General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Shame (1968 film)

Shame (Swedish: Skammen) is a 1968 Swedish black-and-white drama written and directed by Ingmar Bergman, in which the married musicians Eva and Jan Rosenberg (Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow) retreat to a farm on a remote island to escape a civil war that eventually overtakes them¹. It premiered on 29 September 1968 at the Spegeln cinema in Stockholm².

Key fact	Detail
Original title	Skammen; released as Shame in the US and UK, Schande in West Germany, La honte in France²
Director and screenwriter	Ingmar Bergman¹
Cinematographer	Sven Nykvist, using handheld camera work amid pyrotechnic battle scenes¹
Format	Sweden, 1968, 103 minutes, black and white, 1.37:1, Swedish¹
Premiere	29 September 1968, Spegeln, Stockholm²
Budget	2.8 million Swedish kronor, high for a Swedish black-and-white film of the period, largely covered before the premiere by overseas sales handled by United Artists³
Principal cast	Liv Ullmann (Eva), Max von Sydow (Jan), Gunnar Björnstrand (Jacobi), Sigge Fürst (Filip), Birgitta Valberg (Mrs. Jacobi)¹
Honors	Guldbagge Award for Best Actress (Ullmann, 1969); Jury Special Prize, Valladolid International Film Festival (1969); National Society of Film Critics Awards for Best Film and Best Actress (1969); Golden Globe nomination for Best Foreign-Language Film⁴^•⁵

Spoilers

Plot and subject

During a civil war in an unnamed country, Eva and Jan Rosenberg, a married couple of former violinists, retreat to a farm on a sparsely populated island, trying to live apolitically while the war encroaches from the mainland¹^•⁶. Rebel troops overrun the island and neighbors die; when the other side restores order, the couple are arrested as collaborators, interrogated, and released by the local colonel Jacobi, who then begins visiting their farmhouse and gives Eva money⁵. As the fighting returns, Jan turns violent and murderous, and the couple flee⁵.

Bergman described his aim as focusing on the "little war", the war on the periphery where confusion is total and nobody knows what is actually going on; he wrote that everything in the film is shown in pictures, as in a nightmare, and that in the nightmare's world he felt at home while in the reality of war he was lost³. The film never identifies either side as good or evil: both sides speak Swedish and are shown as both violent and human, so the apolitical couple serve as the audience's eyes, and they themselves prove unreliable⁷.

Production

Bergman wrote the story as a psychological triangle drama between a married couple and a third man, the future Jacobi, before the war entered the material; in his working notebook the war appears only in late February 1967, as a conflict of almost incomprehensible duration that may have lasted twenty years or forty or gone on forever⁸. The couple were named Jan and Eva Rosenberg, sprung, Bergman noted, "from the same rose", and characterized as ordinary people and Social Democrats⁹.

The title changed repeatedly: the project was first called The War, became Dreams of Shame (Swedish: Skammens drömmar) during the screenwriting, and received its final title only when the film was completed³. A quotation from the 18th-century German poet Christoph Martin Wieland, "Everything disappears and becomes dreams", stood on the manuscript's first page as an internal key to interpretation⁹.

Bergman, who had recently made his home on Fårö, filmed there between mid-September and the end of November 1967, employing a crew of roughly forty that occasionally received help from Swedish military personnel based close by, while Sudersand on Fårö and Visby on Gotland were used as locations.³^•² It was the first film Bergman shot on Fårö after moving to the island².

In later self-assessment Bergman called the manuscript poorly constructed, judging the first half an endlessly drawn-out prologue that should have been disposed of in ten minutes, and said he had not seen the problem while writing, shooting, or editing³.

The 1968 Swedish debate

The film's release in September 1968, shortly after the Tet Offensive, the May revolt in Paris, and the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, shaped its reception⁸. Most reviews were reserved, and several critics were upset by a war film that refused to take sides, arguing that a war story made during the Vietnam conflict should distinguish more sharply between victim and perpetrator; the ambivalence was judged, at best, blind and, at worst, an indirect concession to imperialism and terror bombing⁸.

In early October 1968 the radical Swedish novelist Sara Lidman published a scathing attack on Bergman in Aftonbladet on 6 October, and after articles appeared in his defense she reiterated her position in two further pieces in the same newspaper on 13 and 19 October³. According to the film scholar Erik Hedling, whose study of the reception appeared in Nordicom Review, the harshest critics, led by Lidman, held that Bergman had created propaganda for the American government and its war in Vietnam¹⁰. Bergman himself rejected readings of the film as a straight parable or commentary on Vietnam, while in interviews during 1967 and 1968 he expressed a desire to reconnect with contemporary history motivated by the violence there¹¹.

Place in Bergman's career

Shame followed Persona (1966) and Hour of the Wolf (1968), and preceded The Passion of Anna (1969); the last three form an unofficial trilogy about couples under duress, all played by von Sydow and Ullmann, Bergman's muse at the time¹². In an essay for the Criterion Collection, the critic Michael Sragow reads the film as Bergman pouring his distress about World War II's aftermath and the growing savagery of the Vietnam conflict into what was the most strongly political movie he ever made¹².

For decades the film was read as a middle work between Persona and Cries and Whispers (1972), but in recent years, the Bergman Foundation's Jan Holmberg notes, it has come to be widely regarded as one of Bergman's foremost works, a shift he connects less to the film's own qualities than to new conflicts and threats giving the story renewed actuality⁸.

Home video and streaming

The Criterion Collection issued the film on Blu-ray and DVD as Spine #961 in 2019, with a new 2K digital restoration, interviews with Bergman recorded for Swedish television in 1967 and 1968, a new interview with Ullmann, and the 1968 production documentary An Introduction to Ingmar Bergman¹. In the United States the film streams on the Criterion Channel and can be rented for $3.99 or bought from $14.99 on Apple TV Store, Google Play Movies, and YouTube¹³.

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026