Shame (1968) is one of the great overlooked films from Ingmar Bergman’s mid-career creative explosion. It builds on and surpasses the previous films: the avant-garde milestone Persona and the surreal shocker Hour of the Wolf. These three films, along with The Passion of Anna, explore physical and psychological violence, collapsing and mutating personalities, and the haunting beauty of the Swedish coast.
Hour of the Wolf, Shame, and The Passion of Anna also form an unofficial trilogy about couples under stress, all played by Bergman’s longtime collaborator Max von Sydow and the director’s muse at the time, Liv Ullmann. Bergman and Ullmann, who had become colleagues and lovers during the making of Persona, lived together on Fårö throughout this productive period. However, they eventually decided to split while filming The Passion of Anna.
In Shame, a powerfully realistic vision of an imagined civil war, Bergman’s collaboration with his actors becomes even more confident and fluid, and his celebrated enigmatic close-ups become unselfconscious and transparent—emotionally clear. As the sixties neared their end, even Bergman, the screen’s foremost investigator of private life, intimate behavior, and post-religious faith, felt the need to make a statement about that turbulent decade and the legacy of World War II.
His vision of how sadism and paranoia fuel martial conflicts and spread from society’s fringes into middle-class living rooms (and bedrooms) fills Shame, the only Bergman film that could be called primarily political or anti-war. The relentless, Kafkaesque backdrop of a never-ending war puts a troubled marriage into stark focus, dramatizing the collapse of solidarity and the dehumanization of death. It reflects its time’s social and political upheaval in ways that still feel shockingly relevant fifty years later.
Bergman’s motivation for creating the film was clear and concrete. As he told the editors of the Swedish film journal Chaplin, it all started with a question: “What sort of situation is needed to turn us from good social democrats into active Nazis?” He was moved by documentary images of an aging Vietnamese couple—an old woman clinging to their “half-starved cow” as it races away from a U.S. military helicopter, her husband fighting back tears as he watches them both disappear in a cloud of dust. He then combined these inspirations.
In Shame, Bergman strips away the polite liberal facade of postwar European life and places Scandinavian islanders as a colonized person. The film is set shortly (the early seventies). Eva and Jan Rosenberg, once classical violinists, moved to a remote island to escape the civil war tearing apart their unnamed country. They scrape by selling produce they grow on their small farm. The white opening credits roll on a black screen as machine guns and artillery fire punctuate a mix of newsreels and broadcasts in different languages.
This audio chaos is not just background noise. It signals that the war is closing on Jan and Eva, and their attempt to avoid it is catching up with them. You can feel their alienation deep in your bones. The movie starts with the couple just before shock troops arrive from the sea. Eva is already losing patience with Jan’s pettiness and his nostalgic escape into the past.
Neither Eva nor Jan turns into a Nazi over the tense 103-minute runtime, but Jan does become a cold-blooded killer determined to survive at any cost. Eva, a grounded, instinctive humanist, despises his cruelty and brutality, but she cannot face the apocalypse without him. As empathetic as it is immersive, Shame opens up our senses and emotions, even when depicting horrors. With heartbreaking clarity, Ullmann and von Sydow capture the devastating effects of war and the unraveling of a complex, intense relationship.
Shame is a mournful ode to a lost world of shared culture, ritual, and myth, but it is vivid and powerful. Bergman fills the movie with unforgettable details that remind us what we should mourn—or preserve. At the start, the Rosenbergs’ marriage, like their part of the country, is stuck in a fractured limbo, covered by a thin veneer of normalcy. Unable to fix their phone or radio or tune their old car, Jan sinks into melancholy.
However, he is not as helpless as he seems: he is a master of emotional judo. His pathos might annoy Eva, but it also tugs at her sympathies, and his longing for old pleasures—like a bottle of wine—still draws her in.
Jan thinks they should wait and stay in practice as musicians. He insists he can change his “selfish” personality whenever he wants. We see how this couple could have thrived in a peaceful life. Their connection is easy, their postures conspiratorial, their faces full of possibility. However, all of that will disappear as they face gunpoint interrogations and impromptu showdowns.
However, their sleight of hand hits with such impact because of the tense density of the images and, later, some strobe-like pyrotechnics. In the first attack, Bergman and Nykvist focus on Jan, who is watering plants; Eva, who is feeding white cabbage to a rabbit, rushes into view through the greenhouse windows. The jets shake the air, turning the Rosenbergs’ small world upside down.
Indistinguishable armies in sluglike helmets confront the Rosenbergs one after another. The local forces warn them about swarms of invaders. The would-be occupiers wield a camera and question Eva for a propaganda film, then twist her evasive answers into a fiery prayer for their victory and her country’s liberation from oppression. Vilgot Sjöman, the provocative director of I Am Curious—Yellow (1967) and I Am Curious—Blue (1968), plays the clever interviewer.
He tries to present the Rosenbergs as ideal examples of “the kind of people we have liberated.” He presses them about their “political affiliation” and pressures Eva into agreeing that she has “taken a stand.” However, it is all just empty talk. The war has dragged on so long that the couple cannot choose between the sides or sometimes even tell them apart.
At night, they huddle together for warmth and support. Jan reassures her, saying, “We’ll have kids when peace comes.” Eva responds, “We’ll never have kids.” The script says: “For them, this is the first day of the war.”
Nykvist, a famously fast cinematographer, brings sharp precision to this section’s handheld newsreel style. He keeps our focus on Jan and Eva, no matter how much the camera wobbles. His clarity and closeness to the characters make us relive, with fresh horror, images we have seen in decades of news coverage: mass roundups, summary executions, innocent families caught in the crossfire, and people forced to scavenge for survival, heightened interrogations in a converted school place Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil” in a perfect bureaucratic setting.
With chilling beauty, Bergman turns the stuff of breaking news into a secular Armageddon. In Shame‘s final act, he shows a false peace shattered by insurgency. Every gesture or impulse becomes transactional, but not just that—the ultimate sign of Bergman’s genius. The Rosenbergs’ supposed friend Jacobi (played with remarkable force and nuance by Gunnar Björnstrand), now the local head of martial law, uses his position to distract Jan with gifts like sheet music while forcing Eva to sleep with him.
The marriage worsens, just like the couple’s makeshift way of life. While Eva stubbornly works the potato field, Jan complains it is all pointless. As their argument heats up and he accuses her of “sucking up” to Jacobi, she slaps him and collapses in the mud. Throughout, Bergman makes us feel what it is like to be a displaced person in your hand. Human wreckage appears out of nowhere.
Holding their small daughter in her arms, she says, “I knew there was something I should remember, something someone had said. But I’d forgotten what it was…” Is that “something” the key to our lost humanity? Who knows? She is forgotten.
Opening with the clang of an alarm clock and ending with Eva’s devastating poetic flight, Shame is both a wake-up call and a cry for help for Western civilization.
References
- Arendt, H. (1963). On Totalitarianism: A Study of Power and Politics. Harcourt.
- Bergman, I. (Director). (1968). Shame [Film]. Svensk Filmindustri.
- Sjöman, V. (Director). (1967). I Am Curious—Yellow [Film]. Sandrew-Baumanfilm.
- Sjöman, V. (Director). (1968). I Am Curious—Blue [Film]. Sandrew-Baumanfilm.
Comments
I was on a Bergman kick for a while some years back, but never saw Shame. I need to rectify that oversight!
Author
Thanks for your comment! Shame is a haunting film, and I recommend seeing it live. The intensity of emotion and performances make it an unforgettable watch.