Editing Cries and Whispers (section)

===Development===
[[File:Viskningar och rop klänning.jpg|thumb|alt=Long, white dress in a museum|[[Ingrid Thulin]]'s dress as Karin. White dresses against a red background were a key colour motif in the film.]]
According to Bergman, he conceived the story during a lonely, unhappy time on [[Fårö]] when he wrote constantly.<ref name="Nyrerod">{{cite AV media |last1=Nyreröd |first1=Marie |last2=Bergman |first2=Ingmar |date=2015 |title=Introduction by Ingmar Bergman |work=Cries and Whispers |medium=Blu-ray |publisher=[[The Criterion Collection]]}}</ref> He described a recurring dream of four women in white clothing in a red room, whispering to each other. He said that this symbolised his childhood view of the soul as a faceless person who was black on the outside, representing shame, and red on the inside.{{sfn|Gado|1986|p=408}} The persistence of the vision indicated to Bergman that it could be a film, he said,<ref name="Nyrerod"/> and he planned a "portrait of my mother ... the great beloved of my childhood".{{sfn|Gado|1986|p=408}} Karin has the same name as Bergman's mother,{{sfn|Gado|1986|p=409}} but all four female protagonists are intended to represent aspects of her personality.{{sfn|Gervais|1999|p=120}}

A childhood memory of the [[Sophiahemmet]] mortuary also influenced the director:
{{blockquote|The young girl who had just been treated lay on a wooden table in the middle of the floor. I pulled back the sheet and exposed her. She was quite naked apart from a plaster that ran from throat to [[pudenda]]. I lifted a hand and touched her shoulder. I had heard about the chill of death, but the girl's skin was not cold but hot. I moved my hand to her breast, which was small and slack with an erect black nipple. There was dark down on her abdomen. She was breathing.<ref name="Wilson">{{cite web |url=https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/3511-cries-and-whispers-love-and-death |title=Cries and Whispers: Love and Death |publisher=The Criterion Collection |last=Wilson |first=Emma |date=2 April 2015 |access-date=15 November 2017 |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20171116133019/https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/3511-cries-and-whispers-love-and-death |archive-date=16 November 2017 |df=dmy-all }}</ref>}}

Since Bergman's films were difficult to market, foreign capital was unavailable to finance the film. He decided to shoot ''Cries and Whispers'' in Swedish rather than English (as his previous film, ''[[The Touch (1971 film)|The Touch]]'', had been) and finance it through his production company, Cinematograph. Although he used 750,000 [[Swedish krona|SEK]] of his savings and borrowed 200,000 SEK, he also asked the [[Swedish Film Institute]] for help with the film's 1.5-million SEK budget. This attracted some criticism, since Bergman was not an up-and-coming director in the greatest need of subsidy.<ref name=criesandwhispersbergmanfoundation>{{cite web |title=Cries and Whispers |url=http://ingmarbergman.se/en/production/cries-and-whispers |publisher=The Ingmar Bergman Foundation |access-date=28 June 2014 |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140815061546/http://ingmarbergman.se/en/production/cries-and-whispers |archive-date=15 August 2014 |df=dmy-all }}</ref>{{sfn|Steene|2005|p=44}} To save money, the main actresses and Nykvist returned their salaries as loans and were nominal co-producers.{{sfn|Gado|1986|pp=397–399}}

In his book, ''Images'', Bergman wrote: "Today I feel that in ''[[Persona (1966 film)|Persona]]''—and later in ''Cries and Whispers''—I had gone as far as I could go. And that in these two instances when working in total freedom, I touched wordless secrets that only the cinema can discover".{{sfn|Vermilye|2006|p=123}} In an essay included with the DVD, critic [[Peter Cowie]] quoted the director: "All of my films can be thought of in terms of black and white, except ''Cries and Whispers''".<ref name="rogerebert.suntimes.com">{{cite web |url=https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-cries-and-whispers-1972 |title=Cries and Whispers |last=Ebert |first=Roger |publisher=[[RogerEbert.com]] |date=18 August 2002 |access-date=12 November 2017 |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20171001040606/http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-cries-and-whispers-1972 |archive-date=1 October 2017 |df=dmy-all }}</ref>