Ingmar Bergman is one of the greatest of modern directors, but he’s also an instant object of comedy because of his incidental association with Woody Allen, America’s leading Bergmaniac. That association is actually more than incidental, however; it’s symptomatic. Thoughts of Bergman’s films, despite their exalted philosophical seriousness (or perhaps because of it), naturally turn toward comedy. That’s no knock on the films; it’s inseparable from their enduring artistic power.

Filmstruck, a streaming site that is now hosting a changing selection of Criterion’s films, has put a batch of Bergman’s movies on view this month, and, of those offered, the one that’s the most crucial to his oeuvre and to the history of cinema is the 1963 drama “The Silence.” It’s the film in which Bergman exposed a deep and decisive artistic fault line in his own work and, in the process, made much of the tremors it unleashed. At the same time, it’s also one of the Bergman films that lends itself most readily to parody, alongside “The Seventh Seal” and “Wild Strawberries.” Bergman parodies are a genre unto themselves, and, in accounting for the vast dramatic and cinematic power of “The Silence,” it’s also worth considering the risk of ridicule at its core, a risk that’s central to Bergman’s cinematic project.

Like most of Bergman’s films, “The Silence” both reflects and exposes the filmmaker’s extreme vulnerability. In “The Silence,” however, he doesn’t do anything so simple as putting his heart upon his sleeve; rather, he elaborates intricately intertwined layers of conflicting artistic strategies, contradictory personal obsessions, and troubled intellectual processes behind such self-revelation. The paradox of intimate confession and aesthetic refinement, of theoretical abstraction and first-person emotion, is the very blend that makes Bergman one of the exemplary modern directors—and one of the exemplary objects of parody. There’s nothing as latently, unintentionally comical as affirming simplicity by way of complexity, as maintaining a tone of high seriousness amid the stuff of ordinary life. If regular old Hollywood melodrama, rendering bourgeois passions operatic, provokes chuckles even among its devotees, Bergman’s infusion of middle-class anguish with metaphysical heights and existential depths risks unleashing a laugh riot.

“The Silence” is a chamber play with only a handful of characters and locations. It’s the story of two sisters, Anna (Gunnel Lindblom) and Ester (Ingrid Thulin), and Anna’s young son, Johan (Jörgen Lindström), who are travelling by train during the heat of summer in a Central or Eastern European country that’s on the brink of war. There, in the fictitious town of Timoka (where the residents speak a language that Bergman invented for the purpose of the film), the trio hole up in a palatial old hotel that puts up a shabby façade of formality. Ester, an acclaimed literary translator, is seriously ill (she’s also drinking heavily); Anna’s main activity appears to be caring for Johan; and the reason for their journey is never made clear. What does emerge, though, is that they’re scheduled to go home soon, and, when they do, things will change for Johan—he’ll board with his grandmother and see his parents only occasionally.

In the hotel, Ester takes to bed, drinks, summons an elderly porter for another bottle (they have no language in common and communicate with gestures). Anna bathes (calling Johan in to scrub her back), sleeps (topless alongside the undressed Johan), and then dresses to go out. Johan wanders the hotel’s grand and desolate corridors by himself, carrying a toy gun, encountering staff and guests (notably, a theatrical troupe of little people who make him their plaything until the head of the troupe returns and restores order). Anna leaves the hotel for the bustling, agitated town, goes to a theatre (where she sees the troupe perform), witnesses a couple having sex in a corner of the theatre, and dashes back to the hotel in a state of turmoil.

In a scene that reverberates with theatrical invention, Anna sends Johan out of the room so that she can speak alone with Ester. There, she confesses (falsely) to her sister that she had quick casual sex with someone she met in the theatre. As Ester appears agitated at the revelations about Anna’s sex life, Anna leaves the room and turns the lie into reality: she grabs hold of a waiter and has sex with him in an empty room—and Johan, roaming the corridor, sees them enter and spies on them through the keyhole. He reports back to Ester about what he saw. Ester, who had been working at her desk on a translation, is thrown into a deeper state of illness, and she may not be able to leave with Anna and Johan as planned.

The movie is called “The Silence” and, though it’s not silent, there isn’t a lot of dialogue, either; some of it entails the mutual incomprehension of people with no common language, and some of it depicts the gulf of bewilderment separating those who have spoken together all their lives. It’s filled with action, but it’s intimate action, staged mainly in rooms, with one or two or three people at a time, and their action is choreographed with a theatrical precision to match the formal fury of their precisely controlled rhetorical diction. Bergman’s theatre is a double theatre, though. He’s an heir of Ibsen, a master observer who calibrates the torments and emotional bruises, the rationed caresses and playful lies, with a clinical precision. But he’s also an heir of Beckett, an opaque symbolist who spurns psychology in favor of total metaphors that rip the veil off reality to expose the core of existential pain.

That duality is matched by a second one, of cinema versus theatre. For all his conspicuously realistic theatrical artifice, Bergman overcomes it, in “The Silence,” with a realm of highly inflected images that owe little to dramatic realism. Surprising camera angles show action from overhead or below or from a mysterious distance or with objects interposed between the lens and the actors; wavering reflections, striated light, extreme brightness, deep shadow, and high contrast all contrive to sublimate performance and character into a visual music, a constructed but spontaneous dissonance that gives rise to a sense of irreconcilable dislocation and inner frenzy. Yet the sense of artifice—of action that’s grafted onto naturalistic settings and situations solely for the purpose of the ideas that it unfolds and the images that it yields—challenges the sensibilities of viewers accustomed to an unambiguous measure of reality or of fantasy.

The two sisters themselves make for another symbolic duality, and Bergman turns their onscreen pairing during their climactic talk into an ambivalent and conflict-riddled identity-meld—a terrifying, quiet outburst, in images, of brutally repressed tensions. The tensely bound pairings at the core of “The Silence”—family and society, art and politics, desire and love, self and other—are the source of the film’s modernity and of its aptness for parody.

When Andrei Tarkovsky, working from the nineteen-sixties through eighties, made films of a symbolically furious anguish, it seemed to make perfect sense; he lived and worked in the Soviet Union, where anguish was the grossest domestic product and more of it was produced than its people could ever consume—and where the abstrusely symbolic realm was the one openly covert way of expressing it. But Bergman lived and worked in Sweden—Sweden!—and still found a way to be miserable in the land of the safety net and political neutrality, and to be symbolic in a land of freedom. What’s more, he expressed that misery vehemently, even pugnaciously, making films that blended a tormented drive for guilty pleasure with a grim Lutheran sense of personal confrontation with the Almighty. In his films, the proximity of pleasure and death, of lust and destruction shifts quickly from the earthly to the cosmic. If it seemed peculiar for him to find the fires of Hell lurking within the permanent Scandinavian chill, it seemed even stranger when he inspired others to find them in their own air-conditioned nightmares, even on the Upper East Side.