shame (ingmar bergman, 1968)

OK, someone explain this to me. Shame is (at least) the 17th film by Ingmar Bergman I have seen. I have yet to see a bad one, so the expectations are great. But after watching Shame for the first time, I was embarrassed that I had never gotten around to it before. It is, to my mind, one of a handful of the greatest films of Bergman's career, and thus, one of the great films in cinema history. But apparently, not a lot of people agree with me. Bergman has 14 films on the They Shoot Pictures, Don't They list of the top 1000 films of all time ... none of them are Shame (it finished at #1279). In the recent TSPDT users poll, Bergman received votes from 853 of the 1983 participants, the 6th-most of any director, and more than such directors as Wong Kar-wai, Welles, and Godard. 21 Bergman films received votes ... 12 of them got more votes than Shame, which got only 6. At the time of its release, noted critic Andrew Sarris wrote in the Village Voice that Shame was "completely worthless as a work of art."

OK, taste preferences and all that. But I'm dumbfounded nonetheless. Here I was so happy to fill in this blind spot in my filmgoing, and after the fact I find I wasn't alone in my blind spot. Except now that I've seen it, for me it is a blind spot no longer, and I am here to say that Shame is a great film.

Shame is a war movie, but at first it feels like an abstract war movie. Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann play an unsettled married couple who are living on an isolated island, only marginally aware of the war going on in the world outside of their lives. Bergman never explains who is fighting, or what they are fighting over. What he does show is the impact of war on even the non-participants. The couple is isolated, but not isolated enough ... eventually, the war comes to them. They must confront their own inner beings, and they aren't very pleased with themselves. Gradually, Shame becomes just brutal to watch (in its way, it's as hard to experience as Ichikawa's Fires on the Plain). We never do learn what the war is about, which is why it feels abstract, but what the war does to the characters is not abstract, but rather unsparingly real.

In the midst of all this, Liv Ullmann gives one of her greatest performances. Shame was left out when it came to Oscar nominations, but surely Ullmann deserved some attention. (Next January, she will finally get her first Oscar, an honorary award.) Ullmann comes face to face with her fellow actors, and with the audience (thanks to frequent close-ups), and she is never less than brilliant.