Cries and Whispers
1972 film directed by Ingmar Bergman
Cries and Whispers (Swedish: Viskningar och rop, lit. 'Whispers and cries') is a 1972 Swedish tragedy film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman and starring Harriet Andersson, Kari Sylwan, Ingrid Thulin and Liv Ullmann. The film, set in a mansion at the end of the 19th century, is about three sisters and a servant who struggle with the terminal cancer of one of the sisters (Andersson). The servant (Sylwan) is close to her, while the other two sisters (Ullmann and Thulin) confront their emotional distance from each other.
Inspired by Bergman's mother, Karin Åkerblom, and his vision of four women in a red room, Cries and Whispers was filmed at Taxinge-Näsby Castle in 1971. Its themes include faith, the female psyche and the search for meaning in suffering, and academics have found Biblical allusions. Unlike previous Bergman films, it uses saturated colour, crimson in particular.
After its premiere in the United States, distributed by Roger Corman and New World Pictures, the film was released in Sweden and screened out of competition at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival. Following two unsuccessful films by Bergman, Cries and Whispers was a critical and commercial success. It received five Academy Award nominations, including one for Best Picture (rare for a foreign-language film at the time). Cinematographer Sven Nykvist won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography, and Cries and Whispers won the Guldbagge Award for Best Film and other honours.
“Cries and Whispers” enters the record as 1972 film directed by Ingmar Bergman. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Cries, Whispers and film can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q830874. VIAF identifies the subject as 177034547. The Library of Congress control number is n85117345. None of the 5 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1972, 1971 and 1973.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cries and Whispers” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.