Cries and Whispers

Cries and Whispers (1972)

Viskningar och rop

Four women dressed in white in a mansion painted red... haunted by whispers and cries.

As Agnes slowly dies of cancer, her sisters are so immersed in their own psychic pains that they are unable to offer her the support she needs.

Date of release
1972-12-21
TMDB
7.9 / 10 (810)
Runtime
1h 35m
Genres
Drama
Director
Ingmar Bergman

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Awards: 1 · Nominations: 5. Including: Academy Award for Best Cinematography

Cries and Whispers is a 1972 Swedish tragedy film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman and starring Harriet Andersson, Kari Sylwan, Ingrid Thulin and Liv Ullmann. The film, set in a mansion at the end of the 19th century, is about three sisters and a servant who struggle with the terminal cancer of one of the sisters (Andersson). The servant (Sylwan) is close to her, while the other two sisters confront their emotional distance from each other.

Production

According to Bergman, he conceived the story during a lonely, unhappy time on Fårö when he wrote constantly. He described a recurring dream of four women in white clothing in a red room, whispering to each other. He said that this symbolized his childhood view of the soul as a faceless person who was black on the outside, representing shame, and red on the inside.

A childhood memory of the Sophiahemmet mortuary also influenced the director:

The young girl who had just been treated lay on a wooden table in the middle of the floor. I pulled back the sheet and exposed her. She was quite naked apart from a plaster that ran from throat to pudenda. I lifted a hand and touched her shoulder. I had heard about the chill of death, but the girl's skin was not cold but hot. I moved my hand to her breast, which was small and slack with an erect black nipple. There was dark down on her abdomen.

Since Bergman's films were difficult to market, foreign capital was unavailable to finance the film. He decided to shoot Cries and Whispers in Swedish rather than English (as his previous film, The Touch, had been) and finance it through his production company, Cinematograph. Although he used 750,000 SEK of his savings and borrowed 200,000 SEK, he also asked the Swedish Film Institute for help with the film's 1.5-million SEK budget.

In his book, Images, Bergman wrote: "Today I feel that in Persona—and later in Cries and Whispers—I had gone as far as I could go. And that in these two instances when working in total freedom, I touched wordless secrets that only the cinema can discover". In an essay included with the DVD, critic Peter Cowie quoted the director: "All of my films can be thought of in terms of black and white, except Cries and Whispers".

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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