Movie Masterworks

“I wanted to hold the moment fast and thought, Come what may, this is happiness. I cannot wish for anything better. Now, for a few minutes, I can experience perfection. And I feel profoundly grateful to my life, which gives me so much.”

Synopsis: Legendary director Ingmar Bergman creates a testament to the strength of the soul - and a film of absolute power. Karin and Maria come to the aid of their dying sister, Agnes, but jealousy, manipulation, and selfishness come before empathy. Agnes, torch red by cancer, transcends the pettiness of her sisters’ concerns to remember moments of being - moments that Bergman, with the help of Academy Award-winning cinematographer Sven Nykvist, translates into pictures of staggering beauty and unfathomable horror.

Critique: The human journey is toward death. As God’s presence dissolved, the human person had to look elsewhere for some meaning in human existence, some hope to cling to in the face of death. Art offers hints of explanations, but without God’s animating presence and the superstructure of meaning that religion once provided for the artist, art’s “answers” can never be adequate. The only hope we have, according to Bergman, is human love. There is no heavenly hope. To make loving contact with one other human being or perhaps with many others is the only salvation available to us.

-Robert Lauder: In God, Death, Art and Love: The Philosophical Vision of Ingmar Bergman

My thoughts: Cries and Whispers is a devastatingly cathartic film. This movie made me more cognizant of my relationships with those who are close to me. In the end, those are the relationships that delineate people who live rich lives from those living in a wasteland.