Word: shame
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...SHAME. Ingmar Bergman lingers once again on the problems of an artist's moral responsibilities. This is his 29th film and one of his best, with resonant performances by Liv Ullman. Max von Sydow and Gunnar Björnstrand...
...LAST Ingmar Bergman has stopped posing questions and begun taking them for granted. Shame is probably his greatest film--and it is the first to aim exclusively below the neck. We had expected "A Film from Ingmar Bergman" on the subject of war to be filled with long dialogues, endless questioning; in our mind's eye we can see a low-key closeup of Liv Ullman or Max von Sydow asking, "Why is this happening to us? Why doesn't it make any sense?" But this is precisely what Bergman avoids. For the first time we can walk...
...Shame inverts this perspective Instead of enlarging detail, Bergman shrinks it. He bypasses our minds by having little that is concrete in the film--the whole thing takes on a dreamish look, and you can only stop to "think out" a dream after you've awakened from it. The few "key" lines in the film are all contained in descriptions of dreams: "At times everything is like a dream. But it's not my dream, it's somebody else's--what when that person wakes up and is ashamed...
...dream. Bergman has certainly gone to lengths to make it subtly unreal, frequently splitting sound and image, for example. The invaders film an interview with Eva, then dub in false dialogue for propaganda purposes. Bells, ringing far away, seem to be trying to wake everyone up. But if Shame is a dream, it's still far from the nightmare of Hour of the Wolf, for there we watched a man at war with himself; here it's men at war with each other. And while the end of Hour left us with nothing but cold fear, Bergman at least chooses...
...rate, he certainly doesn't aim Shame at our minds, but instead succeeds in an overall effect. Making a non-intellectual film he has at last fused his talents as writer and director, and simultaneously bridged the space between his screen and his audience. Still, many of the devices he uses are vintage Bergman. Gaunt Max von Sydow, for example, plays the archteypal Bergman male--weak and childish, incapable of even killing a hen for supper, leaning on Liv Ullman, his strong loving wife (much like Gunnar Bjornstrand and Eva Dahlbeck in a happier film, Smiles of a Summer Night...