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TURN-ONS AND TURN-OFFS IN CURRENT HOME ENTERTAINMENT RELEASES : VIDEOCASSETTES : ****Excellent ***Good **Fair *Poor

<i> Compiled by Terry Atkinson</i>

“The Silence.” Embassy. $29.95. This is the third film in an informal trilogy--on man’s relation to God--which Ingmar Bergman made in the early ‘60s. At the time, “The Silence” was regarded as an explicit shocker; in retrospect, it’s a key film, one of the director’s masterpieces. A small boy, his mother (Gunnel Lindblom) and aunt (Ingrid Thulin)--one sister lusty and animalistic, the other intellectual, sick and masturbatory--are trapped in a weird, war-torn, vaguely Eastern European country. None of them speak the language--which was invented for the film--and their only communications are through sign language or anonymous sex. “The Silence,” done almost without dialogue in cryptic, menacing images, is a nightmare. Its theme is the world in God’s absence, and it was the work in which Bergman cast off, irrevocably, his earlier religious obsessiveness. Information: (213) 553-3600. ****

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