Ingmar Bergman

Cries and Whispers

Cries and Whispers

This existential wail of a drama concerns two sisters, Karin (Ingrid Thulin) and Maria (Liv Ullmann), keeping vigil for a third, Agnes (Harriet Andersson), who is dying of cancer and can find solace only in the arms of a beatific servant (Kari Sylwan). An intensely felt film that is one of Bergman’s most striking formal experiments, Cries and Whispers (which won an Oscar for the extraordinary color photography by Sven Nykvist) is a powerful depiction of human behavior in the face of death, positioned on the borders between reality and nightmare, tranquility and terror.

Film Info

  • Sweden
  • 1972
  • 91 minutes
  • Color
  • 1.66:1
  • Swedish
  • Spine #101

BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

  • New 2K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
  • Introduction by director Ingmar Bergman from 2001
  • New interview with actor Harriet Andersson, conducted by historian Peter Cowie
  • On Solace, a new video essay by filmmaker :: kogonada
  • Behind-the-scenes footage with commentary by Cowie
  • Ingmar Bergman: Reflections on Life, Death, and Love with Erland Josephson (2000), a fifty-two-minute interview with Bergman and his longtime collaborator
  • Trailer
  • New English subtitle translation
  • Optional English-dubbed soundtrack
  • PLUS: An essay by film scholar Emma Wilson

    New cover by Sarah Habibi

Purchase Options

Collector's Sets

Collector's Set

Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema

Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema

Blu-ray Box Set

30 Discs

$239.96

BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

  • New 2K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
  • Introduction by director Ingmar Bergman from 2001
  • New interview with actor Harriet Andersson, conducted by historian Peter Cowie
  • On Solace, a new video essay by filmmaker :: kogonada
  • Behind-the-scenes footage with commentary by Cowie
  • Ingmar Bergman: Reflections on Life, Death, and Love with Erland Josephson (2000), a fifty-two-minute interview with Bergman and his longtime collaborator
  • Trailer
  • New English subtitle translation
  • Optional English-dubbed soundtrack
  • PLUS: An essay by film scholar Emma Wilson

    New cover by Sarah Habibi
Cries and Whispers
Cast
Harriet Andersson
Agnes
Kari Sylwan
Anna
Ingrid Thulin
Karin
Liv Ullmann
Maria/The mother
Anders Ek
Pastor Isak
Erland Josephson
David
Henning Moritzen
Joakim
Georg Årlin
Fredrik
Inga Gill
Aunt Olga
Credits
Director
Ingmar Bergman
Written by
Ingmar Bergman
Produced by
Lars-Owe Carlberg
Director of photography
Sven Nykvist
Art direction
Marik Vos-Lundh
Sound
Owe Svensson
Edited by
Siv Lundgren
Continuity by
Katherina Faragó
Music
Frédéric Chopin
Mazurka no. 4 in A Minor, op. 17, played by
Käbi Laretei
Music
Johann Sebastian Bach
Sarabande no. 5 in D minor, played by
Pierre Fournier

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Sven Nykvist

Cinematographer

Sven Nykvist
Sven Nykvist

Few cinematographers have been as influential as Ingmar Bergman’s close collaborator Sven Nykvist, who helped create such visual tours de force as The Silence, Cries and Whispers, and Fanny and Alexander. A painter whose medium was natural light, a capturer of souls, Nykvist made every human portrait an X-ray, and every interior—whether austerely white or lavishly chromatic—an expressive canvas. Nykvist first worked with Bergman in 1953, when he was one of three cinematographers assigned to the director’s gloomy, twilit circus tale Sawdust and Tinsel. But their union truly began with The Virgin Spring—that savage medieval folk tale ushered in the new era of unsparing, gorgeously shot psychological portraits and open-air location photography that would take Bergman from the devastating God’s Silence trilogy to the richly life-affirming Fanny and Alexander. His work with Bergman made Nykvist an in-demand industry figure, and he would go on to shoot movies in Hollywood and beyond, for directors like Bob Rafelson, Bob Fosse, Philip Kaufman, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Woody Allen. Nykvist died in 2006.