In the cinema of Ingmar Bergman, war is never an event, but a condition of the soul. Not an explosion, but a slow, inexorable corrosion. In "Shame" (Skammen, 1968), the Swedish Maestro strips armed conflict of all its epic sweep, its rhetoric, and any possible catharsis, in order to orchestrate an almost clinical, and for that very reason terrifying, examination of human disintegration. The film presents itself as a crazed shard of shrapnel lodged in the heart of his celebrated “chamber cinema,” a work that expands the psychological tensions of a couple until they coincide with the collapse of an entire civilization. It is the apocalypse distilled into a domestic microcosm, a Chekhovian drama whose cherry orchard is suddenly ripped apart by napalm.

Jan and Eva Rosenberg (played by a Max von Sydow and a Liv Ullmann who reach an almost unbearable summit of symbiotic acting) are two violinists. Two artists. They have chosen to retreat to a remote island—Fårö, Bergman’s own island refuge—to escape a civil war they feel is distant, a background noise on the news. Their life is a fragile idyll, punctuated by minor bourgeois frustrations: financial difficulties, unexpressed desires for motherhood, his neuroses, her pragmatic resignation. Bergman is masterful in constructing this bubble of normality, lulling us with a grainy but luminous, almost pastoral black-and-white, only to burst it with a sudden, deafening violence. The arrival of war on the island is not a spectacular, Spielbergian invasion; it is a graceless, brutal intrusion, a violation of intimate space. The roar of airplanes, the muffled explosions, the soldiers who burst into their home without warning: History knocks on the door not to ask permission, but to kick it down.

Here lies the first, brilliant narrative shift. "Shame" is not a film about war, but about what war does to ordinary people, to those who believe themselves "apolitical," who delude themselves into thinking they can remain neutral. Jan and Eva are neither heroes nor executioners. They are simply inadequate. Their art, music, the very symbol of culture and human sensitivity, becomes the first, useless victim. Their violins lie inert in their cases, relics of a world that no longer exists. In this, Bergman performs an act of pitiless self-criticism, a meta-commentary on the role (or futility) of art in the face of horror. What can a Bach adagio do against an assault rifle? The film’s answer is a chilling silence.

The trajectory of the two protagonists is a descent into hell that is both mirrored and complementary. Jan, the hypochondriacal, sensitive artist, undergoes a terrifying metamorphosis. His initial weakness transforms into an icy pragmatism, a form of survival that empties him of all empathy. The crucial scene is the one in which, after discovering money hidden by a deserting soldier, he kills him in cold blood. It is not an act of rage or revenge, but a calculation. A mechanical, almost bureaucratic gesture. Max von Sydow carves this transformation onto his face, shifting from a mask of perpetual anxiety to an impassivity more frightening than any scream. The artist is dead; the survivor is born, and his survival is a death sentence for his soul.

Eva, by contrast, begins from a position of strength, of resilience. It is she who holds the pieces of their life together. But it is precisely her moral compass that leads to her ruin. She witnesses her husband’s dehumanization, endures violence and humiliation, and finds herself an accomplice in a system of compromises that devours her from within. Her journey is a progressive detachment from reality, magnificently represented by the oneiric sequence—an almost Buñuelian surrealist insert—in which she dreams of a beautiful daughter, a clear stream, and roses catching fire. It is her subconscious screaming, trying to preserve an image of purity and beauty while the world outside, and the one within, turns to ash. Liv Ullmann’s performance is one of devastating emotional transparency; her eyes become the mirror in which the shame of the title is reflected.

Bergman’s stylistic signature, aided by the genius of Sven Nykvist’s cinematography, is elemental and brutal. The black-and-white loses any lyrical nuance to become a raw, almost neorealist document of horror. The combat scenes are shot with a handheld camera—chaotically, grimily, devoid of any aesthetic choreography. The violence is never spectacularized; it is clumsy, stupid, pathetic. It is more reminiscent of the raw etchings of Goya’s The Disasters of War than the composed battles of a Kurosawa. The sound design, free of any non-diegetic score, is a tapestry of real and disturbing sounds: the wind, the crackle of fire, the screams, and above all, the silences. Silences heavy with tension, with unsaid words, with a void that widens between the two protagonists until it becomes an unbridgeable abyss.

Made in 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War, "Shame" is a powerful allegory that transcends its specific context to speak to every conflict, in every era. Bergman takes no sides; he does not tell us who the "good guys" and "bad guys" are. The soldiers of both factions are interchangeable in their brutality and their desperation. The only enemy is war itself, understood as a chemical agent that dissolves social, moral, and emotional bonds. The film enters into an ideal dialogue with the existentialism of Camus’s The Plague, where an external catastrophe serves as a catalyst to reveal the true nature of individuals. But where Camus still leaves room for the solidarity and heroism of Dr. Rieux, in Bergman there appears to be no way out. The only lesson war teaches is how to stop being human.

The "shame" is not just that of the atrocities committed, but the deeper, more intimate shame of having survived. The shame of discovering what one is capable of in order to stay alive. The shame of looking at the other, one’s life partner, and no longer recognizing them, seeing in them only a mirror of one's own degradation. It is the shame of a humanity that finds itself naked, stripped of its cultural and moral superstructures, reduced to primordial instinct.

The finale is one of the most desolate and powerful conclusions in the history of cinema. Jan and Eva, along with other refugees, are on a boat adrift on a sea strewn with floating corpses. There is no land in sight. There is no hope. The last conversation between them is fragmentary, almost aphasic. Eva recounts her dream, the last shred of an inner world now destroyed. Jan does not listen. The boat drifts aimlessly. It is an image that evokes the theater of the absurd of Beckett: they are the Vladimir and Estragon of Waiting for Godot, only they have stopped waiting, because there is nothing left to wait for. The camera pulls away, leaving them lost in a watery immensity that is not a promise of rebirth, but a liquid tomb. A final ellipsis that offers no answers, but abandons us in the same existential void as its protagonists. "Shame" is a ruthless, necessary work, a universal warning about the fragility of our civilization and the ease with which the beast we thought we had tamed can regain the upper hand. This is not a film to be "seen," but an experience to be endured, one that leaves an indelible scar.