What a movie, I mean Bergman outdid himself on this one. Story is, he discussed with a colleague the "cries and whispers" we all have, about our lives, our phoniness, our fear, our existential angst. And he took it from there. Two sisters return home because the third sister is dying of cancer. She has a painful death. She leaves a diary, and in it she refers to a moment when she and her sisters were perfectly happy, when she was happy, when she had no fears about life. What was that moment? You have to watch the film. But lets say we all experience happiness when we are free from existential bad faith, when we are authentic individuals, capable of loving each other.
This film is most famous (i guess) for the eulogy the Lutheran minister says over Agnes, after her painful death. here it is, I typed it from the dvd:
The Lutheran minister’s prayer over Agnes, recently deceased from cancer, a painful death. From Igmar Bergman’s film Cries and whispers.
God in his infinite wisdom Has called you home to him
Still in the bloom of your youth.
In your life he found you worthy
Of bearing a long and torturous agony.
You submitted to it patiently and without complaint
In the certain knowledge that your sins would be forgiven
Through the death on the cross of your Lord, Jesus Christ.
May your father in heaven, When you stop into his presence
Have mercy on your soul.
May he let his angels remove from you the memory Of your earthly pain.
Should it be that you gathered up our suffering in agony Into your body.
Should it be you bore with you This hardship through death.
Should it be that you meet with God As you come to that other land.
Should it be that you find his countenance Turned toward you then.
Should it be that you know the language to speak So this god may hear and understand.
Should it be that you then talk with this god And he hear you out.
Should it be so.
Pray for us.
Agnes, dear child, please listen.
Listen to what I have to tell you now.
Pray for us who have been left in darkness, Left behind on this miserable Earth
With the sky above us, grim and empty.
Lay your burden at God’s feet, The whole of all your suffering
And plead with him to pardon us, plead with him that he may free us of our anxiety and of our
Wearniness, Of our misgivings and fears.
Plead with him that he may make Sense and meaning in our lives.
Agnes, you who have borne Your anguish and suffering so long
Are most surely worthy Of advocating our cause.
She was my confirmation child.
We often had talks together through the many years.
Her faith was stronger than mine.
When this came out in 1972 I went to see it twice with my girlfriend, just one more reason she dumped me I guess. The other infamous scene is when Agnes' sister inserts a broken glass into her Vjay (as Oprah says) as a symbol of the phoniness of her marriage and of her entire life. That MAY be why the film is so famous for some, but I think it is because of the Lutheran minister's eulogy. How Swedish ! I can't imagine the Lutheran minister who gave my father's eulogy giving a prayer to god like that - To better understand Bergman films I took a seminar on Christian existentialism my senior year in college, we read ALL of Kierkegaard. I mean every freakin book. From that course i concluded that having a crisis of faith is what faith is all about. The institutional faith, the cult like faith of some ministers (and not just Luderans, as they say in chicago) is not real faith. Kierkegaard would say that faith involves doubt, but to have faith even though you have doubt, even though you know faith is irrational, is a beautiful thing. That's what faith is: belief in the irrational, belief in something beautiful, something more beautiful than we ugly humans here on earth.
Spoiler: the happiest moment of Agnes' life? When she spent the afternoon with her sisters, playing in the yard, swinging each other on swings, an afternoon full of authentic love, absent of the pretense of everyday life. Thats it: her happiest moment, spending one afternoon playing with her sisters. maybe life comes down to that: a simple truthful moment.
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