The Swedish Connection: Ingmar Bergman's 'Cries and Whispers'

I. Ingmar Bergman's Viskningar och rop / Cries and Whispers (1972) is heavy, dense, intense, and color-saturated, punctuated with ambient sounds emanating from people, objects and spaces at an alternatingly beautiful and claustrophobic estate in late Victorian Sweden.

The Criterion Collection website renders a succinct overview:

Legendary director Ingmar Bergman creates a testament to the strength of the soul—and a film of absolute power. Karin and Maria come to the aid of their dying sister, Agnes, but jealousy, manipulation, and selfishness come before empathy. Agnes, tortured by cancer, transcends the pettiness of her sisters’ concerns to remember moments of being—moments that Bergman, with the help of Academy Award–winning cinematographer Sven Nykvist, translates into pictures of staggering beauty and unfathomable horror.

Source: http://www.criterion.com/films/237-cries-and-whispers 

II. In addition to its emotional freight, Cries and Whispers provides a glimpse at socio-economic class before the Great War, particularly through the eyes of domestic servant Anna (Kari Sylwan). The males in this film do not come off well at all, but then, neither do most of the females, either. Anna, though, is the most centered of them all, even though her economic status is dependent on the whims of her employers. She has suffered the loss of a child and can be dismissed from her difficult service job on a moment's notice.

III.  For me, Anna's perspective evokes Anna Victoria "Tora" Ringberg (1890-1966), my great grandmother, who travelled aboard the SS Baltic, White Star Line, from Liverpool, arriving at New York City on April 18, 1909, when she was eighteen years old. By 1910, she was a domestic servant at the Wilford-Hitchcock household in Branford, New Haven, Connecticut; and by 1914, she'd made her way to the Chicago area, where she married Alexander Drougge (1889-1966), my great grandfather. They resided for at least part of the time in Ludington, Michigan, because Alexander worked as a moulder and steel worker there during the Great War, and then for the next fifty years in Kenosha, Wisconsin. 

Today's Rune: Journey.