Capital Celluloid - Day Six: Thursday Jan 6, 2011

Cries and Whispers: BFI Southbank, 6.10pm NFT3

Ingmar Bergman's 1972 film is screening as part of the BFI Southbank season The Long Goodbye which focuses on the subject of death in the cinema. Critic Geoffrey Macnab wrote a feature in the Independent last month which highlighted the series the BFI is running this month and looked in particular at Clint Eastwood's forthcoming film Hereafter. Macnab pointed out that Cries and Whispers is "often cited as one of the few films that deals truthfully with death."

The film charts a woman's slow, painful demise and the effect this has on her sisters and her maid. Geoff Andrew, the curator of The Long Goodbye season, wrote in his superb A to Z of directors book entitled The Film Handbook: "Past and present, fantasy and reality are seamlessly interwoven to chart, with unsentimental clarity, the way humans inevitably protect themselves against the certainty of their own mortality."


You can see the trailer here.

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