It has been sometimes critiqued in Bergman that his films at times work like theater pieces, but this is more a result of the dramatic quality of his screenplays than of the lack of plastic expressiveness. It is of course indisputable now that Bergman is among the most purely cinematic directors in the medium. Along with the innovations introduced in "Persona" three years later, "The Silence" may be Bergman's most adventurously kinematic conception. From the very first frame the density of the scene comes through in a graceful pan and angle captured by Sven Nykvist's immortally pristine black-and-white lens: we meet two attractive women and a young 10 year old boy riding a train compartment in silence and, we sense, with quiet tension. We do not know outright their relationship, and only as the film develops little by little are we provided hints to their connection (or lack thereof). We learn eventually that the two women are sisters, Anna & Ester, who may or may not have shared an incestual relationship, and we learn that the curious young boy is Anna's son, who loves his mother but is somewhat distant from his aunt. There is no explicit mention as to why the sisters and the boy are traveling to an unknown city whose language they do not speak, but we find that Ester, a translator of foreign texts, is perilously ill with an unknown condition. Her relationship with her sister, as evinced by their coldness and silence with each other, is strained to a great degree. They room at an elegant but otherwise quite lonely hotel, where their only purpose seems to be to battle both Ester's mysterious illness and the onslaught of ennui. When Anna, a voluptuous, worldly type, goes out to seek amusement and relief from the summer heat, Ester stays bedridden at the hotel room and works on translations when she's not enduring a panic attack. Meanwhile the young boy, named Johan, roams the hotel hallways and finds himself getting into idle mischief or encountering a troupe of spanish dwarves in town for a vaudeville act. As the women are trapped in the doom of their terminal boredom and general faithlessness, Johan braves the hotel's forlornness and wanders through it with his purity and wonder in place.
As the film saunters along, the plasticity of the scenes takes over; the drama of the film flashes in spurts, but the primary message unrolls through the visual density that Bergman exploits in the film to great advantage. The transitions from long shot to close, from pan to steady shots, from focusing on one object to turning it inside out by a swift legerdemain involving a mirror or a french paneled door opening to a hallway or a room in seclusion, or in conducting us along lonely hotel corridors, are of a superior technique that only a master of Bergman's capacity could manage with such delicate hypnosis.
The story is never resolved (in the spirit of the "God-Spider" trilogy that this last film is part of, the other two being "Through A Glass Darkly" & "Winter Light") and abruptly ends as it abruptly begins, in media res and stifled with pneumatic doubt. The silence is not only the silence of God here (as it was in the preceding two films) but also the silence that ensues at a time of war without reason or cause, when no one seems to understand the other in any language, even one's own. The symbolic value of Ester's role as a translator who is slowly dying from existential terror cannot be overemphasized. Anna's wayward lust is also a symptom of her inner guilt and shame. Sex becomes the usual escape for those who believe in nothing. It is however Johan's role in the film to perceive the despair that provokes his mother to feckless adultery and his aunt to a possibly self-imagined disease. At the end of the film he inherits from Ester a document containing the meanings of words in a foreign language; whether he will take it to memory and practice the art of understanding is left for the viewer to ponder. But the somewhat disdainful manner in which he looks up at his adulterous mother as he reads out the word for 'face' shows that his sympathies have perhaps shifted from his mother to his aunt Ester and the responsibility she has bestowed on him.
What is resolved though is the certainty with which Bergman's camera pursues the trails of strangers and objects in a strange city. (The film's story takes place in an unknown city by the name of 'Timoka' where tanks threateningly roll on the city streets and a man with an emaciate horse carries a wagon piled with furniture day and night outside the window of the sisters' hotel room.) There's ample probability that this film, following on the heels of Antonioni's own great trilogy dealing with the existential problematics of a world turned fiercely secular and faithless ("L'Avventura", "La Notte", & "L'Eclisse"), owes much to the specific rhythm that Antonioni introduced to the cinema; I am convinced that Bergman very neatly alludes to all three of those films by costuming a lovely Gunnel Lindblom in a Monica Vitti-like dress and wig and having her straggle with aimless intention through a city filled with leering men and alien incidents to be deciphered (among which can be counted the then-infamous, though still quite tasteful, sex scene in the vaudeville theatre). The allusion to Antonioni verges on the mimetic, and it is only up to the point when Ester confronts Anna in a hotel room with her bartender lover that Bergman returns to his familiar setup: a triangular framing bordered on the left by Ester's face upclose in sideview, while Anna is placed at center and free to indulge her unleashed passions by crying and gesticulating to the anchored Ester; meanwhile for the sake of geometric symmetry, Bergman has the unknown lover's mute face come into view at the right end: at this Bergmanesque interplay, his screenplay fleshes out a whole history of tension between the sisters in a few cries and whispers, and the familiar tropes from the precedent films in the trilogy are revisited.
It is without surprise that the two masters convened at this crucial film in Bergman's filmography, the last film in Bergman's trilogy following a year after the last film in Antonioni's trilogy, since they appeared to be connected spiritually (in regard to their existential sensitivity) as well as physically: both would pass away from this secularized world on the same day, the 30th of July, 2007.
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Cf. Kubrick's "The Shining" for moments inspired by the hallway scenes in the hotel with Johan.
http://keepthisthought.blogspot.com/2008/04/tystnaden-silence.html
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