The SilenceFeature Film, 1963 Symbiotic sisters torment each other in a hotel where a boy wanders around among old people and dwarves."Not for the prudish. It demands maturity and sophistication from the viewer." - New York Herald Tribune |
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In February 1962 it was reported in the press that Ingmar Bergman was going to take a break for a year to devote himself entirely to the study of J. S. Bach. His wife, the concert pianist Käbi Laretei, was to help him with his studies. "Once in a lifetime", he is quoted as saying, "one has to try to realise one's dreams". No full-time Bach studies actually materialised. However, in the film that Bergman worked on instead – The Silence – the composer was to play a small yet important role: when Bach's "Goldberg Variations" are played on the radio in the film, the emotional and linguistic distances are bridged for a short moment. This is the only time in the film that the characters appear to connect with each other.
In his book about the making of Winter Light, Vilgot Sjöman describes how Bergman told him about an idea for a new film: "Two women and a thirteen-year-old boy in a completely strange city. The older woman has a hemmorrhage and they stop at a hotel. Ingmar explains that some of the material goes back to an old radio play The City. The rest is quite fresh and is based on a dream he had during his illness in December."
The dream was a frequently recurring one: "I am in an enormous, foreign city. I am on my way toward the forbidden part of town. It is not even some dubious area of ill repute with its steaming flash pots, but something much worse. There the laws of reality and the rules of society cease to exist. Anything can happen and everything does." (Images: My life in Film)
Another dream he had at the time appears to have been incorporated into the film, yet only by association. When putting the finishing touches to Winter Light , Bergman wrote down a dream he had about an old man being pushed around some hospital grounds by four women. In her exertions, one of them falls down and lies flat out on the ground, whereupon the others laugh uncontrollably.
There is a short association to a similar incident in The Silence, when Anna and Ester talk about how difficult it was to carry their dead father's coffin since he was so extremely heavy. (Another, much later film, Cries and Whispers, invites similar comparisons.)
As Bergman expanded on his idea to Sjöman, he explained that the film would be set in an Eastern European state "with troop transports, in smoke and grime". Wondering about a suitable location, he settled on Grenoble: "I recall it as grimy and awful and lacking in culture: no concert hall, no theater, only striptease."
Even at this early stage he had decided that the language in the film should be a made up one, but that he would use his wife's mother tongue, Estonian, as a basis. One working title for the film was "Timoka", which is the name of the city where the action takes place.
"Timoka, the name of the city, I saw in a book belonging to my wife at that time. She's Esthonian. It was a book of poetry. The word 'timoka' stood there on a line by itself, and without knowing what it meant I baptized the city Timoka. Then I asked her what it meant, and she said – there are a lot of cases in Estonian – it means 'appertaining to the executioner'. Otherwise it was just a language I made up." (Bergman on Bergman)
Those to whom Bergman presented his idea were not especially impressed. His wife, a number of his friends and even Kenne Fant, the head of Svensk Filmindustri, tried to dissuade him from making the film: "But I had a tremendous desire to make it. So I did anyway."
As usual for Bergman, the actual writing process was swift: the screenplay is dated 18 April 1962.
Vilgot Sjöman, L-136
Birgitta Steene, Ingmar Bergman: A Reference Guide
Svensk filmografi
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