Bergman's "The Shame": On the horrors of being in a war as a civilian

I can't think of a better or truer war film. Most war films are focused on soldiers, who get to be heroes; but wars today are fought against civilians more than enemy soldiers. They are also fought sometimes over ideologies, which often prove irrelevant, in part because war is their essential realization. Civilian victims most often have the opportunity not to be proud heroes, but only shameful cowards. Indeed, this whole conceptual opposition begins to seem worthy of being called into question. Now the news media are eager to show Ukrainian men as heroic fighting soldiers who are super-tough. That motivates and sells, but it isn't the whole truth. Just consider a situation like that of Auschwitz, or even Hiroshima: what would it mean to be courageous, or to censure cowardice? We treat rape victims as subjects of shame, because it troubles us to think a person might not be guilty of their own humiliation; this challenges our Stoical self-assurances of retaining an 'inner' self-control when outwardly this is stolen from you with a violence you could not effectively resist or stop. That's why this film, one of Bergman's best, is one of the truest depictions of war. It has certainly stood the test of time.