Journal of Fine Arts: Performing Arts & Music

Journal of Fine Arts: Performing Arts & Music

The Meaning of Silence in Bergman’s Cinema: The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Winter Light, The Silence, and Persona

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors
Tayyebe Sobhani 1
Javad Amin Khandaqi 2
1 MA in Art Research, Faculty of Arts, Ferdows Institute of Higher Education, Mashhad, Iran.
2 Assistant Professor, Art Research Department, Faculty of Arts, Ferdows Institute of Higher Education, Mashhad, Iran.
10.22059/jfadram.2025.386751.615981
Abstract
Like other symbolic concepts, silence is perceived and understood through its opposite: sound. In some contexts, silence is described in relation to the threshold of hearing, which suggests that it may be sensed even when sound is minimal. Silence can be an essential element, creating meaning alongside the soundtrack and other formal and narrative elements. In cinema, however, this absence does not remain an empty gap. It can organize attention, shape emotional rhythm, and direct interpretation through what is withheld as much as through what is shown or heard. In the experience of watching a film, silence is the absence of sound and auditory elements, but this absence leaves traces not only in the soundtrack but also in other elements. This research examines the meaning of silence in selected films by Ingmar Bergman. By using cinema’s ability to represent reality, he has addressed religious, social, philosophical, and psychological themes. He develops both direct and indirect themes of silence across his major works and recurring existential concerns.
This is a qualitative, descriptive-analytical study to analyze the meaning of silence in Bergman’s selected films, including The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Winter Light, The Silence, and Persona. This article also takes a phenomenological view, asking how the viewer experiences silence and how that experience changes the force of image, speech, and narrative development. The main focus on how silence is formed and functions in narrative structure, visual composition, sound design, and the semantic layer. The five films were selected because they provide different yet related examples of Bergman’s use of silence in distinct cinematic and philosophical contexts. They were chosen not only because silence appears in all of them, but because each film places it within a different dramatic situation and philosophical horizon, allowing comparison across related yet distinct cinematic forms. The findings suggest that silence cannot be reduced to missing sound alone, because its effects spread into framing, performance, pacing, and meaning. It works through omission, visual sparseness, reduced explanation, and the careful weakening of narrative certainty. In Bergman’s cinema, different dimensions of silence play a role, but it functions most effectively at the visual, auditory, and semantic levels. In these films, silence is not limited to muteness or pauses in dialogue; it also appears through visual emptiness, narrative omission, reduced speech, and the deliberate weakening of explanatory cues.
At the narrative level, Bergman’s films mostly follow the classical plot, and the story is expected to be clear and complete. Still, there are gaps in the script, and in all the films, verbal elements and dialogue structures are reduced in favor of visual representation. The use of silence in the plot is less explicit in two films, The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, but in Winter Light, The Silence, and especially Persona, this element is presented more clearly. More specifically, The Seventh Seal remains comparatively explicit, though some elements, including the accused girl’s background and fate, are only lightly developed. Wild Strawberries becomes more restrained, leaving several characters and situations partly explained. Winter Light moves further in this direction by withholding contextual and psychological clarification, while The Silence leaves central tensions unresolved. In Persona, fractured continuity, unstable relations, and the open ending most fully extend narrative silence.
On the other hand, the reduction or absence of visual elements in Wild Strawberries, The Silence, and Persona has been used creatively to highlight the films’ psychological themes effectively. At the visual level, this is clearest in Wild Strawberries, The Silence, and Persona. Dream sequences, restricted viewpoints, fragmentation, and deliberate absence create spaces where what is unseen becomes as important as what is visible, reinforcing uncertainty, inwardness, and psychological pressure without relying on direct statement. Auditory silence, like visual silence, is distinctive and influential in The Silence and Persona, and the absence of sound helps convey the films’ implied meanings. A similar pattern appears in sound. In Winter Light, pauses and reduced sound deepen spiritual tension; in The Silence, weakened sound is tied to illness and estrangement; and in Persona, Elisabeth’s muteness gives auditory silence its most concentrated form. Bergman has used semantic silence dramatically to raise deep philosophical issues through stories of death, existence, nothingness, loneliness, love, and betrayal. These meanings connect silence to death, divine absence, emotional loss, spiritual exhaustion, broken communication, and fracture. In this sense, silence becomes a means of confronting doubt, spiritual crisis, and metaphysical uncertainty, while also deepening the viewer’s reflective experience. In all of Bergman’s films, the meaning of silence is associated with questions about God and existentialist philosophy; hence, the world of Bergman’s films closely reflects lived reality.
Keywords
silence
sound
absence
cinema
Ingmar Bergman
Subjects
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Journal of Fine Arts: Performing Arts & Music
Volume 31, Issue 3
Summer 2026
Pages 45-57