Ingmar Bergman's The Silence

Ingmar Bergman's 1963 film "The Silence" was made at a point in Bergman's career when his stature as one of the great art-film directors allowed him to push beyond the boundaries of what was acceptable to censorship boards in Sweden and the United States. The film's depiction of sexuality was, as Judith Crist wrote at the time in the "New York Herald-Tribune", 'not for the prudish'. Yet Bergman's notebooks and screenplays reveal his tendency for self-censorship, both to dampen the literary quality of his screen writing and to alter portions of the script that Bergman ultimately deemed too provocative. Maaret Koskinen, a professor of cinema studies at Stockholm University and film critic for Sweden's largest national daily newspaper, was the first scholar given access to Bergman's private papers during the last years of his life. Bergman's notebooks reveal the difficulties he experienced in writing for the medium of moving images and his meditations on the relationship (or its lack) between moving images and the spoken or written word. Koskinen's attention to this inter-medial framework is anchored in a close reading of the film, focusing on the many-faceted relationships between images and dialog, music, sound, and silence. "The Silence" offers film goers an entryway into the cinematic, cultural, and socio-political issues of its time, but remains a classic - rich enough for scrutiny from a variety of perspectives and methodologies. Koskinen draws a picture of Bergman that challenges the traditional view of him as an auteur, revealing his attempts to overcome his own image as the creator of serious art films by making his work relevant to a new generation of film goers. Her exploration of the film simultaneously touches on issues of censorship and the cinema of small nations, while shedding new light on the shifting views of Bergman and auteurist film, high art, and popular culture. Maaret Koskinen is professor of cinema studies at the University of Stockholm and the author of several books on Ingmar Bergman's work.

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PART ONE Backdrops and Contexts 1. National Cinema, Art Film, and the Auteur The Auteur Contextualized; Antonioni: "That Perpetual Foil to Bergman"; Art Versus Business; The Auteur as Star; The Art of Reinventing Authorship 2. Censorship Issues: Sex, Women, and Hollywood The Silence at Home: Debate and Controversy; The Silence Abroad: "The Bergman Ballyhoo Era"; Gender Issues: Now What About All These Women?; Director and Actress: Nudity and Power Relations PART TWO Works in Progress: Intermedial Variations 3. In the Beginning Was (the Fear of) the Word: Notebooks From Word to Sound; Eto Music and Painting 4. In Between Words and Images: Manuscripts and Screenplays Edits: Too Many Words; Sex and the City: The Eroticism of Language; The Published Screenplay: Senses and Synesthetics; Excursion: Flash Forward to a Writer Let Loose PART THREE The Finished Film 5. Framing the Senses Sounds and Linguistic Voids; Beginnings: Windows and Sights; Paintings and Tableaux Vivants; The Phenomenology of Vision: Hotel Excursions; The Eroticism of Vision: Mirrors and Doorways; The Close-Up: The Bergman Icon Conclusion Production Notes; Filmography; Transcript of the U.S. Trailer for The Silence; Bibliography

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