Word: bergman
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...also a passion-play, as Bergman's intended title implies, in which psychological stereotypes act out their psychoses in vain hopes of redemption. The director concentrates on universal patterns of interaction, and thus requires only a brief background sketch for each character: Andreas Winkleman has retreated into an emotional state of non-expression after being abandoned by his wife and lives alone in a small cottage, "a prison as much as a refuge." He soon meets Anna Fromm, a widow who has fantasized her late marriage into a monolith of Truth and Happiness, despite strong indications that she actually murdered...
Never has Bergman created in any other film a more clinical, reductive, spiritless, or hollow prototype of himself as artist, or more aptly, as architect of the themes of human torment. Elis looks and even dresses in a way that resembles the director and shares as his defense against the world the same vast resignation and distancing. Bergman devises his own special "alienation effect," with the actors speaking to the camera about what sort of person each character "is," as if they are universal givens. Whereas Brecht and Godard use the technique of actors speaking as themselves to remind...
...VISION" itself far surpasses the facile "pessimism" often ascribed to Bergman. Shame initiated his latest phase as a director, in which he made obvious his disinterest in all values and means of transcendence due to the frailty of human substance beside the brutality that dominates modern life. he never identifies the political factions in the civil war in Shame, for they are all the same, their line: violence. There can be no salvation, either, not even for artists like Jan Rosenberg and his wife, who are reduced to beasts by the end of the film, no longer higher beings worthy...
...Bergman regards in the same fashion the characters of The Passion of Anna (a really absurd title when you think about it or repeat it very much) and consequently keeps the details of their lives as vague as possible. Almost nothing significant happens on the screen; everything is deliberately consigned to the oft-contradicted past or is omitted and simply brushed over by the narrator (as when and why and how Anna and Andreas start living together, for instance). Plot movement plays such a minimal role that the film seems almost a sequence of still photographs on the varieties...
...camera pans slowly, surely, relentlessly, and the cutting takes up the same rhythm, creating a ponderous, significant atmosphere well-suited to clinical analysis. Adding to this quality of abstraction, the color provides one of the few pleasant aspects of the film. (Bergman's only other try at color proved dismal in All These Women [1964], an unsuccessful sex comedy, and he has avoided it until now.) Cool gold and turquoise pastels predominate in the soft, grainy texture of Sven Nykvist's photography. Bergman wanted a lyrical-but-resigned-to-suffering flavor and certainly...