The Struggle for Hope

...An audience of rebels, except for those few viewers and reviewers who wonder whether so much unmitigated irreverence can accomplish anything positive...

...Above all, there is the B-57, whose complicated mechanisms, complex self-starting and self-locking devices, depersonalized code messages on which millions of lives—all lives, perhaps—depend, have become exactly as much or as little human as the bomber crew that mechanically tends them in an ancillary capacity...

...Ingmar Bergman's The Silence is, I am sorry to say, a disappointing film...

...There are symbols that are cogently conceived: the one sound that unites people who cannot speak to each other is a bit of Bach on a small radio...

...Like Eclipse, again, The Silence deals with noncommunication, and, likewise, makes its points not by preachments but by concrete images...

...As in Eclipse, there is not enough forward thrust, not enough momentum to unite the specific points, the complementary but discrete images...

...heroes of politics, warfare, science, all of them so repellent or, at best, nondescript, that the only rebels must be in the audience— amused, revolted, and ready to revolt...

...the gap is bridged by a deeply perceptive, imaginative handling of memory and an unerring sense for montage...

...What The Fiancés does with great finesse is to combine the scope and severity of the documentary with the intimacy of a short story...

...The Fiancés, is not so palpably ingratiating as his wonderful The Sound of Trumpets, but it is visually poignant, sensitively conceived, and marks a further technical advance...

...The final rainfall I can compare only to the snow at the end of Joyce's "The Dead," no small compliment...

...It is another to know the psychologically and artistically exact moment for the intrusion of remembrance and to recognize the tempos, stratagems and very shape of memory...

...there are suggestions about the present: incestuous and lesbian tendencies in one sister, promiscuity based on inferior intellectual endowment in the other...

...In the film, there are no rebels, only heroes...

...like Antonioni's, Bergman's third installment stringently divests itself of narrative content and shifts the burden of communication from incident to implication, from statement to symbol...

...and the other general whose lust for power is just hypertrophic animal lust, in whom all manners of grossness are neatly imbricated...

...Like Antonioni, Bergman chose to make a trilogy about the emptiness, boredom and lack of transcendental values in life...

...with supreme emotional logic images of actuality call forth corresponding mnemonic ones...

...We are in what might be called Bergman's Antonioni period...

...Nor is this a film in which the rebel against the establishment can be explained away as a Marlon Brando-James Dean type: sympathetic but underprivileged, an unhappily inevitable by-product of our essentially good society...

...There is the colonel in whom sheer stupidity caused dehumanization, and there are all those bigwigs in the Pentagon War Room where the buck is passed around the table as swiftly and mechanically as the ball around the roulette wheel...

...There is the general whose dehumanizing lust for power is based on puritanism and stifled sexuality...

...It is one thing merely to mingle memory and reality...

...After the big, impersonal whirl, this decent, humble rotation becomes an act of devotion and piety...

...Strangelove is, of course, for something...

...Not only is the soundtrack full of the most disturbing sounds and stillnesses, but also the three main characters find themselves in a country whose language is as strange to them as theirs is to the natives...

...The Fiancés is full of landscapes, factories, faces either patiently waiting, or doggedly, dizzyingly juggling, jigging, racing to cope with an unending barrage of demands...

...Lastly, for a film that proceeds by metaphors and implications, certain sensual details are too strong: masturbation, nudity, physical passion, however controllcdly handled, loom too large to allow proper importance to such unstated questions as what may happen to a little boy who is dressed up as a girl by corrupt dwarfs and allowed to observe his mother's frantic infidelities...

...Olmi can make the most trivial piece of dialogue sound touching and true because of some minor but absolutely particularized incident that surrounds it—perhaps nothing more than a bitten, dirty fingernail during an embrace on the beach...

...There is, however, a threefold inadequacy in The Silence...

...It is for humanity, both literally and figuratively...

...there are hints of the past—rivalry between the two sisters, the fatherfixation of the one, the excessive absences of the other's husband...

...Well, one positive, indeed necessary, thing it can certainly achieve: It can prove that there is an audience for satire, for devastatingly witty criticism of an ultimately serious sort, for attacks on institutions Hollywood considers almost as sacred as the box office...

...Art is universal, and so, potentially, is language...

...Here is ghastliness recorded with an exemplary sense of responsibility...

...And there is no end either, though it is arguable that a middle like that is an end in itself...

...Again, there is not enough human content...

...Like Eclipse, The Silence will have no truck with beginnings, but starts with a middle...

...Two remarkable performances should be singled out: Sterling Hayden's welladjusted maniac, and George C. Scott's maniacal adjusted man...

...Strangelove lies in the efforts of such mediocre but well-meaning anti-heroes as President Muffley and, especially, Captain Mandrake, a kind of Ionescoan Bérenger, the lefthanded, out-of-left-field, but at least unsinister, human being...

...And Kubrick's generally fine direction is superb in the treatment of battle: the hand-camera captures it in the hazy, shabby, incoherent way of the documentaries...

...Ermanno Olmi's second film...

...The sisters who speak each other's tongue use it only to pummel each other with it...

...The rebel in Dr...

...Young Olmi is one of the finest hopes of the movies, blending as he does the dedicated naturalism of the neo-realists with the poetic humanism of Fellini...

...The pearls are there, but the string is too weak to hold them...

...The former is a triumph of realistic acting, the latter of making minutest idiocies and hugest beastlinesses larger than actual size...

...Strangelove is nobody at all, unless you count the scenarists: Kubrick, Peter George, and, above all, Terry Southern...

...Whereas the basic metaphor in Antonioni's film was visual—the eclipse of man in a world dominated by things—the master-image in The Silence is auditory...

...The pearls are there, but we can scarcely see the neck on which they hang...

...And as a final grotesquely horrible symbol, there is Strangelove himself, exemplifying both hideous tendencies: the human body so full of artificial or artificially reinforced parts that little of it remains not a machine...

...But the characters do not have enough space in which to develop, precisely because what space there is must remain empty to convey the message...

...High, though not necessarily unqualified, praise must go to the writing, directing and acting, and not the least of it to Columbia Pictures for releasing the film...

...With sovereign assurance the background music reminds us of the present while we are projected into memory...

...Nor is the rebel a comedian, say, a W. C. Fields or a Chaplin, who can be laughed off as a marginal eccentric...

...Here is a perfect binary rhythm by which the film moves fugally on the planes of reality and recollection—sometimes swerving even into the realm of wish fulfillment—asymmetric yet satisfying, a self-sufficient whole...

...Much more than an attack on its various targets, it is a catalogue raisonné of the ways in which mankind mechanizes or dehumanizes itself...

...The only hope in Dr...

...Speech, the common denominator, has dropped out of the world and we are left darkling...

...The least gestures assume enormous significance: returning from a frenetically swirling fiesta, the lonely hero carefully screws back the cap on a tube of toothpaste...

...and the rallying of these mechanical parts till it is they who come to a dominant—and catastrophic—life...

...The pearls are there, but the baubles on the same string deflect our attention...

...Strangelove is that it is the first American film to be thoroughly irreverent about everything the establishment takes seriously: atomic war, government, the army, international relations, religion, heroism, sex, and what not...

...It is a small film, but honest, beautiful and, above all, brave...

...Music, photography, words: everything is wistful, forthright to the point of vulnerability, goodnatured and slightly helpless, but uncomplainingly or complainingly hopeful in the teeth of feral odds...

...And best of all is Sven Nykvist's photography: it fuses the muted tones of the earlier Bergman films with the almost uncanny luster of the later ones, and plays across a whole expressive scale from matte to glossy...

...Like any valid work of art, Dr...

...but we are, at best, beginning to learn its uses...

...the dying aunt leaves the little boy a list of words she has been able to glean from the strange language...

...it flows easily only into foreign, uncomprehending ears...

...Which is not to say that there is no pleasure in such pearls as the exquisite performances, or in beautifully observed and meaningful details, as when Ingrid Thulin looks down on her sister's and nephew's semi-nude bodies and can barely suppress reaching out for her sister by switching the gesture into a contemptuous flick toward the masculine nudity of the other body...