In the screenplay, he asserts the color as something part-unconscious, like an image from a dream returning again and again: The color red is present, if not as overwhelmingly so, in the earlier The Passion of Anna, which similarly dwells on Liv Ullmann’s red-tinged hair and complexion, and also sets them off against dramatic crimson clothing and backgrounds.īergman himself claimed to never wholly understand the significance of the color in this particular film. ”īut this quote is complicated and made more interesting by the fact that Cries and Whispers is not in fact Bergman’s first foray into film-making in color. He defined the film for himself in terms of the color, saying “All my films can be thought in black and white, except for Cries and Whispers. But Bergman never said, at least not explicitly, that the red was that of the interior body, that it was blood, or pain, that the film was about interiors and exteriors, or that the red was about anything at all. It may be tempting to assume, both in Bergman’s film and Twombly’s and Rothko’s abstract paintings, that the color has some clear reference, some straightforward symbolism, that red itself, in itself carries meaning. Red offers so many meanings that upon examination its seemingly obvious symbolism falls apart into illegibility. It is easy to reach for claims about the significance of red, a hugely familiar and over-signified color one might associate it with blood and bodies, fire and violence, anger and power, or joy and luck, celebration and decadence and opulence, with money or with love, with shame or with sex.
Like Twombly’s Iliam paintings, the color consumes everything around it.
It feels, in some ways, much like the Rothko room felt to my friend: Like being inside of a heart. Agnes’ scream is a red thing, breaking the heavy silence of the red room.Ĭries and Whispers is a very, very red film. Even Liv Ullmann’s sleeping face is shaded pinker than life, as though the blood were barely contained inside her skin. The walls inside the house are red, the curtains are red, the carpet is red, Agnes’ satin bedspread is red. And then red seeps in and takes over, much as the color overwhelms the white canvas in Twombly’s paintings of Iliam. The scene shifts briefly to a foggy morning scene, the long sigh of an exterior world. It opens with an all-red screen, an absolute red, over which credits play in white text. The sound that this piled-on accumulation of red makes might be something like the scream that breaks the surface of Bergman’s Cries and Whispers a few minutes into the film, when Agnes (Harriet Andersson), waking up in horrible pain from the cancer that has been slowly killing her for years, finally cries out, as though trying to claw her way out of her own body, “I can’t stand it!” That cry is not the first thing that happens in the film, but the film is immediately red. These reds build and build and build until it feels as though the color has a tangible heartbeat, a vivid pulse, gathering into a sound.
CINEMATIZE MEANING SERIES
Perhaps the most recognizable painting of the series is titled The Fire That Consumes Everything Before It, and that spreading, unstoppable saturation is the feeling those reds offer, at least to me they overwhelm, they consume the viewer, washing red over top of the scene and the landscape. The reds overtake white canvas and scribbles of black. The reds appear wrong, a jarring note, a dissonant pitch. The paintings are not overwhelmingly red in the manner of Rothko, but rather the reds in them shock against white and charcoal, or spread through the canvas like a relentless stain. They house Cy Twombly’s Fifty Days at Iliam, a “painting in 10 parts” completed in 1978, depicting in the abstract episodes from the story of the Trojan War.
My own version of that red room, the gallery that feels “like being inside a heart,” is the series of rooms at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Whatever red is to you, it is a lot of that, all at once. The color will act differently on different viewers, even with the relative universality of red’s associations with blood and the interior body but the guarantee is that it does act on them. There is a lot to be said about Rothko’s red paintings, but at the same time there is really nothing to be said beyond this: They are very, very red. “It’s like being inside a heart,” was the way he described it. A friend of mine used to go to this room and sit for hours on days when his depression was worst. The room is small, and interior the paintings are large, and overwhelming, all shades of dark red. In the Tate Modern, a single room houses nine of Rothko’s paintings, a series originally commissioned in the late 1950s as a mural for the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram building.
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