SHAME (1968)

Friday, August 17th at 4:00pm

Saturday, August 18th at 3:00pm

Wednesday, august 22nd at 6:00pm

SHAME ranks with GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES and NIGHT OF THE SHOOTING STARS as one of the most powerful films about ordinary people caught up in the horrors of war. Laying aside the self-reflexive flourishes of his other late 1960s films, Bergman involves us directly and deeply in the fates of a married couple, Jan (Von Sydow) and Eva (Ullmann), living on a farm on an unnamed island in an unspecified country. As the threat of war darkens the sky with jet planes and clogs the roads with military vehicles, the couple try to carry on life as usual, until a full-scale invasion sweeps them up in a nightmare of flames and corpses. The invasion is pushed back, but the nightmare continues in the form of reprisals and accusations of collaboration. The first half of the film has a relatively epic scope unmatched in Bergman, but the second half focuses firmly on the central couple and the way their loving but fragile relationship is tragically infected by the dehumanizing pressures of war and its aftermath. In Swedish with English subtitles. New DCP digital restoration. (MR)