In Shame, which is set in the present day, he plays a softer character, a laid-off musician living with his wife (Liv Ullmann, his frequent co-star) on a poor farm on a desolate island. A war breaks out, and the character of the island’s residents is tested; the musician is not among those who pass the test. In this picture, von Sydow’s body language is diffident, indecisive; he shambles around, in pajamas or loose, rumpled clothing, as if he has no idea where he is or what he is meant to be doing. He has a superb comic scene in which, to his wife’s disgust, he utterly fails to shoot a chicken, missing it at point-blank range. (He flaps as uselessly as the bird.) The performance is sometimes painful to watch—this is Bergman, after all—but von Sydow does something very difficult in Shame. He finds poetry in weakness.

The emigrants and The New Land together tell the story of a Swedish farm family that comes to America in the mid-19th century, and because the action of the films covers decades, von Sydow gets to play all the stages of his character’s life, from the early days of his marriage (again to Liv Ullmann) through a trying, work-intensive middle age. Troell’s leisurely style allows for a lot of the quiet, subtle domestic scenes that von Sydow and Ullmann are both particularly good at, and in the course of the movies’ six-and-a-half-hour running time you feel as if there isn’t much you don’t know about these people: how they eat, how they do their chores, how they argue, how they make love, how they trust one another, and, sometimes, how they don’t. The mundane stuff—the moments of strength, the moments of weakness—accumulates, bit by bit, and that approach is, I think, the sort of ground in which an art like von Sydow’s can really flourish. He’s happiest when he can dig deep.

The only Hollywood picture in which he was able to cultivate a character in that way was another 19th-century epic, George Roy Hill’s Hawaii (1966), in which he plays a pious, severe Christian missionary named Abner Hale, who travels from New England to Hawaii and does his damnedest to destroy the islands’ culture. He ages a few decades in this one, too, and although it’s a more conventional movie than The Emigrants and The New Land (and he’s burdened with Julie Andrews as his co-star), von Sydow’s performance is one of his most original, and most memorable. He’s upright and rather forbidding in this, as he was in The Virgin Spring and he would later be in any number of supporting villainous roles, but he isn’t really a villain here. Although the Reverend Hale is wrong about almost everything, his intent isn’t mean-spirited or dishonorable, and as the movie goes along von Sydow manages to instill in the viewer a kind of respect for the character’s stubborn rectitude. He makes us understand, from the inside, a worldview that now seems as strange to most of us as pre-Galilean science.