The Seventh Seal

The Seventh Seal

Det sjunde inseglet

Writer & Director ~ Ingmar Bergman

1957, Sweden

Stars ~ Max von Sydow, Gunnar Björnstrand, Bengt Ekerot, Nils Poppe

 

His seventeenth film, Ingmar Bergman’s ‘The Seventh Seal’ was adapted from his own play ‘The Wood Painting’ (‘Trämålning’,1953/1954) which he wrote for an actor’s workshop as director of the Malmö City Theatre. The title ‘The Seventh Seal’ refers to a passage from the Book of Revelation:  "And when the Lamb had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour." (Revelation 8:1) In Bergman’s original play, Death is represented by silence, but Death here is personified by Bengt Ekerot, coming for a knight on his way home from The Crusades. But the knight, played by Max Von Sydow, challenges Death to a game of chess for a delay until he can find meaning.

The influences on the film range from Picasso, Shakespeare, the frescoes at Härkeberga church and his upbringing in a devout Christian household, his father being a rector. A religiously themed film running on symbolism, ‘The Seventh Seal’ is the tonal opposite of Jodorowdy’s ‘The Holy Mountain’, which feels like a film made by a very naughty boy. Instead, Bergman’s vision is playful, clear, pristine, austere, mature, aided by the high contrast black and white. The seriousness of intent and purposeful staginess is the stuff of endless parodies, but there is a confidence here and a surprising humanity that immediately disarms. There’s a lot of lolling around in love and contemplation. The tone is that of a fairy tale being treated to the veracity of a historical drama, although its historical accuracy is erratic: for example, The Crusades were before The Black Death, and witch persecutions in Sweden came much later. But its strength as allegory is not in doubt, and Bergman’s magic touch is in its surety in making such potentially humourless premise easy entertainment.

 

 

Characters speak to one another in existential angst and contemplation, adrift in a world of plague casual misogyny, piety, doubt and stalked by Death. A frivolous and somewhat bawdy mobile theatre is interrupted by a procession of self-flagellating religious zealots that only pause to tell the crowd they are all going to die. It is perhaps telling that the one character without dimension is the hectoring preacher. And yet it is anything but a dark film, offering instead bright black and white and a lightness familiar from Bergman’s earlier amusements such as ‘Smiles of a Summer Night’ and ‘Summer with Monika’. It makes a pit stop for a comic sequence where the blacksmith confronts his wayward wife and her lover the actor, for instance, more like his earlier work, but still has dark gags of Death putting the work in by chopping down a tree and cheating at chess. Interviewed by Melvyn Bragg on the South Bank Show, 1978, Bergman spoke of how he was very scared of Death, how the film acted as “medicine” for this, and spoke of Death’s appearance as a clown or a priest. Indeed, Death is mistaken for a priest a few times.

The squire Jöns (Gunnar Björnstrand) is almost a self-aware character, almost meta in his approach to others and the crisis of Faith all around him. In that sense, he acts as an audience guide through this doomed landscape. And you have actors synonymous with Bergman, for he had a reliable and loyal troupe of actors and crew. Max Von Sydow has a natural, unmatched gravitas but without condescension, which is perfect for the existential crisis of Block the knight. Bibi Andersson was Bergman’s lover at the time and instrumental in convincing to cash in his long stint as a director to produce this project. She provides all the natural, earthy warmth acting as a counterbalance to all the “I should murder my wife” humour.

‘The Seventh Seal’ is considered a benchmark film that contributed to cementing if not creating the idea of the Art Film after its screening in Cannes in 1957. Bergman’s questions about Faith and mortality are persistent and open to the subjective biases of the individual, right through his subsequent films to varying degrees. That they serve both believers and non-believers – the knight, for example, is evidently struggling with sensing he’s lost Faith – is a sign of the complexity, generosity and universality of his treatment of these themes. These questions are always tied in with theatre and performance and often the trimmings of horror, from ‘Hour of the Wolf’ and others like ‘Wild Strawberries’. I always enjoy the fact that I never know if he is going to drop in a little horror motif. Even ‘Fanny and Alexander’ begins with Death casually walking across a room. And here, Jöns’ early encounter with a corpse is a full-on genre moment. From the unsettling flagellation parade to the beautiful coastal vistas, from the horror of witch burning and robbing corpses to the broad “but my wife” comedy and the wild strawberries communion, Von Sydow’s knight rages philosophically and carves his way through all the tonal fluctuations. 

In the end, the knight finds no meaning from Death – who declares himself “unknowing”, so no answers there – but rather, meaning in moments of mercy and acceptance. This is enough because, of course, Death will always win in the end. A film that remains enigmatic, humanely philosophical and resolutely positive, despite the subject matter.