Issue 12. Shame

Ingmar Bergman’s childhood in Sweden was marked by strict religious morality and physical pain. It is no coincidence that his movies explore the agony of shame and humiliation. But over a period of fifteen years, his perspective shifted. Shame, which started as a tool for comedy and social punishment, ultimately became a vital human force.

Ingmar Bergman was born in 1918 in Uppsala into the family of a Lutheran pastor, Erik Bergman, and a nurse, Karin Bergman (he would later often give the name Karin to characters in his films). His father held conservative views about raising children and employed corporeal punishment. Ingmar left home at eighteen and stopped talking to his family for a few years. His debut as a screenwriter came in 1944 and as a director in 1946. Bergman’s total filmography numbers over sixty narrative and documentary films for both the big screen and television. In essence, Bergman created a new subgenre of intimate drama, with complete immersion in his characters’ psychology, the intense emotional portrayal of conflicts, and the deconstruction of western consciousness.

Shame is a persistent theme in Bergman’s oeuvre, including up to his final film, Saraband (2003). In part, this was determined by his own biography. His maturation came in the 1930s–1950s, at a time when private and public life in Sweden was by and large subjected to strict Lutheran morality. Again, Ingmar’s father employed very harsh disciplinary methods: for example, he once forced his young son to wear a skirt after he peed in his pants so that everyone could see what a disgrace he was. In an interview with Torsten Manns, Bergman said:

One of the strongest feelings I remember from my childhood is, precisely, of being humiliated; of being knocked about by words, acts, or situations. Isn’t it a fact that children are always feeling deeply humiliated in their relations with grown-ups and each other? . . . Our whole education is just one long humiliation. . . . One of the wounds I’ve found hardest to bear in my adult life has been the fear of humiliation, and the sense of being humiliated. . . . To humiliate and be humiliated, I think, is a crucial element in our whole social structure.

We begin with a light, even carefree example – Smiles of a Summer Night (1955). At first glance, this is pure Swedish comedy seasoned with elements of vaudeville (clothes swapping, eavesdropping, bed hopping). The respected lawyer Frederik Egerman lives with his young wife, Anne, but is in love with his old mistress, the actress Desiree. Frederik’s son, Henrik, who is tormented by loneliness, reads morality treatises, but ultimately elopes with Anne, defying his father’s authority. At the end, Frederik is reunited with Desiree, of course right after having survived a comical duel with her jealous lover, Count Malcolm.

In this film, shame functions as an element of comedy. Bergman has Frederik fall into a puddle so he can then dress him in the count’s ill-fitting nightshirt. The two idiots complement each other perfectly in their jackassery. The zenith of this masculine buffoonery comes with the aforementioned game of Russian roulette. Bergman shows the characters’ faces in turn, ratcheting up the tension, and then the shot rings out. But instead of a bullet, the pale Frederik gets only a face full of soot.

The lawyer’s foolish antics convince Desiree that he’s in fact worthy of her attention. Bergman, who was deeply depressed during the shoot, ruthlessly mocks the pecking order of male pride. Without the director’s finely tuned sarcasm, Smiles would be just another gag-fest.

The wounded male ego also determines Harry’s actions in Summer with Monika (1953). The main character discovers his wife has been unfaithful and, rejecting attempts to reconcile, he raises his hand to her. He immediately regrets it, but this burst of violence frees Monika once and for all from any obligations, since her father had also beaten her “for her love of freedom.” At the end, Bergman shows Harry and Monika’s mutual isolation: each of their faces appears in an extreme close-up, with the background fading into black. Later Harry, holding a baby in his arms, stops on the street in front of a mirror in which he sees fragments of summer and a nude Monika. The scene of their youthful lovemaking is superimposed on Harry’s face, scarred with experience, and he realizes the depths of his own naivete.

Marital infidelity often serves as the catalyst for conflict in Bergman’s early films. In the prologue to Sawdust and Tinsel (1953), Albert, the ringmaster of a traveling circus, listens to a story about how one of the acrobats, Alma, has brought shame upon her husband, the clown Frost: in order to get men’s attention and feel young again, she goes skinny dipping with a group of sailors. Frost, who runs up wearing his clown costume and stage makeup, becomes the butt of the joke. At first he picks Alma up, but then he himself ends up needing help. The whole scene is styled like a silent comedy—close-ups of faces and the heightened contrast of the lighting make it more expressive in the spirit of Murnau or Lang—which emphasizes just how intolerable the situation is for Frost and Alma.

A similar problem is playing out in Albert’s and his wife’s life, the equestrienne Anne. Saddened that Albert is going to see his ex-wife, Anne decides to sleep with Frans, the leading actor in the local theatrical troupe. Furious, Albert gets into a fistfight with Frans in the middle of the circus ring. Prior to this Albert and Anne are each served a helping of humiliation when they go to the theater to borrow costumes for their evening performance. The director, Mr. Sjuberg, openly mocks the circus performers and their craft.

“Why do you insult me?” Albert asks.

“Because you put up with my insults,” the director retorts, quite pleased with himself.

The actors are standing around them, a group of mocking witnesses. That evening this circle is repeated at a much larger scale in the arena, when Albert, of course, loses his fight with Frans, who – to general applause and laughter – doesn’t think it necessary to fight fairly and kicks sand in his opponent’s eyes.

Later in his circus wagon, Albert repeats the comical duel from Smiles, only this time a real bullet pierces his face in the mirror. For Albert, just like for the clown Frost, everything he’s gone through is not a catastrophe, but a way to come to terms with the way things are – with his three glimmers of hope.

In these movies from the early 1950s, shame is an unstated social institution of repressions and self-limitation that, in assigning standards of behavior to men and women, cements a gender and social hierarchy. In the next decade, Bergman would tend toward a completely different optics.

Through a Glass Darkly (1961) is a drama about a dysfunctional family that takes place over twenty-four hours at a cottage on an island. David, a well-known writer, is completely distant from his children. His teenage son Minus craves his father’s attention. His daughter, Karin, who has schizophrenia, is constantly getting her feelings for her brother Minus mixed up with those for her husband, Martin. Bergman further introduces an off-screen figure, a metaphysical parent whose unreachableness is almost fatal. Minus is writing a play that he puts on about “an artist with the purest of intentions,” a “poet without poems” – it’s a cry for help. Martin bawls David out: “In your novels, you’re always courting some god. But let me tell you, your faith and your doubt are very unconvincing. All that’s apparent is your ingenuity. . . . You’re empty but clever. Now you’re trying to fill your void with Karin’s extinction. But I don’t see how you’ll bring God into that. It’ll make him more inscrutable than ever.” Karin is obsessed with seeing God – but all she gets is a disgusting spider with a cruel, cold gaze.

David is ashamed before his children, Martin is ashamed before Karin, Minus is ashamed before his father, and Karin is ashamed before herself. Paradoxically, this shame prevents the characters from recognizing God. It is possible that this obstacle is overcome in the finale, when Minus demands proof of God’s existence from David, and his father tells him, “I don’t know if love is proof of God’s existence, or if love is God himself.” “Papa spoke to me.” Minus is pleased.

The start of Persona (1966) features a minor character, a ten-year-old boy in glasses. It’s unclear whether he’s in a hospital or a morgue, but it’s certainly a sterile void. He might be the son of the actress Elisabet (played by Liv Ullmann) or the unborn child of a nurse, Alma. Both at the beginning and at the end of the movie, the boy tries to touch their out-of-focus faces shimmering in the depths of a large glass screen.

Elisabet refuses to speak, choosing instead total muteness. Alma is looking after her, and the tension between them grows. The height of their confrontation is Alma’s monologue in which she exposes Elisabet, claiming she gave birth to a child only because she needed to experience motherhood to be a better actress. At this moment, Ullmann’s character is finally stripped of her arrogance. She wasn’t even this deeply shaken in the preceding scene when Alma intentionally left broken glass on the floor so Elisabet would cut her foot.

The child – unborn by Alma, unloved by Elisabet – is their deepest secret. Here it’s worth discussing how the women leave the film. They’re packing their things. Alma leaves the house. The camera pauses on Elisabet’s suitcase, but she walks away without it, because, actually, she’s not going anywhere, as nothing exists beyond the borders of her cinematic reality. A harsh signal divides Alma from Elisabet forever. For Alma, this is the honking of a bus; for Elisabet, it’s the start of the next shoot, literally. Bergman splices in a few seconds of Liv Ullmann on set; it’s Elisabet’s gaze full of silent longing, but she’s dressed as Electra, staring at the camera at the moment that Alma shuts the door. This despair of the abandoned and unforgiven, the loneliness of the one stuck between the eternal effort of acting and touches she cannot respond to with love.

In Shame (1968), another Liv Ullmann character, Eva, is the only woman capable of action in a circle of increasingly aggressive men. They’re on an island that’s first engulfed in civil war and subsequently subjected to a military dictatorship, and even Eva’s husband Jan proves capable of murder.

Shame is only mentioned in passing. Eva says, “Sometimes everything seems like a long strange dream. It’s not my dream, it’s someone else’s, that I’m forced to take part in. . . . What do you think will happen when the person who has dreamed us wakes up and is ashamed of his dream?” Later one of the tortured men admits that the interrogation officers stopped beating him when he screamed, as if they were ashamed.

To speak means to remain human. As the film reaches its end, Eva is the only one who still has this gift. Not yet numb to the victims of torture and execution, she is horrified by what Jan and others perpetrate. Her shame allows her to speak. This is why after Eva’s comment on the beach before she attempts to swim away from the island – “What’s it going to be like if we can never talk to each other any more?” – only she is able to say anything in the final scenes on the boat when all hope is lost.

To tell about her tragically beautiful dream with the burning roses and unborn child and then go silent, close her eyes, and end the film. Will the person who has dreamed these horrors finally wake up ashamed? Or has shame itself ended and has language gone extinct with it?

These films are the best examples of Bergman’s evolution as a director from youthful melodramas and comedies to psychological drama and dystopias. In all of them, shame comes through in the ways that most interested the director. At first it is a source of comical situations (Smiles of a Summer Night), a sign of being initiated into adult life (Summer with Monika), and the engine of the repressive habit of honor (Sawdust and Tinsel, Smiles of a Summer Night). Later it becomes metaphysical alienation (Through a Glass Darkly), a metaphor for the impossible choice (Persona), and ultimately a fundamental component that engenders language (Shame). From the social to the intimate, from protest and the exacerbation of trauma to a reflex and reinterpretation: “I have always had the ability to attach my demons to my chariot,” Bergman once wrote.

Starting with shame as an instrument of coercion and a source of pain, over the course of fifteen years, Ingmar Bergman reached a new understanding of it as an existential axis – something all-too-human that alone is capable of saving us. In doing so, perhaps, he overcame the merciless angels of his childhood.

Translated from Ukrainian by Ali Kinsella