RvB's After Images: Skammen a.k.a. Shame (1968)

Ingmar Bergman's death earlier this week left us with a bigger loss than any average obituary is going to be able to address. There wasn't one masterpiece, there was at least a dozen, and in all sides of the performing arts, too: TV mini-series, comedy, concert films, tragedies, allegories. Shame is one Bergman film that desperately needs a revival. Pauline Kael accurately described it as not just one of his greatest films, but one of his least known. And it couldn't be more timely. The shame of the title of Bergman's 1968 film refers to the humiliation of war, how it opens up the cage inside a human and lets the gorilla out. We get war movies by the gross lot, but what always gets bypassed is the civilian view: that's too much for the gentle viewer.

Bergman's story is of an imaginary war in "1971", with a long-lived civil conflict hitting a rural Swedish island. The director hired ten military advisers for Shame, and it's a very literal, conventional war. There's no allegory to speak of in the way it goes down. It's an Everywar, complete with bombardments, armored cars, partisan activity and collateral damage. "This is just degrading, ordinary old war," Kael wrote in Going Steady, "and it takes a while before we realized that Bergman has put is in the position of the Vietnamese and all those occupied people we have seen being interrogated and punished and frightened until they can no longer tell friend from enemy, extermination from liberation."Jan (Max von Sydow) and Eva (Liv Ullmann) experience a war just like so many millions have: on the ground, in the dark, caught between hostile forces fighting over an ideology that doesn't concern them. Eva says: "Yesterday our radio threatened the most awful things. This morning, their radio answered, congratulating us on our imminent destruction. It's all utterly incomprehensible."

Shame begins many years into the war, and several years into the marriage of Eva and Jan. They are city people who have been hobby-farming a little out of what was once probably their summer home. They have a small greenhouse and grow lingonberries, which they ferry into a nearby city. They raise chickens for the eggs, and occasionally there's enough money left over for a fresh salmon or a bottle of wine. Before civilization ended, she was first violinist in the Philharmonic. He was a bigger named musician. From the way they act around one another, you can see which way the power flowed. once upon a time; he was a little older, a little more worldly; she was younger and more innocent. It's the woman who has the stronger life force; Jan still takes some kind of meds for anxiety, and his teeth bother him. Ullmann's air of youth, physical strength and dismaying Scandinavian optimism hasn't been worn down yet, not even after everything they've had to give up.Now as she's hitting 30 she's starting to become a little insistent about having children. It's a plan that seems foolish and hopeless to Jan, when considering the endless war.

Gradually, this war begins to encircle them. Troop movements are seen in the area, and a fighter plane crashes nearby, setting the woods on fire. In town, the innkeeper they buy their liquor from is already in uniform; he's been drafted. There's cold keenness in the way Bergman shows him treating Jan and Eva to a farewell glass of wine, only to embarrass them by telling them some details of his personal life. (His customers are, as he has to admit, the closest thing to a next of kin that he has.) Here's a foreshadowing of the way Jan and Eva's own personal lives will be intruded upon, later in the film.

Not too long after the trip to the city, the soldiers arrive on the farm. They order the couple to make a propaganda film welcoming the victors. When the battle line changes, the other side uses this filmed "evidence" to arrest Eva and Jan as collaborators. Fortunately the couple has a well-placed friend, the former mayor and now Colonel Jacobi (Gunnar Bjornstrand). As the last half of the film, Jacobi uses his new power to put the moves on Eva. To get his way, he bribes Jan with alcohol and contraband, patronizing him and using the implicit threat of what he could do to them in order to get his way. From happy, bearable poverty, the couple slips into violent quarrels, to grubbing for potatoes in the mud. Eventually they become refugees.

"We've disinherited ourselves. We're on the slippery slope. There's no stopping developments--things have gone too far already. The opposing forces are too few, too badly organized, too nonplussed, too helpless. What's going on in the West is all to hell. And we know it. And it's getting worse." The late director's bleak forecast of the future comes from his book Bergman on Bergman, quoted in this study by Philip Mosely.

Any prophecy of doom is just the voice of human experience talking. It's like predicting rain. It's sunny now, but sooner or later, the prediction is correct. It's more than just Sven Nyquist's neo-documentary camera that makes watching this film like peering into your open grave. Now that black and white film is just about extinguished, it may seem to the future that these last black and white films of the late 1960s were the real triumph of the craft. Nyquist gets both the rough and the smooth: the threatening softness of the Swedish twilight, the pinprick-like pupils of Ullmann, facing her fate in the last shot. What makes this so different from any war film I've seen--and maybe Cuaron's Children of Men is the only one that really is like it -- is Bergman's acute honesty. Jan's capitulation comes by degrees, and it doesn't make a real man out of him. When he uses violence, it's not a triumph but a horror. Shame has the sense of a personal horror, a horror Bergman lived over and over again in his imaginations: "Physically and psychically, I'm a coward ... the long, cold, wearing threat -- how would I survive that?"

I see they're remaking Straw Dogs. The reported director Rod Lurie, a West Point grad, already did a little film in 2000 called Deterrence, another war film set in 2008. It's about a President (Kevin Pollak) who has to toughen up enough to nuke Baghdad. On the evidence of past performance, then, we can expect Lurie's Straw Dogs to pump up every man's fantasy: letting us know that when push came to shove, we'd shove back, no matter how civilized we think we are on the surface. Just like it did back in the day, the new Straw Dogs will speak to that voice inside men: we believe is that rising up to kill is very man's fantasy and every man's destiny...even if we're too embarrassed to admit it to our wives or girlfriends or boyfriends, who have seen us sniveling over Bambi. If the worst happened, we'd get our war on. We'd shoot the intruders, escape the burning city, go back to the land and raise some crops and some kids out there in God's country. Every time I tend my tomato patch or turn over the compost heap, I think in these same idiotic terms: well, if or when it all hits the fan, I'll know what to do. I'll be ready.

After I set the burglar alarm and crawl into bed, the night thoughts are a little different; they're something more like what we see in Shame. Bergman insists that war is never really far away, that it destroys everything it touches. That it is a force that does what it will, not what you will. And it's better to be known to the world as a rapist or a murderer than to have ever encouraged the unleashing of a war. Maybe it's something to think about when watching the natural companion piece to this Bergman masterpiece, No End in Sight.