Jons: “Why do you paint such nonsense?”
Church painter: “To remind people they’re going to die.”
Jons: “It’s not going to cheer them up.”
Church painter: “Why try to cheer them up? Why not scare them a bit?”
I had been hesitant to recommend “The Seventh Seal” (1957) – the masterpiece directed by Ingmar Bergman. I thought it’d be too difficult for some to take – since it’s all about death, and it takes place during a plague. I forgot you had a choice not to see it – plus I recently was reminded that the whole point of the movie is to guide us and comfort us – with its head-on exploration of the subject. This is one of the most important films, and any cinema lover should see it at least once in their lifetime. If you were my student, I’d make it required viewing. I would also say that for a film that is all about mortality it gives you so much life affirmation. I feel emboldened by it. It also occurred to me that the idea of death and sickness has been lurking around in our thoughts since March. Sitting and watching last night, it felt like an exorcism for my thoughts. For a very long time, I hadn’t rested my head on my pillow and turned off the light without dark clouds circling about.
“All this ranting about doom. Do they really expect modern people to take that drivel seriously?” asks Jons, the squire. At the height of the Cold War – the world was frightened of a Nuclear holocaust. It is with that in mind that Bergman set out to directly address his own personal fears and ruminations on existence – religion and death. The result is a film that feels extremely specific and universal at the same time. Its clear allegory becomes so open to interpretation that it feels as if he were addressing our current afflictions. His uncompromising subject matter is matched with extraordinary imagery. Some of it will be familiar to you for scenes from it have made it into our cinema subconscious without even knowing they came from “The Seventh Seal.” “Bill and Ted’s Bogus Adventure” does a send up of it.
The opening is breathtaking. You see the skies, a bird floating above you. A voice recites a quote from Revelations, “And when the lamb had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour. And the seven angels who had the seven trumpets prepared themselves to sound.” Antonius Block, a knight returning from the crusades is yearningly looking at the skies – as his squire Jons sleeps nearby. The personification of Death appears and utters, “I am death. I’ve been at your side for a long time.” Antonius beckons him to play a game of chess. “I get to live as long as I am with you,” he says. “And if I win, you set me free.” There’s a full shot of the two of them sitting – facing each other – the ocean in the background and chessboard in between them. On the far right of the screen the sun shines on them. It’s made even more enigmatic by the fact that the whole tableau is also lit from the front as if there were two suns illuminating them. Cinematographer Gunnar Fischer takes full advantage of the black and white photography – and the stark contrast and richness of dark tones and light. The play between the extremes becomes intensely expressive.
It takes place during Medieval times but don’t be surprised if you see some anachronism. It’s not meant to be a historically accurate. We’re navigating a mixture of dreams – visions and fables. We follow Antonius and his squire as they make their way home after ten arduous years. They remind me of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza – and there’s a picaresque tone to the narrative – in its episodic nature, as well as its shifting tone between serious themes and lightheartedness. Each episode will be perfectly constructed and it will have its own tone.
They pass a caravan of actors – who include Jof, his wife Mia and their young son Mikael – who give Antonius a reason to stay alive – and are intentionally reminiscent of Joseph, Mary and child. Antonius and Jons stop at a church where Jons has a chat with a painter who is doing a fresco of the “Danse Macabre” – an allegory used during the late Middle Ages acknowledging the inevitability of death, and the fact that no matter our economical means we are joined together by it. Like the film itself, it is a memento mori. Antonius goes to confession where he speaks of his struggles with life and the absence of God. “I live now in a world of phantoms. A prisoner of my own dreams,” he vulnerably says. Unbeknown to him he’s being talking to his chess player in disguise.
Their journey will continue and they will encounter a witch, a procession of flagellants. A priest shouts “God is punishing us. We will all die from the plague.” Antonius and Jons will ultimately lead the troupe of actors through a dense forest. And the knight will continue his chess moves – until the final encounter. There are so many wondrous passages, and you will be enriched along the way. It’s a hopeful reminder of the possibilities of art – and in particular of cinema. When a daring director is able to entertain as well as to make you think is extraordinary. I definitely feel lighter on my feet anytime I see this classic.
One scene is one of the most tender, and most moving. They’re on a hill and Maria shares some wild strawberries and fresh milk with Antonius.
Antonius: “I shall remember this moment: the silence, the twilight, the bowl of strawberries, the bowl of milk. Your faces in the evening light. Mikael asleep, Jof with his lyre. I shall try to remember our talk. I shall carry this memory carefully in my hands as if it were a bowl brimful of fresh milk. It will be a sign to me, and a source of great content.”
Love,
Roger
Available to stream on HBO Max, The Criterion Channel and Kanopy and to rent on iTunes, Amazon Prime, Vudu, Google Play and YouTube.
Screenplay by Ingmar Bergman. Based on the play by Ingmar Bergman
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
Starring Gunnar Björnstrand, Bengt Ekerot, Nils Poppe, Max von Sydow, Bibi Andersson, Inga Landgré and Åke Fridell
96 minutes
Bringing “The Seventh Seal” to the Screen
Bergman had already passed on his screenplay to his production company Svensk Filmindustri, but it had been refused. Bolstered by his recent success, he made a new attempt: “Then I flew down to see the head of Svensk Filmindustri, Carl Anders Dymling. I found him sitting in a hotel room in Cannes, overexcited and out of control, selling ‘Smiles of a Summer Night’ dirt cheap to any horse trader who happened to show up. […] I placed the refused screenplay for ‘The Seventh Seal’ in his lap and said, ‘Now or never, Carl Anders!’ He said, ‘Sure, sure, but I have to read it first.’ ‘You must have already read it since you turned it down.’ ‘That’s true, but maybe I didn’t read it carefully enough.” Dymling eventually gave his consent to the project, yet only granted Bergman a minimal budget and a particularly limited shooting time: 36 days.
…The work started out as a one-act play that Bergman wrote in 1953–1954 as an exercise for the actors at the Malmö Municipal Theatre. He had asked his students to suggest roles they would like to perform, quickly writing a few pages of monologues based on their choices. After the exercise he re-wrote the material as a complete play, ‘Wood Painting,’ which has many similarities with ‘The Seventh Seal.’ The main part, however, falls to the squire Jöns, and the knight has smaller role. In this prototype, Death – perhaps Bergman’s best-known role ever and played subsequently in ‘The Seventh Seal’ by Bengt Ekerot – does not feature at all. ‘Wood Painting’ was first performed for an audience as a radio play 21 September 1954, directed by Bergman himself. Gunnar Björnstrand played his later film role as the squire, while Bengt Ekerot played the knight. In September 195 5, Ekerot directed the play at the Royal Dramatic Theatre, following its première six months earlier on the stage of the Malmö Municipal Theatre, directed by the author (a production in which Björnstrand also played the part of Jöns). (ingmarbergman.se)
Filming “The Seventh Seal”
Shooting began on 2 July 1956. With one or two exceptions – such as the celebrated introductory scenes filmed at Hovs hallar in Skåne (in the south of Sweden) – the entire film was shot at the Råsunda Film Studios. Cinematographer Gunnar Fischer recalls that shooting the introduction scene caused a number of problems: simply carrying a 100 kg camera down to the pebble beach was a feat in itself. Given the technological restraints, it is hardly surprising that so many films at that time were shot in the studio…On the subject of the lighting for the most famous of all the scenes in the film, in which the knight plays chess with Death, Fischer remarked: ‘You can see that each of them has a 2 kg lamp behind him, illuminating his profile. People said to me that that has to mean that there are two suns. ‘Yes. That’s quite right,’ I said. But if you can accept Death sitting playing a game of chess, then you can also accept two suns …Bergman has also told of some fairly chaotic moments during the shooting, as in the scene where they burn the witch. “Bergman in Images: My Life in Film:” “The place of execution was a little further down the yard; so we could only shoot from one side, the tower blocks being on the other. When the time came for me to inspect the heap of firewood, a crowd of little urchins were already there, clambering up on the fence and asking: ‘When’s the execution going to be, Mister?’ So I said: ‘We’re starting at seven this evening.’ And one little chap said: ‘Then I’ll go home and ask my mum if I can stay up a bit later!’ Things like that were all part of our way of shooting films in those days. It was as bohemian as that. Out at Solna we had the youngest fire-captain in Sweden, generally known as Squirt-Olle. He was given orders to prepare the bonfire. Squirt-Olle turned out to be an inverted pyromaniac of the first order. For a week he put his whole heart and soul into preparing that bonfire. We’d arranged a fantastic camera-angle from above the bonfire and the girl hangin at the stake, and Gunnar Björnstrand and Max von Sydow and the cart with Åke Fridell, Bibi, Nils Poppe and Gunnel Lindblom in the background; plus the soldiers, of course, who had to light the bonfire. At exactly the right moment for exposure in the twilight I shouted ‘action’. And out came Squirt-Olle and set fire to it and –puff! –not only we, but the whole of Solna, were swathed in a cloud of smoke stretching as far as Haga South. I was standing on a crane yelling ‘Max, where are you?’ And the stallion Fridell should have been riding, that was found right down by the pavilion, with Fridell hanging on behind. The trans all came to stop, and for several week afterwards all the housewives of Solna were cleaning oil off their window-panes.” (ingmarbergman.se)
About Actor Max Von Sydow
He was born Carl Adolf Von Sydow – later taking the name Max – to an academic family in Lund, southern Sweden. His father, Carl Wilhelm, was an ethnologist and professor of comparative folklore at the university of Lund; his mother, Maria Margareta (nee Rappe), was a school teacher. He attended a Catholic school before doing his military service. From 1948 to 1951, Von Sydow attended the acting school at the Royal Dramatic theatre in Stockholm; while still a student there, he had small parts in two films directed by Alf Sjöberg, “Only a Mother” (1949) and “Miss Julie” (1951). After graduating, Von Sydow, who had married Christina Olin in 1951, joined the Municipal theatre in Helsingborg before moving to Malmö, which resulted in the significant meeting with Bergman. Following “The Seventh Seal,” Von Sydow played in six sombre films in a row for Bergman; he was quite content to play supporting roles when asked. He had a small part in “Wild Strawberries” (1957), and was rather peripheral in “Brink of Life” (1957)…but was central in “The Face” (1958, later known as “The Magician”). As Vogler, a 19th-century mesmerist and magician, Von Sydow embodies admirably the part-charlatan, part-messiah character. It was back to medieval Sweden in “The Virgin Spring” (1960), with Von Sydow as the vengeful father of a girl who has been raped and murdered. In “Through a Glass Darkly” (1961), he was the anguished husband of Harriet Andersson, watching his wife lapsing into insanity, and in “Winter Light” (1962), he was a man terrified of nuclear annihilation. Von Sydow refused offers of work outside Sweden, even the title role in the first James Bond movie, “Dr No” (1962), though two decades later he played the evil genius Blofeld to Sean Connery’s Bond in “Never Say Never Again,” 1983. He finally gave in when George Stevens begged him to play Jesus in his 225-minute epic “The Greatest Story Ever Told” (1965)…His next two Hollywood movies were…”The Reward” (1965), in which he was an impoverished crop-dusting pilot trapped in the Mexican desert, and “Hawaii” (1966), as an unbending and arrogant missionary who makes no effort to understand the islanders. Von Sydow’s two sons played his son in the film, aged seven (Henrik), and 12 (Clas)…
… in “Shame” (1968), a powerful parable in which he was allowed to improvise some of his dialogue for the first time; as a man whose peaceful seclusion is disturbed by a woman recovering from the car accident that killed her husband and son (Liv Ullmann), as well as a warring couple and a homicidal maniac in “The Passion of Anna” (1969); and as the cold cuckolded doctor husband of Bibi Andersson in “The Touch” (1971), Bergman’s first English-language film. Von Sydow and Ullmann suffered beautifully as poor Swedish peasants trying to survive in 19th-century Minnesota in Jan Troell’s diptych, “The Emigrants” (1971) and “The New Land” (1972)…Von Sydow was cast as the Jesuit priest, Father Merrin, in William Friedkin’s…“The Exorcist” (1973)…and its…sequel “The Exorcist II” – “The Heretic” (1977). Von Sydow reconnected with Bergman when he played the latter’s maternal grandfather in “The Best Intentions” (1992), directed by August from Bergman’s autobiographical script. “Why me?” was Von Sydow’s reaction to the director Jonathan Miller, after he had been cast as Prospero in “The Tempest” at the Old Vic, in 1988. “Do you have to cross the river to fetch water when you have so many wonderful actors in England?” But Miller was justified in his choice because Von Sydow brought the aura of the Bergman films to the role as well as authority and warmth. In 1988, he directed “Katinka,”…Von Sydow was glad to have made it, but said that he would never direct again. He continued to alternate between mainstream Hollywood (he was in Steven Spielberg’s “Minority Report,” 2002), and…“The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” (2007), mostly in small scene-stealing roles. He was a sinister German doctor in Martin Scorsese’s psychological thriller “Shutter Island” (2010); a mysterious mute in “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” (2011), for which he received his second Oscar nomination; Lor San Tekka in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” (2015); and the Three-Eyed Raven in the sixth season of “Game of Thrones” (2016). His last film role came in Thomas Vinterberg’s “Kursk” (2018). (theguardian.com)
About Writer and Director Ingmar Bergman
Ernst Ingmar Bergman, born on the 14th of July, 1918 in Uppsala…Bergman was a Swedish film and theatre director, writer, theatre manager, dramatist and author. Ingmar Bergman wrote or directed more than 60 films and 170 theatrical productions, and authored over a hundred books and articles. Among his best-known works are the films “The Seventh Seal,” “Wild Strawberries” and “Persona,” as well as his autobiography “The Magic Lantern.” Throughout Bergman’s many works, one finds variations on a central theme: dysfunctional families, blood-sucking failed artists and an absent Almighty all become manifestations of our collective inability to communicate with each other. Shakespeare, Molière, Ibsen, and Strindberg were all enormously important influences on Bergman, not only in his theatrical work, but indeed the entirety of his artistic career. Bergman’s films are set almost exclusively in Sweden, and starting with 1961’s “Through a Glass Darkly,” they were filmed primarily on the small island of Fårö, northeast of Gotland. The international reception of Bergman’s films reflects a not inconsiderable fascination with a Scandinavian exoticism: inscrutable language, primeval nature and flaxen-haired women. The depiction of nudity and a “natural” sexuality in Bergman’s films contributed to their success. Looking over Bergman’s career, another hallmark of both his work for stage and film is the recurrent company of loyal collaborators. Some notable examples from this ensemble include the cinematographer Sven Nykvist, the actors Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson, and the costume designer Mago. The relationship between the life and works of the artist (despite the tendency of biographical analyses to fall victim to the cult of genius) is in the case of Ingmar Bergman as inextricably tangled as it is compelling. In countless interviews and artistic representations, and especially in “The Magic Lantern,” Bergman repeatedly referred to his childhood and its importance for his artistic vision. A number of his relatives were also creative colleagues. (ingmarbergman.se)