtaking film by Ingmar Bergman, namely, Cries and Whispers (1972). The nature of this production entails, as usual, thrilling motivations most of us had never thought about. And here we must put into the mix, as never so emphatically before, that the uniqueness of that delivery entails being without any effective allies. We have encountered, in the films by Bergman so far, a species of more or less thriving upon that neglect, a warrior sensibility. But enfolded within that tang, we are also alerted to partaking of the powers implicit in cooperation, cooperation with those who don’t and never will, give a damn for what a figure like Bergman would live for, however chaotically.
Our film today attends remarkably to that estrangement, and, as a result, lingers with the personnel in such a way as to garner from (some of) them a direction to love. The film’s saga involves two protagonists; and we choose here to spotlight one, a woman, namely, Agnes, who has already died from cancer in the earlier part but conveys her golden moment at the film’s final seconds, by way of a diary, read by Anna, her long-time housemaid (though presented by the diarist’s voice-over). The event recorded involves desultory Agnes being paid a visit to the family manor (under her keeping) by her two sisters whom she has allowed to more or less overtly treat her as a non-entity, as she was treated by her mother. Braced, as the latter were, by her long-term illness, there is a moment of vision emanating from their ramble upon the palatial grounds, strewn with golden leaves. “It’s wonderful to be together again… Suddenly we began to laugh and run toward the old swing that we hadn’t seen since we were children [when kinetics were at least as favorable as frozenness]. We sat in it like three good little sisters, and Anna pushed us slowly and gently. All my aches and pains were gone. I could hear them chatting around me… I could feel the presence of their bodies, the warmth of their hands. I wanted to hold the moment fast, and thought, ‘Come what may, this is happiness. I cannot wish for anything better. Now, for a few moments, I can experience perfection. And I feel profoundly grateful to my life which gives me so much…” (Those visiting angels having—along with Agnes’ skittishness—tossed divided but meritorious Anna to the sharks.)
The full-color composition (unique up until this time for Bergman) needs to be broached, along with the previous films, as a positioning of the urgency of fearlessness. With this particular vehicle, however, we’re on the hook to attending most closely to the apparatus required to fully show what’s ticking here. Therefore, as usual (but not quite the same), we posit, “How new is new?” You’d never have gotten from him anything explicit about the possibility that gigantic and unprecedented change has begun to make inroads and that that uprising (but tempered) is where art attains its stature. Apart from playing the movie game that the single work on tap must stand entirely on the basis of the screen being watched, there would be, however, the understandable discomfort that—unlike the folk reservoir of normal filmic presentation—matters of reflective complexity, generally assumed to be the purview of science and other academic disciplines, have become necessities. Just because the entrenched classical rational experts would utterly dismiss any validity not certified by their practices, does not disable a figure like Bergman to take matters into his own accomplished hands, in his own medium of communication. As such, his work being an extended research of sensibility, the various steps of his disclosures comprise, unlike the normal, disparate entertainments, a constant, expanding investigation, very germane to earlier discoveries. Unlike conceptual building blocks of a technical nature, Bergman has at his disposal, not only a manifold of dramatic sensibility by way of his screenwriting and Sven Nykvist’s cinematography, but a cadre of performers the varying roles of which, from-film-to-film, increase a current of intent or temper a performer’s previous apparition, for the sake of comprehending the volatility of discernment and its creative capacities as a co-host of the cosmos.
Cries and Whispers carries along another cinematic power, namely, the efforts of other filmmakers the work of which being variously able to leverage the efforts of Bergman. Our film here devotes vast areas of a range of red walls and accessories for the interior of the palatial estate. In 1965, Michelangelo Antonioni launched a venture, namely, Red Desert, the redness of which speaking to widespread malignancy and malaise. In the Jacques Demy musical films, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) and Donkey Skin (1970), the settings have been enhanced by pronounced color saturation, for the surrealistic sake of overcoming a profoundly inadequate mainstream. On such templates we’re treated to our guide’s “cyclotron,” the ingredients of which consisting of acrobatics and an impossible trick of juggling—as wild and wonderful in 1972 as it was when launched in the film, The Seventh Seal, in 1957. The first protagonist, Agnes, a spinster and amateur painter, nearing the end of a long struggle with cancer, at the end of the nineteenth century, has drawn to her family heights her two sisters and their spouses, but without their children. The gulf between her horror and their easy anticipations is not the main gulf in the picture. The actress playing Agnes, namely, Harriet Anderson, starred, in 1960, in a film called, Through a Glass Darkly, as Karin, whose husband, a medical doctor, so detests her unconventional physicality that he nudges her toward believing she is schizophrenic and belongs in a mental hospital. She loses her equilibrium during the stresses of a family reunion, comes to a default position in claiming to have seen God to be a giant spider; and infers, as a promising rally, that she should leave her family and do some independent thinking in that rather incongruous sickbay. One of the sisters, Maria, a decorative seductress, is played by Liv Ullmann, who, in 1966, six years before our current puzzle, played the part of a decorative, notable actress coming to a crisis and opting to enter a mental hospital in the guise of having lost her interest in speaking. This silent Elisabet, in face of annoyance from a presumptuous medic and also some street smarts and affection, climbs to a portal where the trick of juggling (making the best of a clumsy talent pool) rears its head. The oldest sister, Karin, is performed by actress, Ingrid Thulin, who, in the film, The Silence (1963), portrayed an overbearing nit-picking prig and prude who teeters close to emotional collapse but draws upon a reservoir of majoritarian dominance. In our current picture she has to be probed carefully, being in fact the other, and more important, protagonist. Though in a flash-back we see her slashing her vagina with a shard of smashed wine glass and rubbing the blood over her lips in annoyance with her insectile husband, billed as a “diplomat,” she does have what might not be an A-game but acrobatic skills to ponder.
We get to know a lot about Agnes during what seems a rare uptick in her palliative days. Maria, eliciting
a measure of placid juggling in lieu of a preamble of gut-wrenching acrobatics (thereby being a pale shadow of Elisabet), proposes taking up her ongoing readings of Charles Dickens’ novel, The Pickwick Papers, to which the invalid replies, “Oh, I’d love it!” Though roughing up a doleful soul for her choice of pleasure would be pretty cheesy in most cases, here there is nothing short of dynamite in this disappointment, as the installment catches fire. “Chapter 34, in which Mr. Pickwick thinks he’d better go to Bath and goes accordingly” [that a sponge bath administered by the sisters has closely preceded this remark hopes to alert the viewer that they should read into the text something pertaining to Agnes’ stature]. “ ‘But surely, my dear, sir,’ said little Parkin, as he stood in Mr. Pickwick’s apartment… ‘Surely you don’t really mean, really and seriously now… and irritation apart… that you won’t pay these costs and damages?’ ” Pay the cost, or forever lost. Or: cover an ongoing acrobatic demand or commit a horror on the order of self-mutilation.
By way of reveries of her childhood, from out of confinement in that blood-red homestead, Agnes shows us that the singular life of paying the costs is not for her and that some of that redness is her contribution to that plague-ridden realm. (Along with the introduction of acrobatics, in The Seventh Seal, there is a plague in the land.) There is an omnibus flash-back, centering upon her mother, which constitutes a ground zero as to her remaining a wimp. Liv Ullmann, acting in double-duty here, becomes the Venus of the preceding generation, one of a series, no doubt, of spoiled, precious airheads. There she is, in elaborate apparel, with a tiny Agnes in thrall and kept at a distance, as if the less than pretty girl would reduce her heights. “I loved her at such a jealous extreme! I loved her because she was so gentle and beautiful and alive and so pervadingly present. But she could also be cold, playfully cruel… and rebuff me … [shades of Ullmann’s gorgeous Elisabet, in Persona, rebuffing her ugly little boy]. I wish I could see her again…” [That’s easier than she thinks.] That dotage being the linchpin of the action’s catastrophe. Thereby she misses the pertinence of a cut to a magic lantern party, at Twelfth Night, involving a “Wicked Witch,” and also the trickery (of the “Hansel and Gretel” saga on tap—an “impossible” trick being the bedrock of her best (and ignored) prospect. She does not, however, miss the constant attentions to Maria, played by Liv Ullmann’s young daughter, during the party, leaving our minor protagonist fretting from a distance. “I was the only one who couldn’t join in the merriment.” After a cut, Agnes, hoping to effect a more rounded picture of her home life, proceeds with, “Another time, I remember … I hid behind the curtain and in secret watched her arrange roses on her writing table. Suddenly, she saw me and, in a gentle voice called me. Uncertain, I went up to her, thinking that, as usual, she was going to scold me. But instead she gave me a look so full of sorrow that I nearly burst into tears. I raised my hand, put it against her cheek. And for that moment we were very close.” That was frail Agnes’ sense of the moment. The camera, on the other hand, does not lie in showing that, while the little girl felt to be loved at last, her vastly cheap mother was beholding her like a thorn in her side, a hopeless cause.
This latter vignette ends with a cut to the patient in her final stage. The intensity of the death throes tends to eclipse the real problematic that that was a pariah who was at the early stages of being under a gun that would never go away, necessitating extreme measures. Before leaving her to myopia and cries and whispers, we must appreciate those factors which might have been decisive. Anxious as Agnes remained, about her position in the scheme of her family, there was wanton neglect of the scheme of her more telling life. Raising a rather feeble gesture in the order of painterly beauty, our protagonist/ victim consistently fussed about her family, and lost the world. Her wild animal braying from a pain now killing, though hard to behold, opens a portal of sensuous energy buried way too long. The film begins with the grace and bounty of the grounds of that funerial confinement. First, as a calm dawn begins, we see hundred-years-stout tree trunks in silhouette, tracing to upper branches carrying our glance amidst those configurations, and presaging those compositions of innovative art which have nothing to do with deletant domesticity. The dashes of sharp sunlight playing over that initial scene carry their vivacity into the following stage, whereby the morning mists shower another prospect, this time steady rays of light alighting upon the greenery. Another cut shows a statue of Orpheus with his lyre being part of a sunny park where the positions of the trees and the dispositions of the leaves induce a deep breath. From there, another unseen region, namely, the interior of the mansion with all asleep, shows what it can do. To the beat of ticking sounds, we are given a tour of Age of Enlightenment clock faces, the textures of their grounds, the variety and motions of their hands, along with bronze embellishments like a child angel looking through a telescope, and also a Medusa as a pendulum; and mathematical mechanism. As if this offering, unseen by the players, were not enough to contemplate, we should hold on to something even more evanescent. Along with a red ground to begin, there is the almost inaudible chime of a triangle. As it strikes, sporadically, it brings along that motif of synthesis on the grounds of acrobatics and juggling, that exigency Bergman is so right not to let go. That gunning forward toward advantage (an Age of Enlightenment key word) is a Mr. Pickwick outrage which Agnes subscribes to, and comes to a silent crescendo in that reverie of the three sisters on the swing. Maria and Karin flanking the protagonist going nowhere. Here was the geometry, but where was the music?
You’re not likely to believe this (before I explain), but a lady with a measure of mojo was on the swing, namely, Karin, the one being unreasonable with the broken glass. (You’ll see that she, like promiscuous and cruel, Anna, in the film, The Silence, would not be someone you’d want to meet; but someone worth studying. And sharing the name of the protagonist, in, Through a Glass Darkly, would also be bemusing, at least.) Whereas that “Twelfth Night” flow of jealousy was shown from Agnes’ perspective, there was a very brief moment showing a young Karin, also not in the holiday spirit. Whereas Agnes has rather frantically here become a student of her opulent family, there are ways of indicating that Karin opts for a very different response. In real time, she’s introduced as the unsmiling, taciturn foil to Maria’s “diplomatic” charms, “humanly” honed by a history of affection, and comfortable in her role as generous care-giver, along with Agnes’ needy appreciation. (Her diverting resumption of throwing herself at the doctor during a visit to Agnes may not have gone well; but the quantification of her maneuvers ensures lusty profits notwithstanding. Here we must recognize that the Anna in, The Silence, looks pretty good, by comparison.)
She catches brief but quite remarkable fire from the deadly intensity of the closeness of death, and proposes giving Agnes a sponge bath, during a lull in the agony. Rather startlingly, Karin, too, is lifted by the occasion, producing smiles and a surprising level of serenity in her motions. Where did that come from, all of a sudden? Perhaps the quiet one has a sustaining history of her own. Earlier in the night, in a dark room where she was reading by a gaslight, possibly something more weighty than Dickens, she calls, Anna, “Do you hear?” The busy and faithful servant, whom we have come to regard as close to a saint, admits, “I only hear the wind and the clocks ticking.” “No! It’s something else!” Karin insists. “I don’t hear anything, why?” the usually acute stalwart maintains. So nonplussed is the odd-one out, she rather misses the mark in describing her confusion: “I’m freezing!” (In the aforementioned film, Thulin/ Ester is seized by chills, fleeting, as compared with her sister’s sweltering in face of a totally inadequate dispensation.) Then there is Agnes complaining to Anna, “I’m freezing…” Soon she is dead; and while Maria backs off and falls apart, Karin, along with Anna, composes the corpse on her deathbed, the three sets of hands upstaging all the sculptures in the building. Thereupon, a modest embrace of the freezing sisters. The triangle mingles with that workload, a feat of passion brooking no relentment but seeing much to celebrate. The flashback of cut-throat diplomacy surfaces there, with some cut-the-crap clarity going forward. As she ponders upon that instrument of pain, Karin tells herself, “It’s but a tissue of lies. It’s a monumental tissue of lies…” (recalling the unhelpful declaration of Tomas, which pushes a suicidal parishioner over the cliff, in the film Winter Light [1962]). Also noteworthy, there is stressed Karin slapping Anna (helping her with her bedclothes before the coup de grace), losing her nerve for a moment. Karin quickly apologizes; and the elite servant and companion does not accept the apology.
Back to the aftermath of the death, we see Karin going over the prosaic (but not necessarily prosaic) task of checking the costs. Her hands and the sensuous grey paper mean business, not as usual. She takes in hand her pince nez reading glasses and slightly flips it upward and downward to the bed of paper constituting but one type of nitty gritty. (The protagonist in First Man [2018] has been seen to be closer to pay dirt flipping a pince nez than hopping around the moon.) Then she gives a spin to that shard of glass, beholding its ripple in the gentle light. At this juncture of rich destiny, Maria comes into the office, and her perception of the moment of vision ignites more mysteries. “Karin, I want us to be friends. I want us to talk to each other. You read much more than I do, you think much more than I do. Your experience is far greater… Couldn’t we devote these days to getting to know each other, finally?” Not wanting another brutal smash like the failing with Anna, she listens to that creature she knows only too well. “We could put our arms around each other… We could talk together for days and nights on end…” (Here we’ve been put to the test to compare how doubting Tomas, in Winter Light, came to put up with “togetherness” maven Marta.) Karin, feeling caught up in a dilemma that can’t work for her, gets up from her desk and heads for the door—an acrobat paying costs of depth which only begins her “thinking.” Holding her back in her exit, Maria—a diplomat of some efficacy—calls out, “It’s easy to do, but I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.” After a cut—accomplished, as always, by a blood-red cloud, that emblem of possible efficacy—there is Karin, confused and pensive. Maria comes in, again, finding her sister reading Agnes’ diary. Now a bit more forthcoming, she reads, “ ‘I received the gift anyone can receive in this life… a gift that is called many things…togetherness…companionship, relatedness, affection…’” [the visual is Anna, by Agnes’ bed]. “ ‘I think this is what is called grace…’” Maria, who was wandering about when the reading was given, moves to touch Karen’s shoulder, and finds the latter spinning away from her. “No, don’t touch me. Don’t come near me!” Togetherness becoming an outrage due to the effort of paying the costs cheek-by-jowl with refusing to pay the costs. Maria, aka Elisabet, comes behind Karin, in a facsimile of the Persona sisters. Maria touches Karin’s cheek and the latter, though backing off, does not repel the approach as before. Soon she is allowing herself to be caressed by that functionary of skin. However, she soon insists, “I don’t want you to do that… I don’t want you to be kind to me” [because I have no resources to be appreciative toward a coward like Maria]. “I can’t! I can’t stand it!” (The optics, particularly the lighting, preserves the uncanny tonal spike, in face of Karin’s melodramatic tailspin, for instance, “It’s like being in the greatest hell. I can’t breathe anymore. All of that guilt!”) After a battlefield fade, Karin apologizes for her “lost control,” and the prosaic “formalities” of selling the property occupy their conversation. No generous consideration for Maria occurs to the other one-note sibling in the room, a sibling unique in the film’s universe for possibly becoming a true aristocrat. Groping for that elusive stature, she tells disappointed sentimentalist Maria, “I’ve often thought about suicide.” (Here we have her less than compelling default stand, by comparison with the man frightened to suicide by the prospect of China gaining nuclear weapons, in, Winter Light.) Then she brings up her husband’s slight that she’s “clumsy”—“I fumble!” Now a glutton for the sensational that goes nowhere, she turns on her slack sister having, for once, had an inspiration. “You thought our talk would be different, didn’t you? Do you realize I hate you? And how foolish I find your insipid smiles and your idiotic flirtatiousness… You understand? Nothing can escape me… for I see it all… Now you learn how it sounds when Karin talks!” (This latter weakling flourish is exactly the one Alma the nurse directs upon Elisabet the silent goddess [Liv Ullmann], in Persona. Having reached an almost complete self-embarrassment, our protagonist cries out, and Maria, who had been reduced to tears, rushes to her; and hears from the “all-seeing,” “Forgive me!” Unlike Anna, Maria does forgive, and the togetherness/ grace catches fire; but not for very long. With a Bach cello composition evoking primordial relatedness, we behold the pair lovingly illuminating their kinetic best, the associated shut-down of sound endowing the tete-a-tete as similar to a Botticelli painting. They whisper in each other’s ears as if revelations of hidden forces had been released. In close-up, Maria seems pensive; in close-up Karin seems tentative and adventurous. This elevated effort comes to an end as colliding with Anna’s last-ditch enlistment of the sisters to steady her fears of poverty. She inhabits the cusp of Agnes’ being no more, and calls upon, first circumspect Karin and then sentimental Maria, to soothe the lost sister. Her prefatory fanfare—“Don’t you hear it?”—stands in stark contrast to that, “Do you hear?” of Karin, which Anna can’t take seriously. Karin is the first one summoned, and her harsh reception to old-style mysticism quickly brings the interview to a halt. “I won’t accept involvement with your death. Perhaps if I loved you… but I do not love you… It’s pure morbidity, disgusting, meaningless. She’s already begun to rot…” The meeting with Maria becomes the latter’s running away in terror. The departure of the funeral party is notable for Karin hoping to sustain the confluence her acrobatics finds essential; and for acrobaticless Maria treating that fling as if it were only a fling. “Could we hold to all our resolutions?” Maria, perhaps a bit miffed by her sisters’ acceding to her deadened husband’s making Anna walk the plank; but transparently back to her mode of gyrating mush, makes a cardboard smile and lisps, “Dearest Karin, why on earth shouldn’t we do that?” Resuming the venomous treatment by Elisabet toward ardent Alma, in Persona, she carries on with, “It’s that everything seems different since that evening.” Karin quietly remonstrates, “I think we’ve become very much closer… What are you thinking about?” The lifetime baby doll, tries, “I’m thinking about the conversation…” “No, you’re not,” the friend in need asserts. Thereby the woman always on the go rephrases her thought, “I was thinking about how [her cuckold husband] Joakin hates it if I keep him waiting… I have no idea why you call me to account as if I were on trial for my thoughts, Karin. What do you want?” In close-up, Karin looks down in disarray. “Nothing,” is what she realizes she must expect—from Maria; but what about the world at large?
Popping up during the funeral formalities, we do get a little fizz from the world at large, surprisingly in the form of the local bishop. (Karin’s diplomat. in a post-mortem moment, counts them as lucky that the clergyman has the flu and therefore their being spared his presence at the dinner following the burial. Looking closely, we see he’s hale and hearty and floats a little white lie to avoid a party of ghouls.) You’ll recognize a fascinatingly tempered version of the rally of Tomas, in, Winter Light. As with Algot the sidekick, there are sextons and candles, here at the entryway to Agnes’s resting place. What you will notice, first and foremost, is that this first swing of the death ritual is light on the big powers and remarkably a weighty eulogy to rather underwhelming Agnes, as if she were on the hunt of something which very few have hazard. “Could it be that you gathered up our suffering and agony into your body. Should it be that you leave with you this hardship through death. Should it be that you meet with God… [Algot slipping when he goes beyond the wonderment that venerable safety nets won’t do. Hence the overestimation of old-timey good news, somewhat upstaging a hard and nourishing magic.] … as you come to that other land… Should it be that you find his countenance turned toward you there [the nature of sensibility being not something to take for granted while sitting on a ruinous scenario]. Should it be that you know the language to speak… So this God may hear and understand… Should it be that you then talk with this God… [the conditional tense here, like that of Algot’s heresy, a weird and wonderful push-back upon millennia being stupefyingly inadequate, while spilling over to wooden humanitarianism and science!]… and he hear you out. Should it be so… pray for us… Agnes, dear child, please listen to what I have to tell you now. Pray for us who have been left in darkness… left behind on this miserable Earth, with the sky above us grim and empty…” [Agnes’ diary being on a very distant page from this dip to formalities]. The last word of this singularity dressed up to seem more of the same is an instance of great theatrical irony. “Her faith was stronger than mine.”
