Turner Classic Movies used to (and may still, for all I know) air foreign films in the wee hours of the morning on Saturdays. As a teenager just immersing myself in all of the world cinema I could find, this was an excellent opportunity to see a lot of movies that I couldn't find elsewhere at the time, and to see many landmark films for the first time. One of these was Bergman's Cries and Whispers. I just re-watched the film last night for the first time in over twenty years. What I remember about seeing it for the first time on TV late that night was the color. That's what everyone talks about with this film, of course -- the stunning, deep reds. Watching it through bleary eyes at 2:00 in the morning, I just remember being so taken with the color and the compositions. I had seen a still from the scene above (not this exact still, but from the same scene) in Gilbert Adair's book Flickers: An Illustrated Celebration of 100 Years of Cinema, in which he selected Cries and Whispers as the representative film for 1972. It still makes quite an impression on me.
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