Blu-ray Review: Ingmar Bergman’s Shame on the Criterion Collection

Criterion outfits one of Ingmar Bergman’s most severe and ambitious films with a customarily gorgeous transfer.

ShameThough stark and despairing, Ingmar Bergman’s films are essentially, perhaps inadvertently, celebrations of art in which erudite characters wrestle with their demons via their creative endeavors. Bergman conjures intricate worlds of sex and violence and creation, which ricochet off each other with a free association of tone that suggests the dream of a gifted and highly self-conscious god. Bergman’s films are catnip to cinephiles, critics, and theatergoers partially because they inevitably flatter such audiences, offering tortured artists of physical majesty whose struggles, to balance the varying privileged scrims of their lives, often suggest nothing less than the great existential plight of humankind.

In this light, it’s doesn’t feel coincidental that Bergman’s less acclaimed films tend to interrogate the foundation on which he’s built this reflexively flattering art, particularly a run of films he made in the 1960s, in which he chafed against his emerging status as a genius and tried to tear his art down and rebuild it from the ground up. In The Virgin Spring, religion (art) is pitifully ill-suited to prevent a series of atrocities, though it perhaps allows the remaining human characters to live with themselves. In Persona and Hour of the Wolf, Bergman attempts nothing less than to foster a cinema that eats itself alive, leaving the respective characters untethered and adrift. And in Shame, Bergman pushes his exploration of the potential futility of art, and artists, even further to the breaking point, following a bourgeoisie couple as they coarsen in the face of an unnamed and highly symbolic civil war.

Shame is a bitter brew that’s leeched of much of the pleasure that even a confrontational Bergman film like Persona can give. The filmmaker begins the narrative, however, in a characteristically evocative manner, mixing eroticism, ennui, and dread. Eva (Liv Ullman) arises from bed, her shirt open and revealing her breasts. She goes to a sink and washes herself, her bare back glistening in the shards of sunlight that are piercing through the shadows. Eva’s husband, Jan (Max von Sydow), gradually awakens, and they begin their morning routine. For many filmmakers, such a series of events would be a matter of setup, but for Bergman this sequence is a kind of ambiguous and ecstatic romantic scene. Eva is a beautiful woman, and her beauty will come to influence the couple’s ability to live in their war-torn country, but Jan has been married to her for years and isn’t struck by her as directly as others might be. (Though the film offers us a moment where Jan regards Eva by a creek, clearly swept up in his intoxication with her.) Yet their casualness together isn’t merely born of routine habitation, as it’s also sensual and nourishing, reflecting the fruits and the challenges of living with someone for some degree of time.

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This sequence haunts Shame as the film moves into more violent and austere territory. In this powerfully acidic production, Bergman dramatizes the invasion of a countryside that presumably has never experienced hostile foreign occupation. And though Bergman is riffing on the Vietnam War, and on the remote safety of his own island home of Fårö, Shame’s images of a prosperous white couple reduced to a status of traveling refugees offer a timeless empathetic dare. Eva and Jan have tuned out atrocity until it came tumbling onto their doorstep, taking their music careers from them, recasting them as farmers and then as fugitives. Apart from their skin color, Eva and Jan come to resemble the sort of people that the United States and much of Europe would presently prefer to lock up or fence away.

Bergman prunes Shame of the overt theatricality of even his other ’60s films so as to suggest a loss of art born of warfare, leaving the viewer to survey craggy, frazzled landscapes and the occasionally sensual, penetrating, unmistakably Bergman-esque close-up of Ullman and Sydow’s faces. And there’s little on-screen violence in Shame to give us a cathartic thrill, which might’ve turned this merciless parable into an action film. Bergman renders horror in terrifyingly fleeting and intimate slivers of imagery: of bodies lying in fields or water, of cars run off the road, of smoke billowing up in the background while military vehicles trundle across the landscape. There are also flashes of light and explosive sounds that aren’t entirely identifiable yet are clearly the product of carnage. Eva and Jan’s home, a synecdoche for this society and their imperiled relationship, is bombed and raided many times, leaving them to start over amid rubble while they castigate one another. Through it all, they compromise themselves over and over, and Jan, initially a coward, becomes a wolf. Which is to say that Bergman has staged a brutal lament of the impotency of war as it’s felt among the populace at its mercy—a bleak poem that’s nevertheless informed with the beauty of his craftsmanship.

Yet death and compromise aren’t the primary terrors animating Shame. Instead, Bergman confronts a realization of the possibility that rarefied society might be stripped of its baubles, including its art, and might have to face the superficiality of the things it loves. (In Bergman’s most obsessive and lacerating films, art is but another kind of mask.) Such terrors are real, of course, and have been faced, most infamously during the Holocaust, but Bergman’s lack of specificity here comes to suggest that war is inevitable and circular and will eventually engulf most of us, who might be currently enjoying the sojourns of Shame’s opening passage. Bergman fillets his interests in this film, forging a vision of annihilation that is, understood, itself, to be yet another bourgeoisie toy. In one scene, Eva wonders if she’s in a dream, and if such a dreamer is capable of feeling shame. The film’s existence is her unattainable answer.

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Image/Sound

The image, courtesy of a new 2K transfer, boasts a greater degree of detail than prior home-video editions of Shame. Minute textures—particularly of the damage wrought against people and land by war—seem to pop out of the frame, and the ocean of the film’s climactic sequence visually resounds with a newfound sense of clarity. Blacks and whites are well-balanced, which is particularly notable in a brilliant and seemingly found image near the beginning of the film where the central couple is separated by a diagonal shadow looming over their farm, casually foreshadowing their rocky future. Plenty of grit has been scrubbed from the image but not at the expense of character. The monaural soundtrack offers a clean and immersive soundstage, allowing small notes of life to resound alongside the vast clinging and clanging of war.

Extras

In a new interview recorded for Criterion, Liv Ullmann speaks candidly, if briefly, about her personal and working relationship with Ingmar Bergman. Ullmann discusses the unity that exists between films such as Hour of the Wolf, Shame, and The Passion of Anna, and vividly recalls the personal anxiety that drove Bergman to tackle these projects. Two short archive interviews with Bergman are also included on this disc, which find him addressing issues of artistic relevance with a candor that shames the puffy sound bites of today’s media. The best supplement of this package, though, is “An Introduction to Ingmar Bergman,” a feature-length documentary that includes extensive footage of rare films and longer interviews with Bergman, as well as intimate footage of him on various sets. A terrific essay by film critic Michael Sragow serves as the disc’s liner notes, rounding out a somewhat slim package.

Overall

Criterion outfits one of Ingmar Bergman’s most severe and ambitious films with a customarily gorgeous transfer, though the supplements could use a bit more meat on the bones.

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Score: 
 Cast: Liv Ullmann, Max von Sydow, Gunnar Björnstrand, Sigge Fürst, Birgitta Valberg, Hans Alfredson, Ingvar Kjellson, Frank Sundström, Ulf Johansson, Vilgot Sjöman, Barbro Hiort af Ornäs  Director: Ingmar Bergman  Screenwriter: Ingmar Bergman  Distributor: The Criterion Collection  Running Time: 103 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1968  Buy: Video

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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