Shame

When Liv Ullman's character says, "I feel like I'm in someone else's dream and they're going to be ashamed when they wake up," she is referring not only to being an unwilling player in society's war games, she is referring to being an ignorant participant in life itself. At the film's end, when she says that she had a dream that she had a child and she was trying to take care of it, but she forgot something else, the implication is that she has forgotten what she has learned in the war she's just survived, that like her own mother before her, she will be unable to pass on any vital lessons to her own child. And, therefore, the cycle of the shame of ignorance will continue...ad infinitum...

It's difficult to choose a representative film from the entire Ingmar Bergman's filmography. Each film deserves a comment because it's like a piece of art in its own.

I chose "Skammen" because I saw it recently and because I think the message -although being a 1968 film- is still valid. The subject is quite simple: a couple is surprised by war, which changes forever the existence of the two people. We can discover their real feelings and their real values.

We can find shame in more levels.

First, husband's shame for not being able of giving a child to his woman. He's also an extremely coward man in the first half of the movie, he feels shame also for that.

Second, wife's shame for not being a mother -she feels frustrated. She's shameful also because she has betrayed her man with an important man of their country's army.

Third. They both feel shame because they pretend being friends of this man, who saves them from tortures and jail. (They're actually accused of being traitors, in expressing other political opinions.) As a compensation, that man come to their home whenever he wants and take advantage of his position for becoming a woman's lover. The husband lets things going like this, it's the price he pays for a kind of freedom...

Fourth. Shameful is of course war and life during it.

Bergman makes a flawless movie, he studies people as they are. Without big budgets and huge sets. A simple film, deep, superbly photographed in black and white.

I watched this movie on a big screen a few months ago. I didn't know what to expect precisely, and for the first ten minutes I feared I might not enjoy this film. It was beginning very slowly, in silence and almost banality, which was all the less exciting as the sound was quite bad and the subtitles sometimes impossible to read.

But I definitely do not regret to have gone on watching it. It is one of the most beautiful Bergman movies I've ever seen, at the same time human, ruthless and psychologically so convincing.

Seldom have I seen actors play so wonderfully, with such an intensity on their faces : Liv Ullman's interpretation is unforgettable and Sydow is excellent too.

There is always psychological violence in Bergman movies, and this one may be the most physically violent of them all. The strained relationships between the man and the woman evolve in parallel with the physical violence that is surrounding them...

Finally, this sober, violent and powerful film contains a surprisingly striking human depth. An excellent Bergman.

A gruelling watch, but one of Bergman's finest films. Interesting to compare this with The Hour of the Wolf, as both feature the same lead actors as artists (or an artist and his wife) who have taken sanctuary on an island. In the earlier film it's largely inner demons that lead to von Sydows disintegrating personality (at least that's how I read it) whereas here it's very much circumstances beyond his control.

Much has been written about the unsympathetic central characters, particularly von Sydow's. For me there are flashes of a good (if flawed) man early in the film, but one who copes badly with adversity. The flaws become all that is left as his humanity is gradually eroded by one horror after another.

I watched A Passion (Ullmann and von Sydow on their island again) soon after this, and was amazed to recognise many of the same locations. And then there's a dream sequence...

"Shame" ("Skammen") (Swedish, 1968): Definitely one of Ingmar Bergman's masterworks, with cinematography by Sven Nyquist (who did most of Bergman's, and some of Woody Allen's films). "Shame" is less symbolic than some of Bergman's works, and, an intense, psychological study of a married couple, Jan and Eva, (Max von Sydow & Liv Ullmann) who have their personal problems like anyone else, but suddenly find their otherwise quiet Swedish island life completely upset by a civil war. Faced with increasing losses and degradations, we watch them struggle not only against circumstances, but their own psyches. The number of "shames" depicted is huge. This story may have influenced Lina Wertmuller's film "Swept Away". Just a guess. "Shame" is an ULTIMATE in gorgeous b/w photography, and ugly psychological horror.