6 - The Illiterates: Cries and Whispers and Scenes from a Marriage

Summary

CRIES AND WHISPERS

The story line of Cries and Whispers is straightforward. Agnes is dying, and her sisters, Karin and Maria, have returned to the family manor to care for her, aided by Anna, their longtime servant and now nurse. Agnes dies in great pain, arrangements are made for the funeral, and the sisters depart. It is this pain and suffering and its attendant helplessness that is the source of the cries and whispers of the title.

The narration of the story, however, is neither simple nor direct, for the heart of Cries and Whispers lies in the memories and reflections these events bring about, and its structure is like that of Wild Strawberries and especially Waiting Women, with their interpolated stories, dreams, and reveries [see Table 2]. Here Bergman returns to the central narrative form of the 1950s and attempts to give the drama of rebirth, along with the religious immanentism of that period, new life. While questions of God's existence seem no longer important, the fundamental concepts and images of Christianity, particularly those of Christ's Passion and the communion meal, structure the film and provide its chief metaphors and allusions.

In the wake of Shame, however, the result cannot be the same, and Cries and Whispers ends more a cry in the wilderness and the reminder of a vision now faded, a looking back rather than moving forward. One sign of this is that such stories are no longer set (as they were even in the 1960s) in the contemporary present. They are real only in, and perhaps only for, the past.