Shame 1968
Directed by Ingmar Bergman in 1968, this film was supposedly in part a rejoinder to the criticism levelled against him that his films were out of touch with current events, particularly the horrors of the Vietnamese war. Rather than make a conventional war film about soldiers, Bergman focuses on two civilians. His film is typically small-scale and personal but no less effective for that.
In Peter Brook’s play US about the Vietnam war, put on the same year this film was released, a character played by Glenda Jackson has a speech in which she wishes the war to come to England: “I want it to get worse! I want it to come here!” Starting with the same idea – that war can only be understood at the level of personal experience – Bergman brings it to his own doorstep: a small island setting (like the one where he himself had his home).
Jan and Eva (played by Max Von Sydow and Liv Ullmann) are ‘artists’ like Bergman – musicians in this case – living in peaceful rural isolation until a conflict erupts around them. Swept up in it, they are powerless and frightened; buffeted back and forth by the power struggle taking place.
The message at the heart of the film is the complete opposite of most war films, where war is often seen as something that is horrific but also sometimes cathartic. Here, it is simply degrading. Violence is always shameful and the ‘shame’ of the title describes the brutalisation and the loss of humanity that war inflicts on people.
Characters under pressure
In many dramas, when a character comes under pressure, the dramatic tension derives from their will to resist. But there is no sense here of the enormity of killing as an act. Instead, it is like a shameful initiation, something ugly that is reluctantly witnessed by the characters and by us the audience.
Jan is the weaker of the couple and therefore the one who succumbs to brutality more easily. Bergman seems to be saying that, in the inverted values that war imposes, it is the weak not the strong; those who capitulate, who are prepared to surrender their humanity more readily; that survive and appear to prosper – but at a terrible price.
That price becomes evident as the film unfolds. The execution portrayed in this scene is the beginning of a process of stripping away that ends in a moral vacuum with the protagonists literally cast adrift.
It is a haunting image and further evidence if any was needed, of Bergman’s clarity of vision and his instinct for what resonates on the screen.
David Clough ©2011
Shame: second extract
Jan and Eva, encounter a young soldier who is part of the defeated insurgency group. Eva offers to help him but Jan has other ideas.
Article on Ingmar Bergman by Philip Strick, The Movie 1986