Trivia for
Tystnaden (1963)

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• The film was submitted to the rating bureau just weeks after the directions had been liberalized a bit: it went through without cuts, and made a real stir. It attracted huge audiences, was fiercely debated - and acquired a reputation for being the film that shot the first big hole in the "sex censorship wall" of Swedish moviemaking. Within five years, film censorship had become a formality.
  
  
• The language in the movie is Bergman's own creation, though it has a Slavonic ring to it. The name of the city, which is indicated first in the train's speaker, and then by Anna, as Timoka, is a real word however. Bergman found it in a book in Estonian on the bookshelf of his wife Käbi Laretei. When he asked what it meant, she replied "belonging to the hangman".
  
  
• The controversy the film acquired for being sexually explicit resulted in a much larger audience than most Bergman pictures. When Bergman realized this, he commented that it had attracted the most unwanted viewers of any of his pictures.
  
  

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