'What do you think will happen when the person who has dreamed us wakes up and is ashamed of his dream?': Ullmann and von Sydow stand amidst the wreckage in Ingmar Bergman's searing 1968 masterpiece Shame.

Ingmar Bergman's Shame is a film about the way war destroys not just bodies but souls, and it has all the forceful clarity of a true masterpiece. As is often the case with Bergman's classic films, there's not a single wasted shot in Shame, and it goes from tentative domestic peace to full-scale end-of-the-world destruction and despair in the course of a little over an hour and a half.

It's a story told very much in tune with the beat of ordinary life, and the way that life suddenly and dramatically changes when bombs start dropping. It's a story filled with long moments and dizzingly short ones, and it is told, more than anything, with faces. Bergman is great with faces; his close-ups pull all the truth out of a scene, due not just to Sven Nykvist's ace cinematography but the intensity of the performances of Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow. The story is advanced through faces, through reactions, both close-ups and those extraordinary long takes of his; in particular, one over-the-shoulder conversation that — just like a real conversation — covers an extraordinary amount of emotional ground.

This is, of course, pure Bergman. One of the most intense shots in cinema history is Bibi Andersson's monologue in Winter Light, where she speaks directly into the camera for eight minutes, interrupted only by a single brief cut; you can't take your eyes off her because everything she says is vital. And who can ever forget Ingrid Thulin's lengthy sexual memory in Persona — so intense that Pauline Kael said she knew of people who swear they remember it as being dramatized. (Kubrick aimed for the same effect with Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut.)

Shame begins in very typical Bergman fashion: a static shot of the bedroom of a married couple, Jan (von Sydow) and Eva (Ullmann) Rosenberg; it is morning, and an alarm clock goes off for an uncomfortably long time, enough to set you a little bit on edge — like those car horns in Godard's Weekend. Eva is up and at `em, Jan lingers a bit, fingering a toothache, and over the breakfast conversation, their personalities take shape: Eva is the practical one, the realist, while Jan is the indecisive idealist, the dreamer, the kind but somewhat ineffectual partner.

Both are orchestra musicians tending a small farm on an unnamed island at war with some invading army for reasons we (and they) don't know; like a lot of wars, this is one that is fought independently of the population, who are just pawns in a power struggle between two equal and opposing evils. Jan and Eva, like most young couples, are focused more on their own future; making a profit from the farm — which typically occupies Eva's thoughts more than that of her lackadaisical husband — and, if Eva has her way, starting a family. Jan is too preoccupied with himself to think of having children, or of any idea of the future beyond the day to day semi-idyllic existence with his beautiful wife. The approaching war is a shadow on their lives that they can only hope will vanish, but it's beginning slowly to eat into them. Early in the film, Jan very suddenly breaks down in tears at the thought of it.