Bergman has often been criticized as apolitical, producing chamber dramas of the soul detached from any larger sociopolitical context. Though this view omits the social realism and working-class settings of his early films, especially Port of Call (1948), Prison (1949), and Summer with Monika (1953), it is by and large correct, particularly in reference to the films of “metaphysical reduction” on which his international reputation was made – The Clowns' Evening, Smiles of a Summer Night, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Virgin Spring, and Through a Glass Darkly. In this regard, Shame in 1968 is a film radically different from any of its predecessors, both in its political awareness and unremitting focus on political events and forces, and in its dramatic resolution. It marks most clearly a crisis in Bergman's thought that had been developing throughout the 1960s and a nadir of depression and despair in which even the most restrained hopefulness of his earlier films is lost.

This does not come without some warning, as the earlier discussion of the trilogy suggests. There, Jonas in Winter Light (1963) fears the Chinese will start an all-out nuclear war, while tanks and other military vehicles (like those in Shame, in fact) patrol the streets during curfew outside the hotel in The Silence (1963). Elisabet, in Persona (1966), is both trans- fixed and terrorized by images of a street execution and a monk's selfimmolation from the U.S. war in Vietnam, while later her apprehension and foreboding crystallize in the famous picture that she finds in a book of a small boy in the Warsaw ghetto with raised arms in front of a German soldier.