"Ester loves her sister; she finds her beautiful and feels a tremendous responsibility for her, but she would be the first to be horrified if it were pointed out that her feelings were incestuous. Her mistake lies in the fact that she wants to control her sister—as her father had controlled her by his love. Love must be open. Otherwise Love is the beginning of Death. That is what I am trying to say."


"Through a Glass Darkly and Winter Light and The Silence and Persona I've called chamber works. They are chamber music—music in which, with an extremely limited number of voices and figures, one explores the essence of a number of motifs. The backgrounds are extrapolated, put into a sort of fog. The rest is a distillation."


"After The Silence I received an anonymous letter, containing filthy toilet paper; so one could say the treatment accorded to this film, which by today's standards was pretty innocuous, was rather fierce. There were even people who rang up and threatened both my own life and the life of the wife [Käbi Laretei] I was married to at that time. Besides being subjected to a telephone-terror, I supposed I must have got about a hundred letters. So the sexual trauma in Sweden must have been acute. Things have changed radically these last years."


"For me the important thing is that Ester sends a secret message to the boy. That's the important thing: the message he spells out to himself. To me Ester in all her misery represents a distillation of something indestructibly human, which the boy inherits from her."


"What shall I say about The Silence? I think it is about the complete breakdown of illusions....It's very difficult to tell you....It's about my private life....It's an extremely personal picture....It is a sort of personal purgation: a rendering of hell on earth—my hell. The picture is so....It is so strange to me that I do not know what it means."


"The pictorial style of Through a Glass Darkly and Winter Light had been restrained, even chaste. An American distributor asked, despair in his voice, 'Ingmar, why don't you move your camera anymore?' In The Silence, Sven [Nykvist] and I had decided to be uninhibitedly unchaste. It contains a cinematic sensuality that I still experience with delight. To put it simply: we had an enormous amount of fun making The Silence."


"The Silence is the great watershed movie of Bergman's career, perhaps of Sixties art cinema: the work of a filmmaker no longer able to contain the creatures and archetypes surging in the playroom of his imagination. These include a troop of dwarfs (out of Tod Browning by Velazquez), an eldritch rag-and-bone man and his horse, several tortured sex scenes, a boy urinating in the hotel corridor, and the choric grind and roar of war machinery—tanks, planes—outside the hotel's windows. Late Bergman meets early Buñuel blended with mid-period Fellini. But The Silence isn't L'Age d'or with angst or 8½ with religious guilt. Bergman's discovery of free association—because it comes from a mind so austere and hermetic—is more nightmarish and far more powerful in its cosmic disgust. The outrage that greeted The Silence—howls of bishops, scissorings of censors, even feces-smeared toilet paper sent to the director—denoted public horror at a morally serious moviemaker surrendering (it seemed) to a libertine, Dadaist nihilism. But The Silence is a massively serious movie. Its deconstruction of the unconscious in a world drifting toward secularity opened the way to modern directors like Kieslowski and Lars von Trier, for whom cinema is a glorious trapdoor art. Linear storytelling is at worst impossible, at best a matter of negotiating ground that can open up beneath you without notice."


"[There is] somewhere between 34 and 38 exchanges of dialogue. If I'd been a bit more alert and logical, it wouldn't have had more than 28. There's a scene in it that I regret, one I don't like. I wanted to make a film without dialogue. I had made so many films with so much talking in them that I wanted to make a film, a true 'cinematograph,' where the image would play the leading role. I never understood that I'd created a film that would cause censorship in so many countries, such trouble. I remember sitting with the manager of Svensk Filmindustri, Mr. Kenne Fant. We were watching the rough cut...and I remember Kenne saying...with a little embarrassed smile, when he had finished watching it, 'Well, this film won't have audiences running to the theatre.' In those days I had progressed so far as to get a share of the films. A couple days later he calls me and says, 'There's a German distributor who's thinking of buying The Silence, all in cash, up front, for the entire German-speaking region.' He mentioned a rather modest amount of money, some 1.3 million kronor, I think. I told him, 'Take the money and run! It's wonderful if we can make any money on it!' I think he made around 130 million kronor on that film in the end. When it was released in different areas of the world...it was definitely regarded as pornography in certain regions. On some posters they even listed the exact times for the indecent scenes so people wouldn't have to sit around and wait."


"I haven't seen many of his [Bergman's] films and some, like The Seventh Seal, I don't like at all. But you don't have to like everything a person does and The Silence is one of my favourite films. I've watched it 15 or 20 times. And when I realized that almost the whole story takes place in a hotel, I thought that maybe it has been a greater influence on me than I had first supposed....I love incestuous situations and I would certainly have noticed if there had been one here! I always thought The Silence had an enormous sexual charge, but that this sexuality was part of the younger sister's desire to distance herself from death. The film shows a desperation and, at the same time, a hunger for life."