Everyone else is doing it, but that does not make it any less valid for me to do so as well. Last week, the film world lost both Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman. Both were master craftsmen. Though I find Bergman to be the better of the two, it is like choosing between a filet mignon and a fine champagne, wildly different things but fantastic in their own right. I choose Bergman for many reasons. Not the least of which is the fact that I happened to share a birthday with the man.
Therefore, the classic movie of the week is Bergman's 1973 masterwork Viskningar och Rop (Cries and Whispers), one of the select few foreign films ever to be nominated for best picture at the Academy Awards. Starring Harriet Andersson, Ingrid Thulin, Liv Ullmann, and Kari Sylwan, the film is a devastating exploration of the human soul and of Bergman's favorite subject, god's silence.
Sven Nykvist (an Oscar winner for this film) uses his camera masterfully and draws the most out of every frame. However, the real star of the show is Marik Vos-Lundh's wonderful set pieces. The house, in which almost all of the action takes place, is the perfect evocation of the human soul, which Bergman is oft quoted as imagining as "a damp membrane in varying shades of red". It is all at once claustrophobic and suffocating but also cold and distant.
The performances all around are fabulous, but Harreit Andersson is amazing as the matriarch of the family who suffers from cancer while her daughters surround and wait for her to die. Using almost no words at all, she is able to convey every feeling of pain and sadness and regret that she experiences.
As is almost always true with Bergman, the symbolism of the story trumps the literal plot, but this is one of his very few uniquely cinematic films. The style and substance of Visningar och Rop could only be done in the film medium and only by an artist like Bergman.
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