Skammen: In War, Only War Wins … and Death Will Have Its Dominion
By SusanUnPC on January 3, 2009 at 10:44 PM in Current Affairs
For the civilians caught up in war. For the Israeli civilians. For the Palestinian civilians. For all civilians in all wars past and present …
…
Come in, then, poverty, and come in, death:
this year too many lie cold, or die in cold
for any small room’s warmth to keep you out.
You sit in empty chairs, gleam in unseeing eyes;
having no home now, you cast your shadow
over the atlas, and rest in the restlessness
of our long nights as we lie. …the wind has tales to tell of sea and city,
a plague on many houses, fear knocking on the doors;
how venom trickles from the open mouth of death,
and trees are white with rage of alien battles.
Who can be happy while the wind recounts
its long sagas of sorrow? ….
And, now, a film review that I wrote in 1969 about Ingmar Bergman’s new film, Skammen, the Swedish word for shame, about a civilian couple enduring a war in a country unidentified because, after all, war is and does what war is and does, anywhere. Some say that this film was Bergman’s response to the war in Vietnam. But I fear that would limit the meaning of this film, which is about all war, throughout the ages, and its impact on civilians.
Skammen * Shame (Special Edition)
Starring Max Von Sydow and Liv Ullman
IMDb.com page || Amazon’s page & reviews
I’m interrupting my own review to add this salient commentary from LifeIsCarbon.com’s “Ingmar Bergman Tribute” on Skammen (Shame): “An under-seen masterpiece selected by author Jonathan Lethem for this tribute, Shame is Bergman’s take on war and its destructive force. Liv Ullman and Max Von Sydow play a married couple who find a civil war erupting brutally in their town. Contrasting the face of blood and death with the pain and torment of the couple’s disintegrating relationship, Bergman crafts a final vision of apocalypse as disturbing as anything ever put on screen.”
AND NOW MY FILM REVIEW for a Stanford University publication, written by me nearly 40 years ago on an April night, very late at night as was my wont when I wrote such reviews:
Most of the time whatever is real to me is only what I have experienced personally. For months, I heard SDS speakers talk about biochemical warfare, counterinsurgency, war research grants, and so on. Words, words, said I. I’ve never even seen the effects of tear gas, let alone nerve gas. But, in the drama of last week’s sit-in — and it was the drama that drew me to the sit-in — a little of what the speakers said began to hit me.
By the same token — by dramatizing the horror of war — Ingmar Bergman’s film Shame hit me hard and drew me into feeling something that I had never seen and heretofore found difficult to conceptualize, let alone feel.
Guerilla theater works on the same psychology that was employed so effectively on such as me last week. Yet, as the San Francisco Mime Troop proved disappointingly at Tuesday’s noon rally, unless the drama is first and foremost an artistic endeavor, it fails as a means to political and social realizations.
Bergman is an artist, and Shame is one of his most artfully composed, penetrating films.
Berman depicts one of the most destructive aspects of war — any war (the film’s characters, unidentified by nationality or politics, could have been Vietnamese as well as Swedes) — and that is what happens to civilians, ignorant of politics, ignorant even of the fact that the war has started until the bombs begin to fall, whose homes are destroyed and whose lives are subject to the whims of military aggressors.
Eva Rosenberg (she and her husband, Jan, are former professional violinists now running a farm and greenhouse) says, after the first attack, that she feels like she’s in a dream — somebody else’s dream — and she wonders “what happens when that other person wakes up and is ashamed.”
Her dream, though, is her nightmarish reality. Jan turns into a monster-child of war when he is induced, by a group of soldiers, to kill a partisan political leader who had befriended the Rosenbergs, given them hard-to-get supplies and presents, and just before he was accosted, given Eva his life savings. 
Having found out just before the soldiers arrive that Eva has had an affair with the man, Jan pockets the savings and refuses to give it over to the soldiers in exchange for the politician’s life. (As my cousin, an infantry commander in the Vietnam war told me, one’s main contact with the peasants is monetary. “You give a peasant $50, which is almost two months’ wages to him, to tell you where a mine is hidden on the road. But what is the guy going to do? He’s going to go out and plant some more mines.”)
Eva alone is not warped by the effects of the war. Earlier in the film, after the first air attack, she spots a parachuter caught in a tree in the woods. She runs out to help him. Jan cries out, “You don’t even know if he’s an enemy or not.” She goes anyway, while Jan runs back to the house to get a rifle.
The personal relationship between Eva and Jan is but a smaller allegory of their relationship to the war. Just as they don’t have communication with the outside world — their radio and telephone periodically don’t work and their car continually breaks down — so they fail to communicate with each other. Jan is the child who runs upstairs and cries when he spots Eva with the politician. Only Eva’s bullying keeps him going. During one brief, pleasant scene, she talks of making themselves practice the violin one-half hour every day. She talks of having a child, after seven years of fruitless marriage, and hints that Jan may be sterile (in more ways than one, it seemed to me — Max Von Sydow initially makes Jan into one of the most castrated, hung-up male characters since Prufrock).
The film is superb as an allegorical story. Yet, it is so tense in the plot outline that some helpful explanations or rationales for Jan and Eva’s behaviors are forsaken for the pace. It is possible, though, such details would probably have detracted from the film’s impact, which lies in constantly pitting the disintegration of Jan’s personality and his and Eva’s relationship against the disintegration of their country and home. The impact is also strong because Bergman wisely doesn’t rely on dialogue to make his points, but rather than on the extraordinarily fine photography and audial effects. (The almost incessant sound of bombing is unbearable.)
I hear an army charging upon the land,…
They cry unto the night their battle-name:
I moan in sleep when I hear afar their whirling laughter,
They cleave the gloom of dreams a blinding flame,
Clanging, clanging upon the heart as upon an anvil.– James Joyce, “I Hear An Army Charging Upon The Land”
And now, videos from CNN today, January 3, 1969 2008:
‘Situation very dangerous’ 5:26
CNN’s Ralitsa Vassileva speaks with Adnan Abu Hasna of the U.N. relief and works agency about Gaza:
Israeli perspective 11:04
CNN’s Christiane Amanpour speaks with Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev about the situation in Gaza:
Gazans seek refuge 7:20
CNN’s Ralitsa Vassileva speaks with Hatem Shurrab, an Islamic aid worker in Gaza City, about the fighting:
Gaza hospital in chaos 1:00
Medics and doctors at a hospital in Gaza frantically try to treat victims of an Israeli airstrike on a mosque:
Israeli forces enter Gaza 1:23
Fighting between Israel and Hamas escalates as Israeli troops enter Hamas-ruled Gaza:
[...]
They cleave the gloom of dreams a blinding flame,
Clanging, clanging upon the heart as upon an anvil.– James Joyce, “I Hear An Army Charging Upon The Land”
, the basis for the Best Motion Picture Nominee (Golden Globes) starring Brad Pitt.
, the novel by John Le Carre, a new motion picture starring Gary Oldman and Colin Firth.
by 
* (Included in the 
* 
.by David Fredosso who wrote 2008's 
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