Word: films
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...down at an enormous electronic chessboard on which the townspeople are the pieces and the prize is the wife's fate. Writer and engineer grapple over the game board as lives are changed, ruined and revived. Or are they? The writer's story becomes the film's own plot; illusion and reality are inextricably and ever so modishly mixed. With the bad guy getting killed, the baby getting born, and the wife regaining her voice, there is even a happy ending...
...usual, after money and power are secured, the name of the game is respectability and status. The Godfather, which advances and contracts suggest should earn its author at least $500,000 in royalties, paperback and film rights, could prove a subtle opening move in getting the Mafia into the same league as the House of Lords and the German General Staff...
...LAST Ingmar Bergman has stopped posing questions and begun taking them for granted. Shame is probably his greatest film--and it is the first to aim exclusively below the neck. We had expected "A Film from Ingmar Bergman" on the subject of war to be filled with long dialogues, endless questioning; in our mind's eye we can see a low-key closeup of Liv Ullman or Max von Sydow asking, "Why is this happening to us? Why doesn't it make any sense?" But this is precisely what Bergman avoids. For the first time we can walk...
...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...