Sony G90 - Manual (Page 100)

The Seventh Seal. Ingmar Bergman, director. 1957.
B&W; 96 minutes; 1.33:1; Dolby Digital Monaural.
Criterion DVD.
he Seventh Seal was the film that made Ingmar
Bergman internationally famous. After The Seventh
Seal
(and Wild Strawberries, which appeared later that
same year, 1957), Bergman the brooding Swede was an inter-
national succès d’estime, instantly elevated to the top tier of
the art-house pantheon alongside Fellini, Antonioni, Kuro-
sawa, Truffaut, Ray, and Buñuel. Marxists, existentialists,
avant-gardists, humanists of every sect claimed him as their
own. And the truth is that there are aspects of The Seventh
Seal
that justify all of these claims. And yet, 42 years along,
with the post-war Age of Anxiety behind us (or fitfully so), the
consensus seems to be that The Seventh Seal is not really a
very good motion picture, after all.
Robin Wood, than whom none can be more prescient (or
dogmatic), puts his finger squarely on the problem in his fine
book on Bergman’s films.
1 When we think of The Seventh Seal
we think of individual images – chalk-faced Death spreading
his cloak like a raven’s wing to engulf Max Von Sydow’s
knight; the game of chess on the beach, so artfully lit by
Bergman’s cinematographer Gunnar Fischer that the contes-
tants glow as if reflecting the fires of Apocalypse; the ghastly
parade of flagellants, dragging that great cross through the
dust like Christ on the road to Calvary; the burning of the
witch in the dark woods, with its conscious homage to Drey-
er; par excellence, Jof’s vision of the final Dance of Death
across that distant hillside beneath that lowering sky. Wood’s
point is that a series of still pictures, no matter how memo-
rable, is no substitute for narrative movement, “not just phys -
ical movement from image to image but the inner movement
of thought and feeling it embodies.”
2 The Seventh Seal lacks
that narrative movement. It is a cold,
s h o w y, supremely well-crafted photo
album that coheres as a gallery of effects rather than as a nar-
rative whole and, even at that, is never as disturbing as
Bergman meant it to be. This is hard, but not altogether unfair.
The Seventh Seal
is an episodic film, built up of groupings and
tableaux, like church art or tapestry. It does move us more by
the power of its imagery (and often by the poetry of its lan-
guage) than by the unity of its story line or our emotional
engagement with its characters. Yet, in spite of this, I find
myself wanting to defend it as an extraordinary work of cine-
matic art. While I don’t see The Seventh Seal as a substantial-
ly different kind of film than Wood does, I do see more “inner
necessity” – and less commercial exigency – in it than Wood
is willing to allow. This does not make The Seventh Seal into
the kind of wrenching character-based drama that, say, Win -
ter Light
is. But it does add a moving personal subtext to the
film’s play of “important and impressive” ideas.
It is time to come to terms with the fact that The Seventh
Seal is an allegory of man’s fate in a Godforsaken universe –
and every bit as serious as that sounds. As such it reflects the
personal spiritual crisis that Bergman was going through at
that moment in his life. It also, quite obviously, reflects the
larger public crises in post-war Europe, where the horrors of
the Second World War and the new horrors of the Nuclear Age
were casting dark shadows backward and forward in time.
Set in the holocaust of the Fourteenth Century, when
bubonic plague was killing off that portion of Europe that had
not already been killed by war or famine, The Seventh Seal is
clearly meant to apply to our own age of holocausts – or to
any time when God seems most distant from suffering
mankind. Antonius Block (Max Von Sydow), a knight who has
returned to Sweden from the carnage of the Crusades, is one
of the film’s protagonists; his squire Jöns (Gunnar Björn-
strand) another. The idealistic knight still yearns for a God in
From Art to Cult
. . . . . . . . .
1 Robin Wood, Ingmar Bergman (Praeger,
1970). [Hereafter, Wood.]
2 Wood, p. 87. J O N A T H A N V A L I N