Despite winning an Academy Award nomination for The Shame in 1969, Ingmar Bergman felt that his critics were ready to dismiss him by 1970, the year his father died. He retreated to his home in Fårö and wrote Cries and Whispers "during a long attack of melancholy." His relationship with Liv Ullmann had collapsed, and several weeks of collaboration with Sir Laurence Olivier for a production of Hedda Gabler at the National Theatre in London proved to be a miserable experience. There was sad news, too, about the death in a car accident of Gun Hagberg, Bergman's wife in the early 1950s; their passionate affair had been the basis for his film To Joy (1950) and would partly inspire his script for Faithless (2000).

Yet within months his fortunes had changed. He received the Irving Thalberg Award at the Oscar ceremony in 1971 (it was accepted by Liv Ullmann on his behalf), and production of Cries and Whispers began "in an atmosphere of cheerful confidence."

For eight autumnal weeks, filming took place at a decaying country mansion where, amid copious laughter and bouts of handball, Bergman married a countess, Ingrid von Rosen, and although short of funds began "mostly for fun" to create his six-hour television marathon Scenes from a Marriage.

Potential distributors for Cries and Whispers were at first hard to find until Roger Corman, aiming to broaden the image of his recently-launched New World Pictures, bought the film without even a preliminary glance, booked it into drive-ins and multiplex cinemas and achieved a near-million dollar profit. "Who else," he asked cheerfully, "could release Cries and Whispers in the same year as Night Call Nurses?" Opening to general acclaim in the States just before Christmas 1972, the film went on to be hailed at the Cannes Film Festival in 1973 and to win Sven Nykvist an Oscar for Cinematography the following year. Bergman's reputation had unarguably been redeemed.

Time, one might propose, is of the essence in Bergman's work, and the first voices to be heard in Cries and Whispers are those of an army of clocks, muttering and chiming in a litany of comment at the uncontrollable passage of time. Their faces stare at us in impassive accusation, as though confirming that to encase life in a mantelpiece ornament is one of mankind's more ludicrous ways of externalizing mortality. There is a close-up of the second-hand, chopping down like a scythe, and then, in an instant of heart failure, a clock has stopped.

It is as if the miraculous suspension of nature lets us slip through into an uncertain period beyond, where a woman sleeps clumsily in a chair while another struggles through a crisis of agony on her sickbed, rises feebly, and sets the clock to rights again. She'll last a little longer—long enough for us to explore whether her existence has been worth the struggle. "It's early Monday morning," writes Agnes in her diary, a Bronte sister striving to come to terms with the intolerable, "and I'm in pain."

It's a superb opening, rich, elaborate, familiar. The images are fresh, yet Wild Strawberries (for example), with its eager coffin and uncommunicative timepieces, began in much the same way fifteen years previously.

Time always seems to have been running out for Bergman's characters, deported as they are from a clouded past to a baleful future through the insubstantial landscape of the present. The journey allows them a few questions, some inarticulate gestures of love and hatred, and nothing more. They endure a lifetime of sleepless mornings, and an entire inquisition of doubts and pains. For Agnes in Cries and Whispers the pain is that of terminal cancer; she is dying among the blood-red furnishings of the family home, attended by her two sisters Karin and Maria, and by the devoted, motherly servant Anna.

It has theatrical resonances, but the situation assumes Bergman's usual cinematic complexity by the simplest means—the flashback which we can believe or not as we please. Such interpolations have not been the most precise means of following the narrative since the ambiguities of Persona (1966) and Hour of the Wolf (1968), but those in Cries and Whispers appear to prove genuine, if startling, recollections, heralded and concluded by floods of crimson across the screen. As to the crimson itself, Bergman told his cast: "Don't ask me why all our interiors are different shades of red, because I don't know. I've pondered the reason myself and found each explanation more comical than the other. The bluntest but also most tenable is probably that the whole thing is something internal—and that ever since childhood I have imagined the soul to be a damp membrane in varying shades of red..."

In many other respects, Cries and Whispers is a well-thumbed catalogue of disillusionments. As in Hour of the Wolf, Bergman has assembled characters from all stages of his previous work—the scornful lover from Sawdust and Tinsel (1953), the tortured cleric from Winter Light (1963), the rapacious sensualist and the brooding intellectual from The Silence (1963), the below-stairs realist from Smiles of a Summer Night (1955). All the old conclusions are there: marriage is a tissue of lies, men are weak, brutal and repulsive, sex is degrading, faith is inaccessible unless you have it already, in which case it's inexplicable.

At times, Cries and Whispers looks like self-plagiarism, particularly when Anders Ek (memorable star of Sawdust and Tinsel, and Bergman's colleague in theatre for many years) tells us straight to camera that Agnes has stronger faith than his, or when Erland Josephson and Liv Ullmann, almost rehearsing for Scenes from a Marriage, take each other's wrinkles to task close-up. Occasionally there's even a narrator, chipping in abruptly to tide us over a bit of explanation the easy way, his contributions too arbitrary to appear much more than second thoughts. "It's the same old film every time," Bergman said while shooting it, "the same actors, the same scenes, the same problems. The only thing that makes it different is that we're older..."

Nevertheless, the other differences are there. For a start, Cries and Whispers is a stunning experiment in the uses of colour, its roots upholstered with scarlet, its occupants like brilliantly costumed ghosts. The elemental shades give a magnificent force to the anguish of the characters: if nothing else, they look too good to be disregarded. And striking in on them from the neglected world outside, like brief illuminations of their dark lives, come geometric slabs of sunlight, warming a face here, a smile there, until the breakthrough comes at last with the final open-air exuberance.

Two other continuing dialogues in the film support Bergman's contest between darkness and light: first, a whole subplot is revealed through the language of hands, caressing, clutching, tearing, breaking, at their most eloquent during the otherwise silent embraces of Karin and Maria, their most terrifying when the talons of Agnes rasp slowly down the edge of her bed. Second, there are the cries and whispers themselves, inarticulate murmurs at the fringes of the long night, somehow combining gossip with guilt, fear and anger, as each of the four women questions her own conscience. With the end title, with Agnes' apparent victory, they at last die away as if they were no more than the ill-formed vocabulary of darkness. And Bergman's clocks maintain their steady pace, all set to monitor the later liaisons of From the Life of the Marionettes (1980) and the haunted rooms of Fanny and Alexander (1982). Since the duration of our own lives is so brief, they seem to say, why not settle for an illusion or two?