15- Cries & Whispers. Director: Ingmar Bergman . Cast: Ingrid Thulin,Liv UllMann,Harriet Andersson and Kari Sylwan.



"Bergman is a stubborn, shy man. He devotes his whole life to the theatre and movies, and one has the sense that he is only happy when he's working surrounded by actresses, and that in the near future one won't see a Bergman film without women. I think he's more involved in the feminine principle than in feminism. Women are not seen through a masculine prism in his films, but are observed in a spirit of total complicity. His female characters are infinitely subtle, while his male characters are conventions."
-Francois Truffaut-
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"Ingrid Thulin's marriage to Harry Schein, head of the Swedish Film Institute, may account for her early wish to move into international films. But her films for Ingmar Bergman were crucial in showing the harrowing trauma that waits on a beautiful woman. That expressive face has doleful eyes unable to forget pain and a wide mouth that can convey passionate suffering and fraught pleasure. It is a tragic face, the unforgettable image of the anxiety that surrounds Bergman's world."
-David Thomson-The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Expanded and Updated
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"Bergman has never set out to be less than demanding; and as an artist his greatest achievement is in digesting such unrelenting seriousness until he sees no need to bludgeon us with it...Bergman has seen no reason to abandon his faith in a select audience, prepared and trained for a diligent intellectual and emotional involvement with cinema."
-David Thomson-
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"All my films can be thought in black and white, except for Cries and Whispers. In the screenplay, I say that I have thought of the colour red as the interior of the soul. When I was a child, I saw the soul as a shadowy dragon, blue as smoke, hovering like an enormous winged creature, half bird, half fish. But inside the dragon everything was red."
-Ingmar Bergman-
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"I believe that the film—or whatever it is—consists of this poem: a human being dies but, as in a nightmare, gets stuck halfway through and pleads for tenderness, mercy, deliverance, something. Two other human beings are there, and their actions, their thoughts are in relation to the dead, not-dead, dead. The third person saves her by gently rocking, so she can find peace, by going with her part of the way."
-Ingmar Bergman-
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"Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers was a worldwide success though it had all the elements of failure, including the sight of the slow torture of a woman dying of cancer—everything the public refuses to look at. But the film's formal perfection, especially the use of red in the decor of the house, constituted the element of exaltation—I would even say the element of pleasure—so that the public immediately sensed that it was watching a masterpiece. And it made up its mind to look at it with an artistic complicity and admiration that balanced and compensated for the trauma of Harriet Andersson's cries and her groans of agony."
-François Truffaut-
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"When four extraordinary actresses are brought together, fatal emotional collisions can easily result. But the women were good, loyal, and helpful. Besides, most important, they were all incredibly talented. I have absolutely no reason to complain. And I'm happy to report that I did not."
-Ingmar Bergman-
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"He knows which actor is going to play which part when he writes the script. So he knows something of what he is going to get. He is also very open for suggestions. He hates it if you start to analyze, but he is very open to your own kind of interpretation of the kind of woman that he has written."
-Liv Ullmann-
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"I like to go to my work early in the morning like anyone else. Then, when it's finished, I can go home and lead my own life. If you are a star you can never have this liberty."
-Harriet Andersson-
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"Harriet Andersson and I have worked together all through the years. She is an unusually strong but vulnerable person, with a streak of brilliance in her gifts. Her relationship to the camera is straight and sensual. She is also technically superb and can move like lightning from the most powerful empathy to conveying sober emotions; her humour is astringent but never cynical; she is a lovely person and one of my dearest friends."
-Ingmar Bergman-