Shame

A recent post at Girish about Jonathan Rosenbaum's list of 1000 essential films prompted some self-criticism from the crowd, confessing their most shameful omissions from the Great Film Canon... I have been saving one of mine for this post: Ingmar Bergman's Shame. (Actually I could count quite a bit of Bergman - though there isn't a lot of Bergman on Rosenbaum's list. Bergman churned 'em out regularly for hundreds of years, it seems - maintaining a fairly high level of quality for most of his career... there's a lot to choose from. I've seen a dozen or so, which doesn't start to do justice to his production...) I hadn't seen it - then last week, it played a double feature with Hour of the Wolf (another one I hadn't seen, though a bit less talked about), so I had my chance.

Shame is a superbly made film, handsome looking, acted impeccably, gritty at places, with some nice use of sound, especially in portraying the confusion and dread of wartime. The story conveys that confusion, that dread, and shows as well the steady erosion of human decency and humanity itself in times of war. There are gestures as well toward the matter of fact will to survive, though these are clearly subordinate to the dehumanization of war... It is unsentimental and biting - but it didn't carry the weight it seems meant to carry.

The problem, I think, is that it abstracts War too much - it strips out information about the warring factions, the politics, the course of events. There are no direct references to real world events - and in the the fictional world, we do not learn any of those details either. Indeed - we don't really see details in the fictional world: explosions, dead bodies, killings and beatings, are all offscreen (with a few exceptions) - the war is indicated, with lights and sound - very effectively - but abstractly.... This, it might be said, universalizes the story - but the universal is usually best seen in the particular.... taking out the particular (whether in references to real world events or to details about the film's world) turns the film into an exercise... Abstraction, in war films - turning war into a series of gestures and signifiers of war - tends to only really work (in this way: carrying the kind of moral impact Shame aims for) when it is rooted in real world events (however vaguely glimpsed they may be.) The Red and the White (which Shame resembles in some ways), Devils on the Doorstep, Tarkovsky's war films, do this - they tend to strip out the details and certainly the political background of war; they show war as a kind of death stagger where only survival matters (though that is never actually true). But they do it, and they give it weight and consequence, by keeping in the back of our minds that this is something that really happened, that had real consequences. Shame, and films like it (Flandres comes to mind), lose those consequences - their abstraction makes the choices they show abstract; the choices don’t matter - all that matters is what the filmmaker wants to subject the characters to, and the points the filmmaker wants to score. The detail - the political, historical detail of wars - whether real or fictional - are what give it moral weight: if that is not in the film (if the film deliberately elides the politics and specificity of the war itself, as all these films do), then it has to be in the war the film is about.

Now - it's not to say that a film can't work at this level of abstraction. There are moments in Shame that reminded me of Weekend, or of Donald Barthelme's "The Indian Uprising" - the absurdity, the odd juxtapositioning of horror and banality, getting together for music - the torture chamber in a schoolroom... and most of all, precisely the things I have been talking about: the artifice of the war; the explicit discursiveness of the war - presented through signs: lights and sound; archtypical characters and situations; references to other texts.... But Godard and Barthelme seem more than willing to follow through on the implications of those devices: they are thoroughly "presentationalist" - the story and film are explicitly acts of discourse, not trying to show a world that has some kind of independent existence - created in the act of telling, asking no suspension of disbelief. Their morality (and they are moral works, I think) is itself discursive, without apology: we don't really see characters as moral agents to be identified with - but as signifying elements that mean something....

Maybe I'm overstating this. I don't know. But it does seem that films like Shame (or Flandres) seem more didactic (in the bad sense - that's this week's discussion at Girish's place) than Weekend (which is unapologetically didactic, or at least essayistic), and much less moving and morally profound than films like The Red and the White, that keep contact to history itself. The moral choices is Shame don't carry the weight they carry in real world films - arguing about the meaning of Jan's treatment of Jacobi, say, is diminished by the sense that the situation is set up and manipulated by Bergman for our edification. A straight up lecture on the subject would seem less manipulative and evasive, I'm afraid....

Though none of this should take too much away from the genuine excellence of the film - Bergman was no slouch with a camera, and a master of staging, and always got the best from his superb casts. It is a moving and morally serious film that just sometimes seems a bit stale... (And, I suppose, there's no denying the fact that it had to compete with the 7 Imamura films I saw over the weekend: not many directors can hold up to Imamura - Bergman doesn't come close.)