Hacker Cinema
The Silence
Tystnaden
1963 · Film · 95 min
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
Traveling through an unnamed European country on the brink of war, sickly, intellectual Ester, her sister Anna and Anna's young son, Johan, check into a near-empty hotel. A basic inability to communicate among the three seems only to worsen during their stay. Anna provokes her sister by enjoying a dalliance with a local man, while the boy, left to himself, has a series of enigmatic encounters that heighten the growing air of isolation.
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Ahh, time for a rambling ode to cinema of the days past and the Italian Cinema course I audited at Purdue from the incomparable Ben Lawton: Although I have admired Antonioni's great shots (l'Avventura is picture perfect, that final shot! And this one: https://kinorotterdam.nl/content/uploads/2022/04/Lavventura-10.png) and the head games of Bergman (I find The Silence to be the least suffocating among his films although I also like Fanny and Alexander, too) I've always been a Fellini person, since the day I watched La Dolce Vita. He can be over the top (e.g. Amarcord and Roma) but to this day I cannot watch the last sequence of Otto e mezzo without tearing up. Lawton also introduced me to Lana Wertmüller, who does not seem to be as well known as she deserves. If you have the chance, watch her controversial Swept Away.
My wife and I both love cinema, so we tried to get our son interested in it, to little effect ... until he started watching Criterion on his own. He started to watch Kurosawa's movies because they were "samurai movies" but got hooked! We're now having discussions about his characterizations in The Hidden Castle and other movies.
If you can spare some time I very strongly suggest to subscribe to Criterion streaming, at least for a few months ($10/mo in the US) to discover the old gems.