General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Silence (1963 film)

The Silence (Swedish: Tystnaden) is a 1963 Swedish black-and-white drama film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman, in which two sisters and the younger sister's young son are stranded in a hotel in an unnamed foreign city on the brink of war, unable to reach each other emotionally or linguistically¹^•². It is the third and final film of Bergman's so-called "Silence of God" trilogy, after Through a Glass Darkly (1961) and Winter Light (1962), and its explicit sexuality provoked one of the most heated censorship debates in Swedish film history³^•⁴.

Key fact	Detail
Original title / director	Tystnaden, directed and written by Ingmar Bergman; produced by Svensk Filmindustri¹^•⁵
Running time / format	96 minutes, black and white, Swedish language¹^•⁶
Principal cast	Ingrid Thulin (Ester), Gunnel Lindblom (Anna), Jörgen Lindström (Johan), Birger Malmsten, Håkan Jahnberg⁵^•⁷
Key crew	Cinematography Sven Nykvist; editing Ulla Ryghe; art director P. A. Lundgren; costumes Marik Vos-Lundh¹^•⁵
Premiere	Sweden, 23 September 1963; released across Europe and elsewhere in 1964–1965¹
Trilogy position	Third of the "Silence of God" trilogy with Through a Glass Darkly (1961) and Winter Light (1962); originally titled God's Silence³
Reception	SF's biggest box-office success to date; 1964 Guldbagge Awards for Best Film, Best Direction, and Best Actress (Thulin)⁷^•⁶

Spoilers

Story and setting

Sisters Ester (Ingrid Thulin), a sickly intellectual translator, and Anna (Gunnel Lindblom), together with Anna's young son Johan (Jörgen Lindström), interrupt a train journey home through an unnamed European country because Ester falls seriously ill. They take rooms in a near-empty, faded grand hotel in a city preparing for war, where the inhabitants speak a language no one recognizes²^•⁸. Anna provokes her sister by taking a local lover, while Johan, left to himself, wanders the corridors and has a series of enigmatic encounters, including with a troupe of dwarfs²^•⁹.

The film is largely wordless, and its title operates on several levels: the breakdown of communication between the three travelers, the invented language of the city, and the absence of God¹⁰^•⁸. Roger Ebert, the Chicago Sun-Times critic who won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1975, noted that while the two earlier trilogy films referred to God's silence directly or by implication, The Silence contains no theology at all, only a world bereft of it⁸. The invented language was built on Estonian, the mother tongue of Bergman's wife at the time, the concert pianist Käbi Laretei; the city is called Timoka, a word Bergman took from a book of poetry in his wife's possession and later learned meant "appertaining to the executioner" in Estonian⁹.

Origins and writing

In February 1962 the Swedish press reported that Bergman would take a year off to study the music of J. S. Bach with his wife's help. The full-time Bach studies never happened, but the composer entered the film in a small, important way: when Bach's Goldberg Variations are played on the radio in the film, the emotional and linguistic distances between the characters are briefly bridged, the only moment in the film in which they appear to connect¹¹.

Musical and dream sources. Like Winter Light, which began from Stravinsky's Psalms symphony, The Silence began from a piece of music, Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra. Bergman described his original idea as a film working by musical rather than dramaturgical laws, functioning associatively, rhythmically, with main and secondary motifs¹¹. The material also drew on a recurring dream of being in an enormous foreign city, moving toward a forbidden district where the laws of reality and society cease to exist⁹.

Bergman's wife, Kenne Fant, and several friends advised against making the film; he made it anyway. The screenplay is dated 18 April 1962¹¹.

Production

Filming began on 9 July 1962 and was carried out entirely in the Råsunda studios. Bergman told cinematographer Sven Nykvist that although the film should be dreamlike, it must avoid dream clichés such as soft-focus images and dissolves; the challenge was to make the film itself resemble a dream. They chose Eastman Double-X, a stock that can be developed to a high gamma value, and after the austere visual style of Through a Glass Darkly and Winter Light decided to be considerably more unrestrained. Bergman later called the experience "a cinematographic lust that I still experience with joy"¹¹.

Nykvist remembered the shoot as a playground compared with the ordeal of Winter Light, though it was also when he and Bergman had their only real argument¹¹. His lighting in the finished film works obliquely, holding half a face in shadow or lighting the two faces of a two-shot separately, and concealing its own techniques⁸.

Censorship and reception

Following the Swedish premiere on 23 September 1963, newspapers competed over who could quote the most shocked viewer, with headlines such as "Moral outrage" and "Indignation and abhorrence for Bergman film"; one letter writer called Bergman "an ordinary vulgar peeping tom"⁹^•¹¹. The debate reached the Swedish parliament in December 1963⁴. Bergman and his wife received death threats and soiled lavatory paper in the mail⁵.

The controversy did not prevent commercial success: the film became Svensk Filmindustri's biggest success to date⁷. Censors abroad were challenged as well. In Britain the BBFC awarded an X certificate, but the frank sex sequences were trimmed by 35 seconds for the original 1964 release¹⁰. An enterprising exhibitor screened the film uncut in Colonia, Uruguay, about 30 kilometers from Buenos Aires, offering Argentine viewers a package deal of a boat trip and a ticket; an Argentine producer was later convicted over the screenings⁹. One measure of the film's notoriety came in November 1963, when the entire AC Milan football team, in Sweden to play IFK Norrköping, was bussed to the Röda Kvarn cinema in Stockholm to see it⁹.

The scandal proved short-lived. A few years later, more explicit Swedish films, notably Vilgot Sjöman's I Am Curious (Yellow), made The Silence seem tame by comparison¹¹. At the 1964 Guldbagge Awards the film won Best Film, Best Direction, and Best Actress for Ingrid Thulin⁶. On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes it holds an 85% critics score from 20 reviews and an 88% audience score².

Place in Bergman's work

Bergman regarded the film as the third in a trilogy with Through a Glass Darkly and Winter Light, films that explore explicit questions of religious faith³. Where the first two films treat religious faith explicitly, The Silence drops theology and examines emotional isolation in a world without God, shifting Bergman's focus from God to people, from theology to psychology³^•¹². It is also the first film in this group without a central male subject or patriarch⁵.

Formal legacy. The film's abstraction and formal experimentation pointed toward the modernism and subject-dissolution of Persona (1966), and critics have traced its influence on later filmmakers such as David Lynch and Peter Greenaway⁵. It was Bergman's last substantial box-office success until Cries and Whispers in 1972⁵. Revisiting the film years later in his book Images: My Life in Film, Bergman was largely satisfied, judging that two or three sequences, chiefly the confrontations between the sisters and the closing dialogue between Anna and Ester, had a "literary list," while other details, such as some street scenes and the variety-theater sequence, could have been better with more time and money⁹.

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026