'Shame' (1968, Skammen)

'Shame' (1968, Skammen) Dec 28, 2017 0:47:55 GMT teleadm likes this

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Post by petrolino on Dec 28, 2017 0:47:55 GMT

'Shame' tells the story of a pair of musicians who go on the run during a civil war. Violinists Eva Rosenberg (Liv Ullmann) and Jan Rosenberg (Max Von Sydow) are ducking the conflict during a national draft but they eventually get swept up in the fighting. The conflict forces them apart but the reasons for this extend beyond the combat zone.

'Ingmar Bergman is a director whose daunting reputation precedes him by several thousand miles. And now among the confirmed pantheon of greats-who-are-no-longer-with-us, his back catalogue has been canonized to the point that it is difficult to simply happen across a Bergman film, or to discover his movies organically. For many, there is an overt, slightly serious sense of duty when you first sit down to pop on a Bergman DVD, or a self-conscious “look at me being all intellectual” feel to buying your first ticket to a Bergman rep screening. It’s unavoidable, and unfortunate, but it also means that generation after generation of film lovers get to make the same incredible discovery that many of us did: Bergman is amazing. Experimental, alive, almost shockingly modern at times, Bergman’s films are not museum artifacts set back behind glass, but enormous, immersive, thrummingly alive works of art that can impact you so profoundly that all you really want to do is devour one after another at a gallop and see if you are even remotely the same person on the other side. That’s Bergman week.'

- Excerpt from the article 'The Essentials : The 15 Greatest Ingmar Bergman Films' credited to The Playlist Staff at IndieWire

Ingmar Bergman & Liv Ullmann

The incisive civil war drama 'Shame' is a powerful political statement from writer-director Ingmar Bergman that's been read in many ways. Some see it as Bergman's confirmation regarding comments he made about the Vietnam War. Some feel it is a vibrant attack on the Swedish left-wing that supports Bergman's moral conservatism and right-wing ideology. Others feel it is a more open, even-handed work of art that doesn't come down entirely on any particular side, but does probe the darkest corners of its maker's mind. The interpretations are many.

"Ingmar Bergman is one of the greatest of modern directors, but he’s also an instant object of comedy because of his incidental association with Woody Allen, America’s leading Bergmaniac. That association is actually more than incidental, however; it’s symptomatic. Thoughts of Bergman’s films, despite their exalted philosophical seriousness (or perhaps because of it), naturally turn toward comedy. That’s no knock on the films; it’s inseparable from their enduring artistic power."

- Richard Brody, The New Yorker

"Sex scenes in some of today’s films are so graphic that they are little more than “porno” movies, according to Liv Ullmann, one of cinema’s most revered actor-directors. “It has gone too far,” the award-winning Norwegian star of stage and screen told the Observer. Referring to films such as Fifty Shades of Grey, the explicit adaptation of the bestselling erotic novel, Ullmann said that art’s depiction of sex should leave something to the audience’s imagination: “You can’t make it as it is in reality … Then it becomes like a porno film … You have to come in with your fantasy. The public are so much part of it. To see [everything] takes away so much. “I can get a close-up of you in a movie. It would be beautiful. But if I knew all of your thoughts, it would be different. In my imagination, I can hint and see it in your eyes. Maybe I’m wrong, but it’s my sense of reality.” Ullmann, one of cinema’s natural beauties, said that she would never have agreed to appear in nude sex scenes. She is instead admired for her ability to peel off layers of emotion, baring the innermost soul of her complex characters. Her performances, in dramas from Shakespeare to Ibsen, inspired directors such as Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish film-maker who cast her in the lead role of his psychological drama Persona in 1966. She become his muse and partner, appearing in Scenes From A Marriage and Shame, among other classics that made her an international star. One critic wrote: “Muse hardly describes Ullmann’s role as co-creator of some of the most seminal scenes ever committed to film.”

- Danya Alberge, The Observer

"Wes Craven’s career is a startling link between the European arthouse and Hollywood exploitation horror. This was no movie brat, growing up obsessively watching movies on VHS, getting steeped in trash-celluloid lore, knowing scenes by heart and shooting his own homemade version on Super 8 at the age of nine in the way we might expect of a hugely successful genre director. In any case, his upbringing was before the era of video (he was born in 1939) and his strictly religious parents hardly let him go to the cinema at all. In fact, after an initial plan to go into teaching, Craven’s move to New York from his hometown of Cleveland as a young man introduced him to arthouse theatres where he was electrified by the work of directors like Ingmar Bergman: it was this that inspired him to go into film-making and he had the idea of remaking Bergman’s 1960 film Virgin Spring as The Last House on the Left in 1972 — three years before Woody Allen’s Love and Death pastiched Bergman, among other high European masters, in an obviously cod-reverential way. Craven took from Virgin Spring the idea of people enacting revenge for the rape and murder of their daughter, but in a more obviously secularised, ironised and sensational style. Wes Craven could be said to have invented, or at least popularised the modern rape-revenge genre and ironically did so in the same era when the name “Bergman” became a widely understood talk-show punchline for jokes about Hollywood trash vs highbrow Europeans."

- Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

"Yes, I think he deserves his reputation — of course he does. But I’m not so fond of his movies. He made 50 movies, and I like three of them, three or four. But he was not a kind person, he was a mean person, jealous of other people’s success. And he was very, very aggressive and not respectful to the members of his team. He was very right-wing as well. He grew up in a family with a father who was a bishop, and this father sent him every summer to Germany, and that was before the war. At that time, Hitlerjugend was growing up, and Ingmar Bergman was sent to Germany at that time and also was accepted as a Hitlerjugend guy with a uniform and so on. But that was before the Holocaust. We knew about the Holocaust. So, I mean, Ingmar Bergman couldn’t help that, but no doubt he was very, very right-wing, and very, very egoistical. I like “Persona,” “The Silence,” and one is “The Seventh Seal.” There, again, you have an epic figure like “The Living Trilogy.” As I said before, I think he deserves his reputation, because he has worked a lot. I think he couldn’t stop working, because if he stopped working he’d go crazy. There are not so many filmmakers of his quality. So I don’t accuse him of anything — except that he had no humor."

- Roy Andersson, IndieWire

Bibi Andersson & Liv Ullmann

We see tanks roll by on occupied town streets in 'Shame'. Men who've been drafted for conflict bare the scars of becoming philosophical, self-aware and increasingly nostalgic. They're shown to attach greater significance and meaning to the objects around them. Eva is initially torn but strives to create a better place in this hostile world. Jan is cowardly and apathetic, detached from his society, believing his artistic contribution alone constitutes greater social engagement and can even create change for the better. My reading of the text is that it asks whether an individual's personal conflict is greater than that of his society? I think 'Shame' also makes the point that when you engage someone into being overtly political who hasn't been, don't be surprised if you don't like their politics or the person they become.

"In the late 1960s Ingmar Bergman was not a particularly fashionable figure, despite having made the astonishing and experimental Persona in 1966 (now one of the most respected films of postwar European cinema). By 1968, things were changing very quickly. Sweden’s most famous filmmaker, it was increasingly claimed, was much more interested in portraying the onscreen crises of privileged artists than essaying an increasingly violent contemporary social reality. Such was the environment into which Skammen (Shame, 1968), his in many ways surprising film about war and its effects, emerged later the same year. Often spoken about as one of Bergman’s least discussed works, Shame has nevertheless been very highly praised by his admirers as one of the director’s greatest achievements. (Robin Wood’s pioneering 1969 book on the director treats this then most recent film as Bergman’s masterpiece.) More immediately, however, the film also elicited an enormous amount of debate in the Swedish press around the extent to which it commented on the escalating war in Vietnam. Exemplifying the increasingly radical climate within film culture and beyond, students walked out of Bergman’s 1968 classes (ironically, perhaps, during lectures on Eisenstein’s Strachka [Strike, 1924]) at the Swedish Film Institute for being an out-of-date “bourgeois” figure. Yet this period, in which Bergman was portrayed as being so out of touch with a quickly changing present-day reality, also produced his most radical filmmaking. And appropriately, 1968 was the year of arguably his most politically potent film. While recognisably a Bergman film from its first frame, and in many respects continuing his remarkable series of 1960s chamber dramas, Shame also seems to offer, in certain respects, a different form and more topical content. Following the modernist fragmentation of Persona and the coolly received Vargtimmen (Hour of the Wolf; emerging earlier in 1968, and seeming to prove Bergman’s hermetic disconnection from historical reality), a comparably subdued aesthetic palette and comparably “realist” transparency now returns to his filmmaking. And while Shame does concentrate on a central couple, instead of a privileged duo or mere handful of people constituting the entire human presence on screen (as was so often the case in Bergman’s then most recent work), a larger cast of characters and extras enact the most horrific of all realities."

- Hamish Ford, Senses Of Cinema

"From the time he made Summer With Monika, the 1953 film that introduced the peerless Harriet Andersson (18 at the time, exactly half the age of her lover and mentor, the twice-married Ingmar Bergman), right up until 1973 when he made Scenes From a Marriage, Bergman would churn out a steady stream of thoughtful, nuanced, profoundly serious, cinematically overpowering films that, even when they failed to meet their objectives, exerted a mesmerising effect on the audience. These are the motion pictures that created the Bergman legend. They are, by turns, mysterious, introspective, experimental, strange. Not a single one is negligible, nor does the film lover ever get the feeling that the director is phoning it in. These are the motion pictures that have filled art-house cinemas from Helsinki to San Francisco for the past five decades, the works that gave meaning to the term "foreign film". "Foreign" as in "serious", "foreign" as in "pretentious", "foreign" as in "not starring Barbra Streisand or Clint Eastwood. And definitely not starring Robin Williams". Then, abruptly, Bergman's creativity dried up. From 1972 onward, he would make an unbroken series of repetitive, self-indulgent films that ceaselessly exhumed the same old themes of marital discord, disappointment in one's parents, remorse over abortions or aborted love affairs, and a general sense of hopelessness in a world where there is very little meaning and even less good sex. Some of these films are good (Cries and Whispers, Fanny and Alexander), some are terrible (From the Lives of the Marionettes, After the Rehearsal) and some are mediocre (Saraband, Autumn Sonata). But in none of them does Bergman have anything to say that he did not express far more eloquently 30, 40 or 50 years earlier. Almost all of these late films are in colour, and, however provocative the lighting and wardrobe choices, they lack the haunting quality of his great black-and-white movies of the 50s and 60s. Just as LPs sound warmer and fuller than CDs, black-and-white movies are more riveting and emotionally affecting than colour ones. Though a couple of the later works undeniably pass muster in the narrow critical sense, not one film after Scenes from a Marriage needed to be made. Perhaps, not even that."

- Joe Queenan, 'Operation Ingmar'

'One For My Baby' - Stina Nordenstam & the Swedish Parliament

I think 'Shame' also asks a question that was posed by many European films of the 1960s, which is, "must art be political and therefore, must the artist be political"? The break-up of the Rosenberg's orchestra seems metaphorical in the context of their conflicting positions held during wartime. In Bergman's 'Hour Of The Wolf' (1968), a painter is humiliated beyond repair. In 'Shame', a man who's been shamed becomes a dangerous one. By its close, the film suggests every refugee has his or her own story; more simply put, they're us. 'Shame' strikes me as being a work of humanism but I find it troubles me too.