'Silence' Not Golden

Censors Mutilate Ingmar's Message in 'Masterpiece'

By W. Ward Marsh

If the film were of greater importance it would be interesting to learn what Ingmar Bergman thought of the censorship that riddled his "The Silence," which ended its abbreviated

run

at The ColonyArt last week. This was a melodrama

woven around two emotionally abnormal sisters and the small, quite

normal son ofW, WARD MARSH one of them, all traveling in an unidentified country.

If proper definition had remained in the story, the sisters would have been revealed as a lesbian and a nymphomaniac, with the small boy innocently caught in a moment of suggested

incest.

The unidentified country in which the trio plays out this singularly unwholesome drama could be a symbol, a meaning that the two women are lost.

THEN ONE, because some of her sexual proclivities are normal and because she has a son, finds her way back

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to normality at the end. The other remains lost and will

die in an unnatural land. However, Bergman so fills his films with symbols that your interpretation of this background may be as good as mine, even better.

The fact that the drama was mutilated before it reached here may prove there is increasing fear that some films are going to far into subjects which should be untouched.

Certainly one expects better drama from Bergman who is, one concludes after looking at the film, far

better when working in his own metier which is, I feel, quarreling with God.

HE ABANDONS himself to the Devil with this film, and the conflict between the women is so diseased as to be sickeningly unimportant. I am not sure the screen will be ready in the foreseeable future for characters who veer so far below the norm.

Curiously, no such thought apparently entered the mind of Jorn Donner whose "The Personal Vision of Ingmar Bergman," has just been published by the Indiana University Press at $5.95. It considers all of Bergman's. films as well as the authordirector-producer, himself.

Listing "The Silence" as the third of Bergman's "chamber plays," Donner "the mature B's masterproclaims "The Silence" as piece."

His criticism, well and thoughtfully written, compels me to believe that "The Silence" in Sweden was a far greater drama than the film exported.

I URGENTLY recommend "The Personal Vision of Ingmar Bergman" for your li« brary shelves, however. Many books have been written about this man who restored the Swedish picture to its former high place in the standards of the world, but none has been more com-

plete or more carefully and honestly analytical of the great film maker.

Donner considers all Bergman productions in chronological order, showing convincingly his star's first steps into films, his growth as a genius and his power in the entire world of films.

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The book has a bibli ography, perhaps, the best which has been written about Bergman in the last five years. It also has an index of the Bergman productions together with casts and credits.