"Sometimes everything seems just like a dream. It's not my dream, it's somebody else's. But I have to participate in it. How do you think someone who dreams about us would feel when he wakes up. Feeling ashamed?"
This is said by Eva, one of the protagonists of Ingmar Bergman's The Shame (Skammen, 1968). We are almost at the beginning of the film and, for us, she is a violinist turned peasant who is telling her dream. Little by little, as we enter the nightmare, we realize that the film itself is Eva's dream. Bergman's incubus. The dream the filmmaker makes us watchers dream. And as we wake up -when we live the cinema or when we finish the video- there is nothing to feel but shame for the human race. The story of Skammen is about descent into war and how wat gets into us even if we don't want to, even if we run away from it. The couple of musicians who have taken refuge in the countryside, as an unnamed war develops, want to be far and neutral. But war reaches them, transforms them, desintegrates them, turns them into pieces. There are two sides in this war. We don't know -as it usually happens with civil populations- who is right, but we understand, throughout the film, than both sides commit atrocities and that there is injustice. That people live war as a dead end, and in the process of running, accommodating or merely surviving, they degrade themselves. The film was made when memories of World War II were still fresh and when the Vietnam War raged on. But it's about all wars. A war anywhere, with anyone, and the chaos it can generate. External and internal, because there is emotional destruction, also. A war without end, because you can't run away from yourself, from your broken dreams, now distorted by the traumatic experience. There are hidden reason why one doesn't see a certain film in its moment. It's disheartening to realize that, half a century later, Skammen works exactly the same way (the same boat who sails from a Swedish island in a fictitious war, sails today from the coasts of Africa for the same reasons, with the same broken dreams and the same, horrifying, results.
At the end, one remains with a bitter feeling. Humankind has no remedy. What a shame.
This is said by Eva, one of the protagonists of Ingmar Bergman's The Shame (Skammen, 1968). We are almost at the beginning of the film and, for us, she is a violinist turned peasant who is telling her dream. Little by little, as we enter the nightmare, we realize that the film itself is Eva's dream. Bergman's incubus. The dream the filmmaker makes us watchers dream. And as we wake up -when we live the cinema or when we finish the video- there is nothing to feel but shame for the human race. The story of Skammen is about descent into war and how wat gets into us even if we don't want to, even if we run away from it. The couple of musicians who have taken refuge in the countryside, as an unnamed war develops, want to be far and neutral. But war reaches them, transforms them, desintegrates them, turns them into pieces. There are two sides in this war. We don't know -as it usually happens with civil populations- who is right, but we understand, throughout the film, than both sides commit atrocities and that there is injustice. That people live war as a dead end, and in the process of running, accommodating or merely surviving, they degrade themselves. The film was made when memories of World War II were still fresh and when the Vietnam War raged on. But it's about all wars. A war anywhere, with anyone, and the chaos it can generate. External and internal, because there is emotional destruction, also. A war without end, because you can't run away from yourself, from your broken dreams, now distorted by the traumatic experience. There are hidden reason why one doesn't see a certain film in its moment. It's disheartening to realize that, half a century later, Skammen works exactly the same way (the same boat who sails from a Swedish island in a fictitious war, sails today from the coasts of Africa for the same reasons, with the same broken dreams and the same, horrifying, results.
At the end, one remains with a bitter feeling. Humankind has no remedy. What a shame.