Cries and Whispers and Prayers

MENA FOUDA

Mena Fouda is an aspiring storyteller. Her dignifed process includes: petting and interviewing every cat she is lucky to cross paths with, telling bedtime stories to her basil plants, smelling expensive perfume to fnd out its secrets, and dancing to dreamy music in languages she can half-understand. 61 6

Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers (1972) starts with neither cries nor whispers but a natural silence. When we are first brought into this world, we see a statue, a thing that by its very nature is made to be unmoving: a figure that crystalizes movement. It is a quiet dawn and light streams softly past the trees, suggesting a tranquil openness to this environment. At first glance, I wonder what it would be like to walk these serene fields, to dance beneath these emerging rays of light. This must be somebody’s paradise. Without warning, this utopic space bleeds a deep red, until the colour overtakes the screen and transports us somewhere inside the manor. Here, we see more statues and a number of clocks before cutting to a larger view of the internal landscape. A sense of claustrophobia wraps its vicious hands around my throat. Something dead twists in my stomach. I no longer want to walk through here. I want to leave this damned Hell. Writing about this film is difcult—not because it doesn’t stir passion within me, but because it stirs too much. Having started with this film, I have since gone on to enjoy Bergman’s other works including Persona (1966), Autumn Sonata (1978), and Wild Strawberries (1957)—but I always find myself retreating to Cries and Whispers for comparison. Not to pit them against one another, but to build on my understanding of what pain and touch and memory mean to Bergman. It is almost as if these stories create a strange and poetic puzzle, one that I only understand when the pieces are in conversation with one another. The film tells the story of four women, three of whom are sisters: Agnes, Karin, Maria. Agnes is on her deathbed as a result of uterine cancer. Karin is stoic, maintaining a distance from all and rarely displaying her emotions. Maria is flirty and flighty, described as the only sister who ever truly garnered the attention of their mother. Lastly, there is sweet Anna, the dutiful and faithful maid. She grieves over the death of her daughter, yet remains unwavering in her dedication to Agnes. If duality is a sword, Bergman is its master. In Persona, there is 62 CRIES AND WHISPERS AND PRAYERS a strange relationship between two women who merge into one at moments—emphasized by the famous still of their faces, one in profile, and one facing the camera. In Cries and Whispers, it is likewise easy to believe that these four women are actually diferent facets of one person. There are multiple moments of reflection, such as the literal reflection of Anna and Karin standing in front of a mirror. In this scene, Karin barks at Anna to not look at her, almost as if not being able to bear her gaze. Almost as if the two women cannot both look into the mirror, or else it would break. Perhaps this is also why Karin cannot accept the touch of Maria. To touch someone else is one issue, but to be touched by oneself is almost repugnant, as if a hand is reaching out from within you, and twisting back in horror to touch the body of origin. How surreal to be consumed by your own self, to be swallowed by your hatred, jealousy, and disgust—and for Karin, these feelings are quite literally personified in the form of the other women. The film feels like one living entity that splits itself into four characters, locking them within the confines of this deep and dark house that serves as purgatory. Through this process, perhaps Cries and Whispers is a treatise on what happens to the soul after death: division, purgatory, and finally peace. To discuss this film is to delve into its striking colour palette. In his essay on the film, Peter Cowie recounts how Bergman would have been content to have all his movies viewed in black and white—save for Cries and Whispers. The most prominent colour in this world is a deep red, specifically a crimson. Crimson’s Biblical meaning is said to indicate the presence of God. But is God here? Much like the characters, the tale is conflicted in its representation of a higher power. Then again, is there anything more appropriate to represent faith than a story of conflict and confusion? To me, it reads as if God, the Creator, has constructed this house of red. He has created the confines of this story-world. In this house, there is senseless sufering. In this world, there are those who pray and nurture and those who reject and turn away. When it comes to belief in a higher power, a pertinent question emerges: why would God cause all of this sufering? And why, specifically, let someone as pious and believing as Agnes, sufer? God, who has constructed this world, who has painted the most specific of details onto our surroundings—surely this God has the power to spare us from pain, or at least to ofer us a sign, a reassurance, anything. But Agnes does not voice these questions, and in fact, her faith remains unwavering. So unwavering that when the priest comes to speak over her dead body, he asks her to pray for them: “Pray for us. Agnes, my dear child, listen to what I tell you now. Pray for those of us left behind on this dark and

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miserable earth beneath a cruel and empty sky. Lay your sufering at God’s feet and plead with him to pardon us. Plead with him to free us. Plead with him to give meaning to our lives.” As he delivers these words, there is anguish strewn across his face, and a teardrop falls from his eye. So strange it is to see a religious figure turn to an ordinary woman for guidance, relinquishing all authority in a surprising confession. Agnes, a seemingly weak-bodied and ordinary woman, was more of a believer than he ever was. Agnes’ faith reminds me of a stanza from “Enoch Arden” by Lord Tennyson:

He was not all unhappy. His resolve Upbore him, and firm faith, and evermore Prayer from a living source within the will And beating up thro’ all the bitter world Like fountains of sweet water in the sea Kept him a living soul. (795-800)

In this world, God has set the scene but decided not to interfere—like a silent stage manager who conjures characters into existence without providing any of the lines. At the beginning of the film, we see the four female characters dressed in white, blank canvases of innocence and purity. We are not yet entrenched in their guilt and sufering. They are God’s perfect creations: delicate, mesmerizing, and soft. As the film progresses, this clothing palette shifts. Anna wears a plaid maid’s outfit, while Maria and Karin wear shades of grey. Agnes remains in white, the child who never grows past her initial innocence. Upon her death, the characters descend into mourning, donning black dresses. There has been an irreversible transition, both in their temperament and situation, and they are no longer pure canvases. It is only in the very last scene, when Anna reads an entry from Agnes’ diary, that we return to that initial state of purity. In this entry, Agnes describes a tranquil memory of all four women taking a stroll through the garden. It is autumn, and the leaves are dying all around the white-clothed women, but Agnes is filled with life. She laments how this simple moment encompasses a feeling of happiness and fulfilment: “Now, for a few minutes, I can experience perfection, and I feel profoundly grateful to my life, which gives me so much.” At this peaceful and resigned state, Agnes’ words remind me of a fond passage from “Maud; A Monodrama,” also by Tennyson:

So now I have sworn to bury 64 CRIES AND WHISPERS AND PRAYERS

All this dead body of hate I feel so free and so clear By the loss of that dead weight That I should grow light-headed, I fear Fantastically merry. (779-784)

Agnes has come to terms with the conditions of her bodily existence, but has opted for flight. Abandoning the dead weight that comes with existence, she turns to memory for freedom. Despite her imminent death, Agnes will always exist in this distilled fracture from the past, like a broken mirror that retains its reflection despite its shattering. Moments like these also serve to distill Agnes as a child. In the world of Cries and Whispers, mothers are only half-addressed. The mother of the three sisters is absent from the present, only existing in tenuous and unstable pieces of memory. Yet a maternal presence still lingers here. Like dreams that we slip in and out of, we are often reminded of the tragic circumstances of Anna’s life: that she had a daughter, and that child is no longer alive. What happens to the body and soul of a mother deprived? It is a general principle that energy is not created, but transferred; in this world, Agnes becomes a child re-mothered by Anna. The most striking visual comes near the film’s end, as a half-naked Anna holds Agnes’ dead body. The shot resembles that of a pietà, where Mary cradles the body of her dead son Jesus. At this point, Agnes is a martyr, and Anna the matriarch. Here, Agnes has received the honour of apotheosis. After this long and painful trial, she is rewarded. On the thresholds of death, it is Anna’s maternal touch that carries Agnes from one realm to the next. By cradling her in the quiet of the bedroom, Anna resembles the tired mother of a newborn baby, half-awake and stripped of energy. But her arms have taken up this position before, her heart has felt the same helpless grief, and her desperate prayers are merely repeated. She has been cast as the weeping mother, doomed to witness death around her and having nothing but prayer to wield against the storm. With this, Anna becomes every helpless mother, every depiction of Mary’s face turned heavenwards in acceptance, every anguished scowl drawn by Käthe Kollwitz on the faces of a bereaved parent. Her touch is not Holy. Her touch is not Divine. It is simply the gentle rocking of the boat that carries you across the river, away from this diorama of crimson and its whispered confessions, and into the quiet of what comes after. We have reached the end of Hell, the journey framed on either side in silence. There are neither cries nor whispers. Listen close: I wonder what sounds are made in this next realm.

65 MENA FOUDA Works Cited

Cowie, Peter. “Cries and Whispers.” The Criterion Collection, Criterion Collection, 18 June 2001, https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/ 108-cries-and-whispers Tennyson, Alfred Lord. Poems. Edited by Jerome Hamilton Buckley. Houghton Mifin, 1958.

Filmography

Bergman, Ingmar, director. Cries and Whispers. Svensk Filmindustri, 1972. Bergman, Ingmar, director. Persona. Svensk Filmindustri, 1966. Bergman, Ingmar, director. Autumn Sonata. Personafilm GmbH, 1978. Bergman, Ingmar, director. Wild Strawberries. Svensk Filmindustri, 1957.

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