The Death of All Things Human

If Bergman began the 1960s with hints of private hells and the disintegration of one isolated family in THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY, he soon made it clear that he was haunted by collapse in the world beyond individual skulls. In WINTER LIGHT, he showed the collapse of religion as it failed to confront modern dreads like nuclear war; in THE SILENCE, a collapse of communication as families and countries fell into pre-war chaos; in PERSONA, a similar collapse of language and identity in a world of Warsaw Ghetto genocides and burning Vietnamese monks.

By SHAME, Bergman was ready to confront the ultimate collapse of human solidarity and human meaning in the fire and ashes of modern warfare, and the result was a film bleak even by the standards of the 1960s, with a final sequence as ferociously grim as anything conjured up by SECONDS, THE BIRDS, THESE ARE THE DAMNED, or GOKE.

David Conenberg has referred to his own films as a way of rehearsing his own death. In the 1960s, Bergman seemed to rehearse the death of all things human. I respect the courage of his films, even as I fight the urge to hide from them.