Ingmar Bergman’s latest film Cries and Whispers has been acclaimed wherever it has been released. For many critics it is quite simply Bergman’s masterpiece, one of the most remarkable films ever made. This acclaim has been accompanied by violent controversy over his most enigmatic work since Persona. In New York, Gay Liberation responded to it with packed houses and bursts of applause. Lesbianism can well be found in Cries and Whispers, but it is only one aspect in a whole world of female relationships that Bergman has chosen to explore.

The film is mysterious, a haunting and desperate evocation of life and death presided over by four women. Critics have been questioning its curiously Victorian quality, and why Pickwick Papers should be read as Agnes dies. The confusion extends to accounts of what is actually taking place in the film. Ingmar Bergman in his initial draft (there have been many changes in the course of production) has not clarified the problem of interpretation. ‘What it most resembles’, he wrote, ‘is a dark, flowing stream—faces, movements, voices, gestures, exclamations, light and shade, moods, dreams. Nothing fixed, nothing really tangible other than for a moment, and then only an illusory moment. A dream, a longing, or perhaps an expectation. A fear in which that to be feared is never put into words’ [The New Yorker, 21 October, 1972, p. 38). Having written this, Bergman then produced one of his most static films, a series of theatrical tableaux in gaslit rooms, with a constant emphasis on close-up and abrupt change of scene. Cries and Whispers is a statement affirming the paradox between vision and reality. Frequently the dialogue is stilted, establishing another order of ambiguity within the filmed image. What can only be rationally defined as memory and dream are given the same quality of temporal reality by the camera. Time, the sequential order of events, is the first power destroyed in the film.