Cries and Whispers

Jung held that a whole self is one that has integrated its opposing parts, and that psychic suffering is what happens when those parts split off and refuse each other. The four women of Cries and Whispers read as a single psyche fractured into its components. Karin is the frozen intellect, so armored against feeling that she mutilates her own body with a shard of glass rather than let her husband near her. Maria is the seductive persona, all surface warmth and no substance, who charms and abandons in the same gesture. Agnes is the suffering feeling-self, the part that actually experiences and therefore actually dies. Anna is the body and the instinctual ground, the only function still capable of contact.

The film's tragedy is a failure of integration. Karin and Maria have a moment of near-union, touching faces and speaking without sound in a scene Bergman films as tenderly as anything he made, and then Karin recoils and denies it ever happened. The split reasserts itself. The psyche that might have become whole around Agnes's death instead scatters back into its isolated parts, and the two sisters leave the manor having learned nothing, the wound uncrossed.

Alchemy names its final stage the rubedo, the reddening, the point where the purified substance is reunited with life and the great work is finished. Bergman floods his film with the color of the completed opus, and then shows you souls that cannot reach the state the color promises. The red is everywhere in the room and nowhere in the sisters. It surrounds Karin and Maria like a womb they refuse to be reborn from.

Agnes is the substance being worked. Her death is the fire, the calcination that should transform everyone attending it. And one transformation does complete. Anna, holding the dead Agnes against her bared body in a pietà the whole film builds toward, achieves the union the red was always pointing at: matter and spirit, body and love, joined at the moment of death. The sisters flee it. Anna alone stands in the rubedo, and Bergman gives the film's final grace to Agnes's diary, read after her death, recalling one perfect afternoon in a white swing with all four women together, the wholeness that existed once and could not be held.

Other Bergman films that film the soul directly: Persona (two women bleeding into one identity), Through a Glass Darkly (God arriving as a spider), Winter Light (the silence of God at its most bare).