Word: bergmans
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...from it. Both these films showed people's brains driving them out of their minds. Every detail of time and space was enlarged: in Hour of the Wolf Max von Sydow measures out one minute in the dark and shows us how unbearably long it can be; in Persona Bergman constantly shows us detail of the two women's faces, so that when their personalities fuse we have already noticed an increasing physical likeness...
...Shame inverts this perspective Instead of enlarging detail, Bergman shrinks it. He bypasses our minds by having little that is concrete in the film--the whole thing takes on a dreamish look, and you can only stop to "think out" a dream after you've awakened from it. The few "key" lines in the film are all contained in descriptions of dreams: "At times everything is like a dream. But it's not my dream, it's somebody else's--what when that person wakes up and is ashamed...
...whole film is a dream. Bergman has certainly gone to lengths to make it subtly unreal, frequently splitting sound and image, for example. The invaders film an interview with Eva, then dub in false dialogue for propaganda purposes. Bells, ringing far away, seem to be trying to wake everyone up. But if Shame is a dream, it's still far from the nightmare of Hour of the Wolf, for there we watched a man at war with himself; here it's men at war with each other. And while the end of Hour left us with nothing but cold fear...
...BERGMAN finds less horror in men destroying men than in a man destroying himself. Maybe he feels war, in its horror, teaches something to those who are left--while a man's war with his own brain can never leave any survivors...
...Shame at our minds, but instead succeeds in an overall effect. Making a non-intellectual film he has at last fused his talents as writer and director, and simultaneously bridged the space between his screen and his audience. Still, many of the devices he uses are vintage Bergman. Gaunt Max von Sydow, for example, plays the archteypal Bergman male--weak and childish, incapable of even killing a hen for supper, leaning on Liv Ullman, his strong loving wife (much like Gunnar Bjornstrand and Eva Dahlbeck in a happier film, Smiles of a Summer Night). Here, too, the estranged couple...