The final part of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman's trilogy of 'chamber plays' (so-called for their confinement to a small group of characters in an isolated context) at first sight appears strikingly different from his two preceding films. But Bergman's summary of the links between them was very much to the point: 'Through a Glass Darkly: certainty achieved. Winter Light: certainty unmasked. The Silence: God's silence—the negative impression.' The purpose of The Silence, by this definition, was to explore what compensations, if any, might exist in the assumed absence of God.

As something of a deliberate enigma, the film's title is the only reference to the question of God's existence. Even so, there seemed no doubt when the film first appeared in 1963 that it concerned mankind's unspeakable predicament in the midst of a potentially nuclear crisis.

By contrast with the earlier films in which God's concern for man is debated at length, no religious topics are discussed in The Silence. Instead, the pasth has been cleared for other much-repeated Bergman themes, such a—particularly close to home—sexual humiliation and physical impairment, subjects familiar from pre-trilogy screenplays like Sawdust and Tinsel (1953) and the agonizing So Close to Life (1958). The setting for The Silence is an ominous war-zone seething with aimless crowds, where a church bell summons only sparse attendance.

Bergman claims to have dreamed about this location on many occasions, turning it into a radio play The City in 1951, "about a large town in decay, its buildings collapsing and streets undermined," reconstructing it for The Silence, and assembling it once again, an imitation Berlin, for The Serpent's Egg (1977). It's not real, he says, but a stage setting—which is just what it looks like as contemplated from their hotel window by the three reluctant travellers of The Silence. Yet the artificial street below yields unsettling images: the zombie-like pedestrians, the emaciated horse, and the predatory tank, appear to be the emblems of some unknown hostility.

Inside the hotel, the battle is between two sisters, Ester (Ingrid Thulin) who is seriously ill, and Anna (Gunnel Lindblom) who is seriously well, if a touch overheated. Opposites to such a degree that they can easily be interpreted as the two halves of a single being (the physical and the spiritual, the body and the soul), they unevenly share a responsibility for Anna's young son Johan (Jörgen Lindström), who observes and absorbs such lessons as may be learned from their behaviour. Interpretation in fact represents much of the purpose and fascination of the film, which is intriguingly well furnished with symbols, from the obvious (the Rubens painting) to the complex (the troupe of dwarfs) to the subtle (the use of Bach, who even turns up in a newspaper headline).

There was a rumour, just prior to the film's production, that Bergman would instead take a year off from filming and stage work to devote himself to a study of the life and music of J.S. Bach. There was talk, too, of Greta Garbo returning to movie-making, possibly even as one of the sisters in The Silence. As usual, Bergman refrained from delivering the expected, and claimed that an inspiration for his film was Bartok's Concerto For Orchestra: "The dull continuous note, and then the sudden explosion." The explosion, as it turned out, was one of the loudest of his career.

Wherever it was shown, The Silence created waves of controversy, much encouraged by its distributors, who were not averse to spreading profitable myths. It was said that in certain countries there were separate screenings for male and female audiences, even that—under strict supervision—eyes had to be covered at certain points of the action.

The film was banned briefly in France and narrowly avoided suppression by the West German government. To Bergman's surprise, the film he had expected to reach only a modest international art-house audience brought him huge quantities of hate mail and accusations of contempt towards people in general.

As is often the case with films that hit the headlines, much of the shock element in The Silence derives from what it suggests, rather than what it actually shows. Bergman manages to confront us with discreetly staged extremes that are disturbing for the motivations and implications, for what they say about the characters. Any sympathetic consideration of the two sisters in The Silence seems more likely to evoke pity than disgust: rather as with The Virgin Spring (1960) with its horrific rapes and murders, Bergman chillingly maintains a humanitarian gaze where others would turn unhelpfully away, and his message is the more powerful for it.

Although normally on the best of terms with his cast, he met with resistance from Gunnel Lindblom during the filming of what she described as the "complicated, atrociously difficult love scenes." She told him: "It's OK to turn my soul inside out, but my clothes stay on," with the result that, to his fury, a body double had to be edited in for some of the close-ups. Lindblom did not appear in another Bergman film for ten years (Scenes From a Marriage, 1973), but forgiveness came more quickly than this suggests, in the form of employment as Bergman's assistant for productions at Stockholm's Royal Dramatic Theatre. And when she became a filmmaker herself, with the well-received Summer Paradise (1977), Bergman was her producer and his company put up a third of the cash.

Possibly more successful than Lindblom internationally, her co-star Ingrid Thulin had won the Best Actress award at Cannes in 1958 for her performance in Bergman's So Close to Life, and returned from making the glamorous The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1962) for Vincente Minnelli in Hollywood in order to play her two extraordinary and harrowing roles in Winter Light and The Silence. She alternated between Bergman and working for such directors as Alain Resnais and Luchino Visconti before she too ventured into film direction. But Bergman brought out the best in her: her beauty matched by her evident intelligence, she had an on-screen intensity unique among his roster of favourites.

That intensity, transferred from the minimalist furnishings of Winter Light to the seedy opulence of the hotel in The Silence, helps Bergman to achieve what one critic has called "a synthesis of Dreyer and Fellini." A disconcerting fusion of stern principle and copious self-indulgence, it offers an honest enough appraisal of authentic human nature and, conceivably, of Bergman's in particular. In ironic contradiction to its title, The Silence is about the desperate need to communicate between these two extremes.

Both sisters have their 'confessors,' the two waiters for whom actions speak louder than words, who do what they can to assuage any obvious needs. Anna's insatiable attendant signifies a self-defeating lust for life, while Ester's, with his funeral snapshots, is associated with death. It is life, naturally, that survives, rain-washed, arrogant, and ill-informed. But conscience and empathy survive as well, and the boy Johan had inherited his aunt's interest in reaching out by means of the use and understanding of words. In the delicately observed relationship between Johan and Ester there is a scene in which he entertains her with a puppet show, explaining that Punch speaks a funny language because he's afraid. Although, claiming to have completed the trilogy, Bergman next turned his attention to the broad comedy of Now About These Women (1964), he compulsively resumed Johan's quest with Persona (1966) in which being afraid has become so acute that language has failed altogether.