The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Ingmar Bergman · a film · 1972 · about 91 minutes · in Swedish, as Viskningar och rop · photographed by Sven Nykvist
Mode
Chamber drama of a deathbed, in colour; passion play, ghost story and family settlement inside one house
Mythos
The passion and the Pietà, with the servant in the Virgin’s place; the dead woman who returns to ask for love and is refused; the women who watch at a deathbed
Phase
The last day of a dying woman and the days after it, from the park at dawn and the house’s clocks to a remembered afternoon at a swing
Presentation
Feature film in colour, the Academy frame, about 91 minutes, Swedish dialogue; photographed by Sven Nykvist, costumes by Marik Vos; four women and four men, one house and its park
Register
From the cold manners of an estate settled to a dead woman calling in the night; red rooms and white dresses, clocks and whispers, a mazurka and a sarabande
Scale
Three sisters and a servant, one house, one death
Governing Proposition
Two sisters and a servant keep watch in a manor house while the third sister dies in pain. The wager of the film is that care before death is given in the body or not at all, that those with every advantage of family and class are the ones who cannot give it, and that rooms dressed wholly in red can make a house the inside of a body; its command is of colour, faces and sound, and the grammar it works in was already its maker’s own.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film opens outside the house: a park at dawn, in grey light and mist, with its statues in the mist. Then the inside, and the clocks, one after another, each ticking, before anyone has spoken. The house is a manor at the end of the nineteenth century, known by its dress and furnishing, and the film will not leave it and its park. No town, no road and no world beyond them is shown. Time is in the walls from the first minutes, and the walls are red.
Every interior is in shades of red: walls, carpets, hangings. Against them stand white things, a bed, nightdresses, the dresses of the women. When the film passes from one sequence to the next it fades not to black but to red, so that every passage leads through the same interior. Sven Nykvist photographs it in the Academy frame, lighting the red without harshness and leaving faces half in shadow. Four women carry the film: Agnes, who is dying, played by Harriet Andersson; her sisters Karin and Maria, played by Ingrid Thulin and Liv Ullmann; and Anna, the servant, played by Kari Sylwan. Four men come and go in shorter scenes.
Agnes wakes in pain and writes in her diary. Then, through a close-up of her face, half lit, the film enters her memory of her mother, whom Liv Ullmann also plays: a mother who gave her touch sparingly. This is the first of the memories, and each is entered the same way, through one woman’s face, so that the past comes in through one consciousness at a time. What the dying woman will ask of the living, the touch her mother rationed, is set before the agony begins.
Movement II
Anna’s morning comes next. She prays, and before her is the photograph of a dead child. The film gives her few words, and Sylwan plays her near silent, a presence made of the body rather than of speech. She is the one who nurses Agnes. Her prayer before the photograph is set early and asks nothing of the story yet; it is what will make sense, at the end, of the lap she gives.
Maria’s memory opens on her face. David, the doctor, played by Erland Josephson, stands with her at a mirror and names what the years have written on her face. She is the soft sister, the one who offers caresses easily, and the mirror holds her to the face behind the softness.
Then Joakim, her husband, played by Henning Moritz, with a paper knife in his chest. The memory turns from a mirror to a wound, and in both Maria is the sister who touches while touch costs nothing and withdraws when it is needed. The husband is drawn in a few strokes, and the scene leans toward melodrama; what it says has been said at the mirror. But the pattern it sets will be tested again, in the night, by a sister who is dead.
Movement III
Agnes’s agony is the fixed point of the film. Her breathing turns to cries, and the camera does not leave her. Andersson plays the dying with the whole body, physical and unrelenting: a white bed in a red room, a woman fighting for breath while her sisters stand near and draw back. Anna does what they cannot and nurses her. The cries of the title are hers, and the whispers are the house’s, on the soundtrack, the unsaid kept in the walls.
Agnes dies. The body is laid out. The pastor, Isak, played by Anders Ek, prays over her, and the prayer turns the dead woman into an intercessor: he asks her to plead for him before God. Her suffering, which no one in the house would share, is now asked to serve the living. The believer does not ask what she endured; he asks what she can do for him.
A passion in a bed, a prayer and a death whose benefit the living claim: the film has laid out its sacred frame without saying whether God is in it. Agnes bears the name of the lamb and of the virgin martyr. The second half of the film will ask whether the living have earned what they claim, and it will ask in the body, by whether they will hold her.
Movement IV
Karin’s memory opens on Thulin’s face. She sits at dinner with her husband, Fredrik, played by Georg Årlin, in a marriage of manners. A wine glass breaks. Karin takes a shard of it and wounds herself, and then turns to her husband with blood smeared on her mouth. The act is terror played as defiance: a woman’s self-wounding shown inside manor-house decorum, and the face she turns to the man is a refusal of him.
Karin is the sister who cannot bear to be touched at all. Where Maria offers caresses and takes them back, Karin will not let them begin. The two living sisters stand, between them, for the two ways of failing the dying: the cold one and the soft one. They lie close to types, and the film lets them stand so.
The two sisters are reconciled. The film lays the Sarabande of Bach’s fifth cello suite over their faces, and their talk goes under the music and is not heard; for the length of the music they are close. The reconciliation is then reversed, and the sisters are where they were. The one moment of touch between the living lasts as long as a piece of music, and what is said in it the film does not let anyone hear.
Movement V
One night the dead woman calls for her sisters. Agnes, dead, asks to be held. Karin refuses. Maria comes to her, and when Agnes grips her, Maria tears herself free and flees. Then Anna bares her breast and takes Agnes into her lap, and the film holds the image still: a Pietà, with the servant in the Virgin’s place. Whether the night happens or is Anna’s dream the film does not settle, and it gives grounds for both. The refusals are the judgment either way.
After the funeral the husbands and sisters settle the estate in business tones, cold and nearly comic in their manners. Anna, who nursed the dying woman and held the dead one, is paid off and dismissed. The family that could not touch Agnes arranges her affairs in good order, and the one person who did touch her is let go.
Alone, Anna reads Agnes’s diary. It holds one remembered day of happiness: the sisters and Anna in white in the park, together at the swing, close for once. Read after the living have failed her, the page judges them without a word of blame, and the dead woman has the last word. The one afternoon in the film when no one is measured is given only in her memory. A closing title says that the cries and whispers have fallen silent.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure, at about ninety-one minutes. Agnes’s agony is the fixed point, and the memories are required by it. Her own memory of her mother shows why she asks of the living the touch her mother rationed. Maria’s shows the sister who offers caresses and withdraws them when they are needed; Karin’s, the sister who cannot bear to be touched at all. Anna’s prayer before the photograph of a dead child earns the lap she gives later, and the diary is the measure the whole is held against. The give is real, and it holds the axis here. The husbands are drawn in a few strokes and make one point between them; Joakim with the paper knife restates what the mirror has already shown; and a few tableaux hold past their work.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and holds: before another’s dying, love is shown in the body or not at all, and those with every advantage of family and class are the ones who cannot give it. The one who can is the servant, who is paid off when the death is over. The pastor’s prayer adds a second truth: the believer asks the sufferer to plead for him before God, so that her pain is made to serve the living who would not share it. Much of this is given in image and sound, and it is credited as fully as speech. What holds it here: the sisters lie close to types, the cold one and the soft one, and the charge that the film stages female suffering for the eye has force against them; the class truth in Anna’s dismissal is shown and not opened.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Elevation is frequent and mostly dreadful. Agnes’s dying is the longest height: Andersson’s breathing turning to cries the camera will not leave, a white bed in a red room. Karin turning to her husband with blood smeared on her mouth is terror played as defiance. The night of the return rises to horror, the dead woman calling for her sisters and Maria tearing herself from her grip, and turns to its opposite when Anna takes her into her lap. Stillness answers it: the park at dawn with its statues in mist, the sarabande laid over two faces, the sisters and Anna in white at the swing. What holds it here is that much of the force is pressed rather than released. The red and the cries are applied hard, and the self-wounding borders on shock.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The myth is built more than cited. Agnes, who bears the name of the lamb and the virgin martyr, suffers a passion in her bed; the pastor’s prayer makes her an intercessor, so that her death is framed as a sacrifice whose benefit the living claim; her return in the night asks the living for love and is refused twice, and the refusals are the judgment. Anna’s lap is the Pietà, composed and held, with the servant in the Virgin’s place. The particular stays particular: a diary, an apple, a dress, a wine glass. What holds it here: the film’s own silence about God puts the Christian frame in doubt, the return may be Anna’s dream, and the older patterns, three sisters in a house ruled by clocks, the fates and the women who watch at a deathbed, are an undertone rather than a structure.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The inheritance is Bergman’s own: the chamber films of the 1960s, Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, The Silence and Persona, with faces in close-up and few people in a closed place, and behind them Strindberg’s chamber plays, which Bergman staged. Two turns are real. Colour, which he had used before, becomes the structure: red walls, carpets and hangings, and fades to red between sequences. And the dead speak in a period chamber drama otherwise played as realism, with a woman’s self-wounding shown inside manor-house decorum. But the grammar, faces and silence and women in extremity, was by 1972 the maker’s proven path, and the film keeps it whole. A turn of palette and a return of the dead, made on ground already won, risked little in art; that is what holds the axis here.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The red is not decoration: every interior is in its shades and the fades are to red, so that the house becomes the inside of a soul and of the body failing within it. The white of the dresses and of the bed against it sets each woman as a figure against her own interior. Each memory opens on a face, half lit, so that the past enters through one consciousness at a time and the film becomes a set of rooms in one house. The clocks and whispers put time and the unsaid into the walls, and the diary gives the dead woman the last word. What holds it here is that the codes, red for the soul and the face before each memory, are applied as a system, and at moments read as code.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Fifty-four years of return are the evidence, and the questions have stayed open: whether the night of the return happens or is Anna’s dream, since the film gives grounds for both; whether the Pietà is consolation or the film’s hardest judgment on an absent God; whether the four women are four persons or four parts of one psyche, as some readings hold; whether the film is a serious account of women’s bodies or, as feminist critics argued from the 1970s, a man’s spectacle of female suffering. It yields formally on return, in the rhyme of white against red, the faces lit from one side and the sarabande laid over silenced speech. What holds it here: the critical literature is smaller than that on its maker’s most studied films, and much of each return is to the film’s pressure rather than to new meaning.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The field is the cinema of the 1970s, and the film was released in December 1972, so force and reach are scored together. Its force is the demonstration that colour in an art film could be the structure of meaning rather than its dress, and that bodily suffering and death could be held on screen at length without the consolations of plot. Much of that force belongs to Persona and the chamber films before it, and is discounted: the film extended a reorganisation already made more than it made one, and that holds the axis here. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a foreign-language film nominated for Best Picture, which was rare; Nykvist’s Academy Award for cinematography; Woody Allen’s Interiors (1978) as the plainest heir; and red rooms and a long dying carried into an art cinema of death and the body, a breadth hard to pin to this one film.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric across fifty-four years. The form survives whole, the film as released in one version, and restorations have repaired the image. The red depends on colour stock and printing and is the part of the fabric most at risk; it has been kept legible, and that is the smallest charge. The surface is fixed to no moment: a manor at the end of the nineteenth century, dressed as period, so that nothing in it dates to 1972. Presence is continuous in revival, on television, on home video and in teaching, and the film is among its maker’s most often shown. What holds the figure is the reach of that presence: wide inside art cinema, it has not passed beyond it, as its maker’s best-known images, from other films, have.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight. Nykvist lights the red interiors without harshness, leaves faces half in shadow, composes white figures against walls of colour and gives the park its grey dawn. Vos’s costumes and the design make the colour scheme a world rather than a filter. The four performances carry the film: Andersson’s dying, physical and unrelenting, is the summit of the making; Thulin’s Karin is rigid and in pain; Ullmann doubles Maria’s soft evasions with the mother; Sylwan’s Anna is a presence made of the body. Clocks, whispers, the mazurka and the sarabande are used sparingly and placed exactly. The costs weigh: the husbands are written and played to a single note, Joakim’s scene leans to melodrama, a few tableaux hold past their work, and the red and the cries are pressed hard. Invention is credited under the Swerve and Pressure on Tradition, not here.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the husbands and sisters settling the estate in business tones after the funeral, cold and nearly comic in their manners, and the dead Agnes calling out in the night. One law governs both: the living are measured by whether they will touch the suffering, and every scene applies the test. The talk of money and Anna’s dismissal obey it as fully as the return; Karin’s glass and Maria’s mirror obey it; the swing, the one moment the law is suspended, is given only in the dead woman’s memory, so that the exception confirms the rule. The range runs from manners to horror and the supernatural. What holds it here is the strain at two points: the return, which a film otherwise realist absorbs only through the uncertain frame of a dream, and Joakim’s stabbing, louder in register than all around it.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Judged on what a chamber film of about ninety-one minutes holds. Consciousness, in four women, each given her memory; the family, in three sisters, a remembered mother and two marriages; the body, in illness, death, sex and self-wounding, held as an order of its own; class and labour, in Anna, who nurses, lays out the dead and is dismissed, and in the husbands’ talk of the estate; the sacred, in the pastor’s prayer, the Pietà and a God the film neither affirms nor denies; time, in the clocks. They are held through Agnes’s dying, not listed. What holds the axis lowest: history is a period setting and nothing more, the state is absent, nature is a park at dawn and a page of the diary, labour is one servant, and the world beyond the house does not exist. The figure describes the form.
Score: 7.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.7, then The Living Form and The Made at 8.1. A film whole in its one version after fifty-four years, its period surface fixed to no year and its presence continuous in its field; a form in which red rooms, white figures and memories entered through a face make the house the inside of a body; and a making in which Nykvist’s light, four performances led by Andersson’s dying and an exact use of sound carry the argument.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.0: consciousness, the family, the body, a servant’s labour, the sacred and time are held through one death, but history is a period setting, the state is absent, nature is a park at dawn and the world beyond the house does not exist. Next above it, The Swerve at 7.5: colour made structure and the dead given speech, on a grammar of faces and silence that was already its maker’s proven path. Then Pressure on Tradition at 7.6: an extension of a reorganisation already made, with a reach that is real and hard to pin to this one film.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.1, The Made at 8.1, The Inner Law at 7.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.7 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 7.9, The Unconcealment at 7.8, Pressure on Tradition at 7.6 and The Swerve at 7.5 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is met, with nothing to spare: no axis it covers falls below 7.5, and The Swerve stands on the line. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.0. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.8, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Viskningar och rop (Cries and Whispers), written and directed by Ingmar Bergman, photographed by Sven Nykvist, produced by Bergman’s company Cinematograph AB, with costumes by Marik Vos: first shown in New York in December 1972 and released in the United States by New World Pictures, with the Swedish premiere in 1973; colour, the Academy frame, in Swedish, about 91 minutes. The object is the film as released, in its one version, from the park at dawn to the closing title; restorations repair it and bear on its survival only. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Every axis is judged on the Swedish film; English renderings are a reader’s aid rather than the object, and nothing is charged to them. The structure, the memory sequences, the principal images, the casting and the music are held with confidence; the wording of the dialogue, the timing of scenes and the order of the short scenes after the death are not, and nothing on this page rests on them. No line of dialogue is quoted, since no Swedish line could be certified word for word, and the closing title is given in substance. The music is a Chopin mazurka (A minor, Op. 17 No. 4) and the Sarabande of Bach’s fifth cello suite. Details that could not be verified, among them the film’s other producers, the month of the Swedish premiere, the place of shooting, the number of fades to red, the accounts of its financing and of its box office in America, the scene and shot counts and the share of the dialogue, are not given.