Cries and Whispers (1972)

Cries and Whispers arrives from 1972, a Swedish production in which Ingmar Bergman places four women inside a crimson mansion and lets terminal cancer do the rest. Agnes wastes away upstairs. Her sisters, Karin and Maria, orbit the deathbed with a mixture of dread and indifference. The maid, Anna, holds her. Sven Nykvist's camera took an Academy Award for treating red as a moral condition, and the film has been canonized ever since. It is a serious work about suffering, faith, and the failure of touch. None of that makes it a document of contemporary social instruction, and we should be clear on the distinction.

The film does concern itself with women, their repression, and the violence they turn inward. Karin mutilates her genitals with broken glass to repel her husband. This is a critique of patriarchy in roughly the sense that a funeral is a critique of mortality. It offers no program, no uplift, no empowerment. The sisters are trapped by biology and circumstance, and Bergman regards them with pity and something colder underneath. There is no racial consciousness at work, and no engagement with class beyond the dismissal of a servant without severance, which registers as an afterthought. The charged physical intimacy between Anna and Agnes, set against the sisters' revulsion at any touch, sits inside a framework of marriages and affairs. We find no modern identity politics in the red room.

The body here is a site of decay, not celebration. Illness, blood, and revulsion dominate the frame. No climate allegory, no neurological diagnosis, no rewriting of the historical record. Bergman is not lecturing anyone. He is arranging a Pietà and letting us watch it happen. It remains a great film, and it is almost entirely innocent of the preoccupations that occupy our current discourse. We classify it accordingly, with respect and without much enthusiasm for its relevance.