Continuing the explorations and understanding of, and seminal dialogue with viewers on Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman’s cinematic ouvres, LACEFilms, this Sunday, has scheduled two more of Berman’s celebrated works.
Taking place in the oppressive stickiness of a baking day and hot night, The Silence, spotlights on two sisters of opposite personalities — Ester the elder and Anna the younger.
The two check into an arid hotel in an alien city. A bleak and disturbing study of loneliness, love and obsessive desire, The Silence speaks about the emotional distance between the two sisters.
Young, attractive, Anna picks up a lover, while the older, ailing Ester too seeks a similar human connection but cannot leave the hotel room.
 While Anna represents the physical side, sensual, shallow, intolerant, driven by desire; Ester is the intellectual side; disappointed by life, and finding shelter in books, and addicted to alcohol, clinging onto her sister. With them is a small boy who encounters a strange world of his own in the hotel.
 Arguably the most abstract and nihilistic film, exploring spiritual bankruptcy, The Silence makes an intense examination of emotional isolation in a world without God — where salvation lies in human connection.
Persona, which in many ways, leads on from The Silence, is an unusual Bergman work, existentialist and avant-garde. Taking place mostly at a seaside summer residence, it explores an encounter between two women: Elisabeth a successful actress who has become mute during a performance of Electra, and Alma (soul in Spanish and Portuguese), the nurse charged with caring for her and is loosely drawn from August Strindberg’s play The Stronger.
Like in The Silence, the Persona too, deals with several layers of thematic trajectories of an ambiguous psychic war between two women.
Most technically innovative, provocative, highly cerebral, and artistically complex depiction of human frailty, cruelty, and identity, Persona, is also, one of Bergman’s most difficult films to understand, due to multiple levels of meaning he tries to communicate through innovation and experimentation.
Screenings at Suchitra Film Society, Banashankari II Stage. The shows start at 11 am. For details call: 26711785 / 9900146487 (Prashant Pandit)