- Title
- The Silence
- Creator
- Ford, Hamish
- Relation
- Senses of Cinema Vol. 50
- Relation
- http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/index.html
- Publisher
- Senses of Cinema
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2009
- Description
- The Silence is one of Ingmar Bergman’s most important and most perfect films, marking a high point in his distinctive formal experimentation, challenging thematic discourse, and fomenting of radically intimate spectatorial affect. Despite notably increased aesthetic and conceptual challenges, the film was a substantial box office success at the time (Bergman’s last until Viskningar och rop/Cries and Whispers in 1972) in no small part due to the major controversy that erupted over its fairly explicit sexuality. Challenging both audiences and censorship laws around the world, The Silence also offered important signs to the future, both in Bergman’s own work – most notably looking to the increased modernism and subject-dissolution of Persona (1966) – and that of others (such as David Lynch and Peter Greenaway). Both marked by and contributing to its historical cinematic moment, the film can also be seen as exemplary of early-’60s European art cinema: in its evocative mise en scéne dominated by the crumbling European heritage of a faded baroque hotel; “liberal” but complex and conflicted sexual expression; reasonably abstract aesthetic form that forces the viewer to interpret often very ambiguous images; and thematic treatment of contemporary Western modernity’s culture and subjects as conceptually and existentially in crisis.
- Subject
- Silence; Ingmar Bergman; aesthetic form; cinematic
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/917020
- Identifier
- uon:8183
- Identifier
- ISSN:1443-4059
- Language
- eng
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