Page Two

THE MICHIGAN DAILY

Sunday, September 14, 1969

oqe Two THE MICHIGAN DAILY Sunday, September 14, 1969

CIema

1r

q

A

war with guns,

but

little

By DEBORAH LINDERMA NN
Shame, the latest film from Ingmar
Bergman is about the disasters of war.
After making a long series of psycho-
logical and involuted films, full of pri-
vate association s and still half em -
bedded in his own mind, Bergman has
Comle out of himself. This film, which
played at the Fifth Forum Theatre, is
lucid and direct, and has no demons or
delusions. It is a straightforward nar-
rative about the ordeal of two people
in the crumbling civilization of a myth-
ologized---as opposed to an historical
war, in which everything is exactly
what it seems to be.
Where the violence in Bergman's pre-
vious films was either symbolic--as in
The Seventh Seal--or interior-espe-
cially in Persona aid Hour of the Wolf,
it is altogether external in this one. The
violence is the "usual" violence of war.
filmed in images of bombings. raids.
execution, sniping, terror in the night ,
flames, explosions strangely, no rapel ,
The sound track has percussive war
noises. But even though war and its
violent dissolutions are explicit through-
out, the film never takes on a panoramic'
sweep. Its focus is domestic and per-
sonal.
Bergman's last few films have had no

more than two or'three people in them,
people lost inside their own torments.
What was shown of a real exterior world
functioned symbolically as an interior
mental world. Here there is an exterior
world which appears on the screen and
is not part of a character's psyche. Many
people appear on the screen too, and
the film is full of tangents and anec-
dotes. But there are still only three peo-
ple in the film who count. They speak
little, really, coming at you large in
close ups, and this silence plus the
simple settings makes the film very
much an interiorized thing. It is de-
finitely a war from Ingmar Bergman,
characteristic in its prevailing mood of
strain and isolation.
The couple whose lives fall in as' the
war goes on are Jan and Eva Rosenberg
Max Von Sydow and Liv Ullman), a
handsome pair who once were musicians
in an orchestra and are now farming
some bleak and primitive land on an
island that is never named or located.
As the film begins. Jan is a bit of a
crank-he fusses about his sore tooth,
his nostalgia, his bad heart, his fright.
Eva reacts with contemptuousness and
strength. Both characters evolve, how-
ever, with the events that trap them.
As things get worse Jan loses his finick-

ness and hardens: the man who was
unable to shoot a hen from two feet,
under compulsion executes a former
friend, and then murders a boy soldier
for his new boots as much as his politics.
Eva's ability to hold things together be-
comes irrelevant as life gets more brutal.
He comes to dominate.
The very fine sequence that ends with
the execution of the friend is a long
one, and it makes the film. The friend
is a complicated, gentle, elegant man
named Jacobi (played excellently by
Gunnar Bjornstrand who has become
an enemy official for reasons of his
own. The new regime and the times
make clarity impossible between them
all. and the sublest, most interesting,
most dramatic things in the film hap-
pen here.
Interwoven with the grosser unheavals
of the war are the nuances of Eva's and
Jai's life together. They have been
childless, and now there is no place'for
children. Her barreness is a source of
pain for her, and her preoccupation with
children appears in one way or another
over and over again. There are also re-
curring ironies set up by the juxta-
position of the war with mnemoirs of
a fo'mer life--not only their life but
that of the whole of European civil-
ization. For example, they buy the last

'Shame'
of a fine wine at an inn full of beauti-
ful old curios, they rescue a violin from
their blasted cottage and talk of Beet-
hoven, Pampini, the Congress of Vienna.
. These are rather easy ironies, how-
ever, and their facileness is compounded
by a heavy-handed treatment. Berg-
man is definitely not a wit, and does
not have a talent for making the ab-
surd contemporary world seem fantastic
and impossible. The end of Western
civilization has been done much more
trenchantly by Godard ii Weekend, and
the ordeal of the survivors of a war
of the future is told in an extremely
disquieting way in a Polish film called
August at the Hotel Ozone. Neither the
personal crises of Jan and Eva nor the
wider turmoil of the far seem extra-
ordinary, and they are meant to.
To a sensibility conditioned by seeing
the atrocities of Vietnam on television,
the horrors of Shame seem almost
elegiac. And when one thinks. for an-
other example, of Richard Lester's How
I Won the War, a film which is full of
new evocations about the banalities of
war. Bergman's seems unfortunately like
ordinary everyday war, without partic-
ularly making us realize the horror of
having grown used to it. The film stirs
no new consciousness and certainly no
shame.

I

Ili

I

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wl

GJIfIEI(BUli(Y i0USB
Swing and Sway with
j SPIDER JOHN KOERNER
and
WILLIE "Sweet William" MURPHY
9 P.M. TONIGHT $200 at the door
It's good and good for you. Kids! Tell Mom."
-R.C. and others
330 MAYNARD 665-0606

111641 INrl'E111;ST R.,4T S

Stuelt Ioatii face UpIllll f iolit

of the insured loan branch in the
U.S. Ofice of Education, reports
that th1a banks have responded
"magnificently.' Banks that had
dropped the program entirely be-
cause the 7 per cent rate was un-
attractive alotgside the current
prime interst rate of 8 per cent,
have reinstated it without re-
Atictions, he said, and many new
lenders have also entered.

"One bank advertised it would'
make 10,000 loans." Simmons said,
"and a savings and loan asso-
ciation said it is committting $3.5
million to the program at once.
W" are tickled to death with the
response
Even if the bill basses the House
the banks won't be sure of their
higher return at once. The Sena.te,
in passing it earlier, added amend-

ments that would increase the au-
thorizations for other student aid
progranis and prohibit a banik
from making loans conditional
upon the applicant or his family
having an account at the bank
The House and Senate versions
wil have to be reconciled and the
results submitted again to a vote
in each body.
If the antiriot forces succeed in
getting their amendment approved
by the House, the effort to achieve
,a compromise with the Senate
would be considerably more dif-
ficult. In the view of Perkins and
othe t suppoiters of the loan pto-
gram, this might doom it entir'elvy.

WINNER! 3 ACADEMY AWARDS
INCLUDING BEST ACTRESS KATHARINE HEPBURN
NOW SHOWING
AT REGULAR PRICES
FCTER O'TOOLE KATHARINE HEPBURN
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MASS

MEETING

-READ AND USE DAILY CLASSIFIEDS-


PREMIERE WEDNESDAY

I

THE UNIVERSITY THEATRE ORCHESTRA
an all-campus orchestra!
sponsored by MUSKET and G&S!
performing 3 hit shows!
MASS MEETING

Sept. 16--Sept. 28,

1969

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SHAKESPEARE'S

* ,?

RICHARD
EASTON
-{af

Sept. 15, 8 P.M., 3A

-Union

' , a""
.:
x,
; :_
5
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SADA
THOMPSON

17

Directed by Ellis Rabb

KICK-OUT
IFC-PAN-HEL PRESENT'S
first fall weekend: 9-18--20 '69

l ut codc h
'dla Secrthehraie in 'hila egphia esterday seized over s200,000
dlollars in c'ounterfeit 810 bills. Special Agent Joseph 11. Jordan
displays the photogriaphic negatives used to print the bogus bills,

~i-Acci hx' st (1(1(0 t~ :u Ito' t'itix-cr~ttx- of
ii N ~'ws t~ iULt(' ?04-t)552 - 5w
Ciu~ p0'.' -.-e~ Vit(i ~t Aim Arbw - .\itrL-
t-~2(Ii, ~i2U .\liAVtlOr(I Ot., Aiiii Arbor.
"i ieiiigati 4111 u4. Pitbi ~-i~ d (i.~ it\- tin'
N eor, ~AtbScttt)t1Ufl ro tv~- : ~9 tA' (I,, I~I
$tU ly iitatL
through ~ urdo v murtito g. iSuOscri mm
hun rates: 52.50 i~ Lort't'r, 511 00 U
mot!.

Rent your
Roommate with
a Classified Ad

University of Michigan Bands
Varsity Night Show, 1969
FLIP WILSON and
SARAH VAUGHN and her trio
UNIVERSITY EVENTS BUILDING
Satuurday, September 27
8:30 P.M.

11

RAMSEY CLARK

THURS. 8 P.M.
Hill Aud. $1

__

PEP RALLY FRI. 7:30 P.M.
X R The Floating Opera East Univ.
GAME SATURDAY
OPEN HOUSES AFTER GAME
THE FOUR TOPS_ 8:30 P.M

MONDAY, SEPT. 29 8:00 P.M.
PIONEER HIGH SCHOOL AUDITORIUM, ANN ARBOR