Bergman Centennial: In "Shame" Love is a Battlefield

Any passing visitor who’s toiled amongst the weeds of Ingmar Bergman’s vast garden of emotional entanglements will surely recognize the same familiar seeds of chaos, conflict, and spiritual carnage sown between the damned pistel and stamen of whichever variety of lovers feature into a particular film – but in Shame (1968), his scabbed and battered masterwork of wartime wreckage, the Swedish auteur lays fire to the roses. Incendiary combat between dueling psyches in intimate locations fuels much of his filmography – the mother-daughter melee of Autumn Sonata and frosty schoolhouse rejection in Winter Light immediately jump to mind – but Shame ignites a maximalist fuse within its scope that quite literally drops a bomb on the long-suffering couple at the broken heart of its story. By contrasting the domestic drama of Eva and Jan Rosenberg’s (Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow) decomposing marriage against a backdrop of military destruction and societal decay, Bergman turns the canvas of the soul inside out and externalizes the conflict of a toxic relationship into the very warzone that is exacerbating its decline.

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LAFCA Honors Max von Sydow with Career Achievement Award

by Daniel Crooke

There’s something inherently epic about Max von Sydow’s body of work, a near seven-decade span marked by performances of quiet magnanimity in tales of biblical proportions, literally and thematically. More often than not, his mere presence – lanky yet lancing, wispy and towering, handsome and weary, often perturbed by the particulars of his environment  – conjures a lightning bolt of philosophical inquiry into each scene.

After exorcising (not to mention playing chess with, and later playing) the devil, portraying a host of priests, popes, cardinals, and apostles, directors and professors, living-breathing ciphers, and the occasional everyman, von Sydow will be awarded the Career Achievement prize this year from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association...

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