Cries and Whispers

Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers (Viskningar och rop) opened in 1972 and won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography (Sven Nykvist) the following year, with four more Oscar nominations, for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best Costume Design, an unusual breadth of recognition for a non-English-language film at the time. Bergman financed it partly out of his own pocket, through his own Cinematograph company, after Swedish industry support fell through, and it became one of the most internationally consequential works of his maturity.

In a remote red-painted Swedish country house at the turn of the twentieth century, three sisters, Karin (Ingrid Thulin), Maria (Liv Ullmann) and the dying Agnes (Harriet Andersson), keep watch with their housekeeper Anna (Kari Sylwan) through Agnes's slow death. The film is built as a sequence of confrontations between the women, alternating with flashbacks to earlier moments in their marriages and friendships. Nykvist's red-saturated interiors became some of the most recognisable images in all of Bergman, and the Oscar-winning photography turns the ordinary conventions of film language against themselves.

It is a study of female grief and of physical pain, and a reckoning with the failure of language between sisters who do not love each other. Andersson's performance as Agnes is one of the most physically committed in Bergman's filmography. The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, a rare honour for a foreign-language work, and it is the centrepiece of the late turn to colour that Bergman made with Sven Nykvist.