Ingmar Bergman | Skammen (Shame) / 1968

spiraling into hate

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ingmar Bergman (screenwriter and director) Skammen (Shame) / 1968

 

Bergman’s 1968 movie, Shame, came as a surprise to his Swedish audiences. After years of being criticized for concentrating on the personal psychological makeup of his characters, most often at the expense of larger political and social events, the great director chose in this work to focus very much on events of the day, the war in Viet Nam, political tensions in Czechoslovakia and the student protests in Paris. Working with the original title of “The War,” Bergman set out to create and succeeded in producing a terrifyingly political work, a work in which the major characters, Jan (Max van Sydow) and Eva (Liv Ullmann) Rosenberg—former musicians in the now disbanded symphony orchestra—attempt, like the Swedes throughout World War II, to remain neutral, but are gradually sucked into the waves of violence going on in the periphery and later at the center of their lives.

    The Rosenbergs, living, like Bergman, on an isolated island, grow ligonberries and various vegetables; their only contact with the rest of the world is limited to an occasional purchase of fish from a local neighbor and trips across the bay into the small city where they sell crops and purchase their needed groceries. Although a war has been brewing around them, their radio does not work, and they have little notion of the various factions or how close they are to the front.

     As the film opens, they are scheduled to travel into town, and after several delays, where Bergman establishes Jan as a frightened, dysfunctional being and their car as a near non-functional machine, they arrive in the mainland village only to witness caravans of military forces; even their local antique shop and wine dealer has been drafted into military service. Upon returning home their island is suddenly attacked, and they are forced to return to the ocean for a possible escape in the ferry. Along the perilous short journey, however, they discover nearly all the neighboring houses have been destroyed, the occupants’ bodies—both adults and children—lying scattered about. The ferry port has been blown up, and they quickly retreat back to their own home, the only one that has seemingly escaped destruction.

 

    Just as suddenly, the advancing rebel forces break in upon them, demanding they come into the yard where the leaders, with camera, microphones, and spotlights, attempt to interview Eva about her political views. She has none she declares; she is neutral. When they turn to interview Jan, he falls to the ground, apparently suffering from a heart condition.

     That scene, as others before it, is emblematic of Jan and Eva’s relationship: she is the forceful, practical woman who must prod and hold up her weaker husband. Jan will, in fact, continue to suffer with heart problems throughout the film—not only those connected with a defect of the heart, but with a lack of heart, an inability to comprehend the suffering of others.

     The couple is spared for the night, as the nationalist troops regain control of the island. But a short time after, they are arrested by their own countrymen and denounced as traitors. The film, which supposedly reveals their treachery, evidently has been doctored, and Eva is shown as supporting the rebels.

      In some of the most powerful scenes of the film, Jan and Eva are threatened with torture, as others about them appear to have died and had their limbs torn off, arms broken. In fact, the head of this new military outpost (formerly the local folk high school) turns out to be the Rosenbergs' friend, the former mayor of their local town, now Colonel Jacobi (Gunnar Björnstrand). He is well aware that the film is a fraud, sending them home without damage to their bodies. But the event, has clearly shaken them, has damaged their souls, and soon after, as they attempt to restore their lives to some sense of normalcy, we recognize that—no longer able to pretend neutrality—they have come to depend on the patronage of the now militarized mayor. Their neighbor warns them of the dangers, but despite their own anger with one another for their weaknesses, they seem unable to escape events; like many individuals living in a nation at war, unable to change the course of events they have become prisoners of their own country.

     When Jacobi offers Eva his life savings, she agrees to a sexual encounter. Jan awakens from a drunken stupor to discover the money, recognizing what has occurred while remaining too weak to prevent it. The rebels, consisting of locals on the island, break in upon them, interrogating Jacobi. Discovering that he has given them money, the intruders claim they are willing to spare his life if Jan and Eva turn over the cash. For the first time in his life, however, Jan stands up to the warriors—even though we recognize his motives to be connected to jealously and anger—claiming he has seen no money. Like Peter denying Christ, Jan denies his wife three times: “I’ve seen no money.” The rebels retaliate by destroying the contents of the house before torching it. Jan, they demand, must shoot Jacobi. Barely able even to hold the gun, Jan shoots Jacobi in the back, merely wounding him. Again and again he shoots his former “friend” as he attempts to crawl across the yard to safety. Rosenberg, who justifies his act by arguing that “they would have shot him anyway,” suddenly has become one of the murderers, and the couple, now ousted from their former Eden, has no choice but to salvage anything remaining and wander the island in search of escape.

     The discovery of a young soldier, a boy who has deserted his unit, brings out Eva’s tenderness as she attempts to salve his wounds; the boy, who has not slept in days, falls to sleep upon her lap and, for a brief moment, represents the son she has sought throughout Bergman’s grim tale. Jan, now a maniacal bully, demands the young man stand, taking him from her side with the boy’s gun in hand, demanding to know why the soldier was seeking out a nearby beach. As Eva runs toward them in an attempt to save the child, we hear gunfire in the distance, and we recognize that Jan has shot him, becoming one of the monsters they so feared early on. So Bergman reveals how a whole nation can be transformed into a mob as horrifying as the Germans under Nazi rule, or the Serbs in Kosovo, or….the Americans in Viet Nam and Iraq, how a basically good people can become beings who, if they awaken from their horrific trance, will face only shame.

     At a rocky beach they await, with others, a fishing boat to take them away. But that trip is only a further voyage into Hell, as the boat’s captain—presumably in disgust—slips off into the ocean as the vessel becomes ensnared in a flotilla of hundreds of dead bodies. The film ends with Eva’s dream of a better world, but even in that faint memory of love and peace, the roses are burning, creating what she perceives as a beauty in their very destruction. Jan and Eva, we realize, have entered a world where redemption is impossible, a place from where there is no escape.

 

Los Angeles, November 10, 2007

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2007).