Shame

Beginning in 1960, when his stature as a preeminent film artist was at its height, Ingmar Bergman suddenly, somehow, felt trapped. So he threw away everything he had learned about filmmaking and he exiled himself to an island and began to make what critics called "chamber films" - like chamber music for a small number of instruments instead of an orchestra. He was like a caterpillar and the island was his chrysalis. Past 50, he expressed his mid-life crisis by trying to expand his formal range. Through a Glass Darkly, The Silence, Winter Light, Persona. I think he succeeded, here and there, but it was a Pyrrhic victory. He was like a composer who, having used music in a thoroughly and gloriously romantic style, expressing rich emotions, wanted to return music to the laboratory, where it could express nothing but itself. After Hour of the Wolf, which perceptive critics saw as a digression for Bergman, he felt emboldened to go after an unwieldy subject. From the impregnable safety of his island, he imagined terrors, and to illustrate them, he introduced them - if only when he said ACTION! followed hard upon by CUT! - to his island.

By the late 1960s, Bergman had already shown everyone what kept him awake at night. Death, God's silence (or His absence), the isolation of the individual, even creative bankruptcy. Before turning to the ultimate subject - the battle of the sexes, he made Shame, which tried to tackle war. Why war should worry a Swede, whose country sat out two world wars that defined the history of 20th century Europe, is a subject unto itself. I do not believe, as Vernon Young did, and stated in his book Cinema Borealis: Ingmar Bergman and the Swedish Ethos, that Sweden's neutrality disqualified Bergman from addressing the subject of war. But Young made a valid point - the notion that Shame introduces, that some sort of armed conflict would ever reach Sweden, especially a remote Swedish island (Shame was shot on Bergman's island of Fårö) in a thousand years is unlikely at best.

[Throughout its writing, Bergman called the film Dreams of Shame. After their capture by loyalists, Liv Ullmann whispers to Max von Sydow, "Sometimes everything seems just like a dream. It is not my dream but somebody else's that I have to participate in. What happens when the one who dreamt us wakes up and feels ashamed?"]

In the near future (1971), a married couple, Jan and Eva Rosenberg, both former musicians, live in an old farmhouse on an island. Waking very early, they prepare for a trip to the mainland by ferryboat. Before leaving, they notice a convoy of trucks towing howitzers pass by on the road. On the way, the wife stops to buy some freshly caught fish from a man she knows. Her husband sees her chatting with him and asks her when she returns to the car what they were talking about. The radio reports that an "enemy" invasion is possible. The husband, who seems a little neurotic, says, "They've been saying that for years now." She complains that their radio is never working. He says, "It's better not to know anything." The wife answers, "I'm sick of your escapism." But they are evidently happy together, if understandably worried.

From this tranquil beginning, with some ominous signs of trouble, Bergman draws us into an exploration of how war has somehow become domesticated, a fact of daily life - acceptable as long as it stays far enough away. But Bergman brings it home to the married former musicians to tear into their contented lives. We watch as the man and woman are differently affected by this literal invasion. They aren't combatants, but at various times they are demoralized, terrorized, physically assaulted, forced to compromise themselves in different ways, and to become refugees from the fighting. Their peaceful lives, originally far from the fighting (they had come to the island seeking refuge), are disrupted to the extent that they lose almost everything in order to survive.

Bergman lays the groundwork carefully, giving us two characters, played with absolute conviction by two of the greatest actors, Max von Sydow and Luv Ullmann, who we can care about deeply. Most films either fail to do this or don't even try. Why bother exposing characters to perils if the people involved in their creation have failed to make them identifiably human? But who is this "enemy" that invades this peaceful, idyllic island? Who and what do they represent? We are never specifically informed of either. War itself is the intruder in Bergman's drama - its cause or ideology are, for his purposes, irrelevant.

War is the ultimate destroyer of civilization. Depersonalizing, dehumanizing, demoralizing, brutalizing. It is indiscriminate. It doesn't care who you are. If you survive and want to escape, you find you that you must do things your own personal delicacy would never allow you to do. And the day to day, moment by moment witnessing of horrors creates a callousness, an indifference to further horrors. One of the things that goes into the training of combat soldiers is brutalization, being exposed to brutalities of lesser or greater magnitude that inure one to them and that enable the soldier to remember his training and go on fighting. Few films have examined more closely and carefully than Shame the effects of the brutalization of ordinary civilians.

Everyone the Rosenbergs encounter, even the conductor of their orchestra, who was drafted, finds the war such an inconvenience. Nowhere is there a sense of national peril, which might perhaps justify conscription or involve something as embarrassing as patriotism. Bergman emphasizes all of the pleasant things that war eclipses, like music and wine and lovemaking. Unfortunately, Bergman, by making the cause of the conflict totally ambiguous and failing to identify what exactly all the fighting is for, fails his brilliant actors and us. He takes the old pacifist stance: since neither side is in the right, I declare myself neutral. But neutrality, in this film, doesn't protect you. You will simply be killed without the knowing, even tentatively, what you were killed for. Your death is meaningless, absurd. You may as well have died in a car crash. Bergman deliberately makes the soldiers in their uniforms indistinguishable from one another. But if I can't tell the difference between one side or the other, how the hell did they? And I don't buy the "Kafkaesque" argument, which is invariably a cheapened interpretation of Kafka. As unjust as the war in Vietnam was, it was clear, from beginning to end, what it was about - after centuries of colonization, a tiny Southeast Asian nation struggled to determine what kind of society it wanted to be. The military intervention of the U.S. did nothing but delay the outcome - the establishment of a communist state - by twenty years. Predictably, Sweden was against the war. Americans learned the hard way that the quickest way of ending the war was to lose it. (The truly amazing thing is that we have learned the same thing in Afghanistan, but it took us twice as long to admit it.)

In 1968, Bergman decided to look beyond the personal traumas he had explored so determinedly in his previous films. With Shame, I don't believe him. He and his actors created two marvelously believable people, but, as finely made as Shame is, he failed to create a believable war. The low-flying fighter jets, the explosions (pyrotechnic effects) look expensive (for a Bergman film), the dead bodies that he doesn't give us a good look at, the incessant distant gunfire. All we really have to go on is the terror on the faces of Jan and Eva. Some soldiers rough them up a bit. And I find it strange that Bergman wanted to recreate scenes in a Swedish city that every European city outside Sweden and Switzerland had seen between 1939 and 1945. I can't believe that any Englishman, Frenchman, Italian, Russian, Pole, Czech, Dane or Norwegian older than 40 in 1968 was unfamiliar with the appearance of military vehicles on city streets. During World War Two, Sweden's cities were under blackouts at night only so Allied or German bombers wouldn't mistake them for enemy targets. 

There are some marvelous things in the film. Max and Liv. Seeing them together in Hour of the Wolf, A Passion, and in Jan Troell's The Emigrants convinced me long ago that they were the greatest on-screen couple. But because both directors were in love with her, Liv Ullmann was the ultimate beneficiary of Bergman's and Troell's work. One scene takes place in Shame in which Jan and Eva are eating fish and drinking wine and, shot entirely over Max von Sydow's shoulder, we are lavished with a prolonged look at Liv Ullmann's face. As much as I have to rely on subtitles, so much so that my eyes are drawn to them irresistibly, I had to turn them off and watch the scene again just to gaze at Ullmann's enraptured face. Look at how many times Von Sydow places his hand against her cheek (I counted five times). How could he resist? Viewed from certain angles, Ullmann has a somewhat plain face. Hers is not a typically beautiful face. But she is able, by the sheer force of her being, of her concentration (with a little help of Sven Nykvist and Jan Troell) to radiate extraordinary beauty in some scenes.

The film wasn't received well on its first release. At the time, for the first time, people watched a war unfold on the evening news. Bergman's staged pictures of war, taken by Sven Nykvist, had to compete with actual filmed atrocities, taken by nameless cameramen in Vietnam. And film violence, in Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch, was provoking debates about how it trivialized murder and desensitized audiences. Bergman was unpracticed at depictions of violence. Only once, in The Virgin Spring, had he dealt with murder directly, making fresh and immediate a tale from the distant past. In Shame, Bergman, his actors, and Sven Nykvist make violence much more personal and make it as shocking as it is likely to get - in a fiction film. But on the scale of shocks to which actual war footage was exposing TV viewers every day, Bergman's imaginary war was small potatoes.