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Friday, January 21, 2011

The Seventh Seal

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The Seventh Seal (Swedish: Det sjunde inseglet) is a 1957 Swedish film directed by Ingmar Bergman. Set during the Black Death, it tells of the journey of a medieval knight (Max von Sydow) and a game of chess he plays with the personification of Death, who has come to take his life. Bergman developed the film from his own play Wood Painting. The title refers to a passage from the Book of Revelation, used both at the very start of the film, and again towards the end, beginning with the words "And when the Lamb had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour" (Revelation 8:1). Here the motif of silence refers to the "silence of God" which is a major theme of the film.[1]
The film is considered a major classic of world cinema. It helped Bergman to establish himself as a world-renowned director and contains scenes which have become iconic through parodies and homages. The Jesuit publication America identifies it as having "began a series of seven films that explored the possibility of faith in a post-Holocaust, nuclear age".[2]. Likewise, film historians Thomas W. Bohn and Richard L. Stromgren identify this film as beginning "his cycle of films dealing with the conundrum of religious faith

Synopsis

This article's plot summary may be too long or overly detailed. Please help improve it by removing unnecessary details and making it more concise. (August 2010)
Antonius Block (Max von Sydow), a knight, returns disillusioned, with his squire Jöns (Gunnar Björnstrand), from a Crusade and finds that his home country of Sweden is being ravaged bythe plague. To his dismay, Death (Bengt Ekerot) has come for him, as well. He challenges Death to a chess match. Death agrees to the terms: as long as Block resists, he lives. If he wins, he shall go free.
The iconic scene of Death and Antonius Block in a chess game
Master and squire ride across a mossy heath beyond which the sea lies shimmering in the white glitter of the sun. Jöns seeks directions from a man who appears to be sleeping, but is actually dead. An actor, Jof, is shown sleeping in a wagon with his wife, Mia (who is also an actress), their son, Mikael and their manager, Skat. Jof, wandering alone outside, begins to have visions.
The knight and squire enter a church in a strange white mist where a fresco of the Dance of Deathis being painted. Jöns discusses the plague with the painter, then draws a small figure to represent himself. "This is squire Jöns. He grins at Death, mocks the Lord, laughs at himself and leers at the girls. His world is a Jöns-world, believable only to himself, ridiculous to all including himself, meaningless to Heaven and of no interest to Hell."[4] The knight Block approaches a priest in the confessional booth: "My life has been a futile pursuit, a wandering, a great deal of talk without meaning. I feel no bitterness or self-reproach because the lives of most people are very much like this. But I will use my reprieve for one meaningful deed."[5] The knight tells the priest that he is playing chess with Death and reveals his strategy, only to find that the priest is Death, hidden in the shadows. Upon exiting the church, Block converses with a girl in chains who has been condemned for being a witch and will soon be burnt alive. H
Shortly thereafter, Jöns walks into an abandoned farm looking for water, where he saves a servant girl (Gunnel Lindblom) from being raped. He recognises the rapist as Raval, a theologian (whom Jöns sarcastically calls "Dr Mirabilis, Coelestis et Diabilis," "Doctor of marvels, of heaven, and of the Devil") who ten years ago had convinced the knight, his master, to leave the wife he loved and join "a better-class crusade to the Holy Land." Jöns threatens to brand Raval on the face. Shaken, the girl agrees to come along with Jöns as his house keeper. Block and Jöns ride into town, where Jof and Mia are performing in front of a crowd, although their performance is interrupted by the arrival of a procession offlagellants. In the confusion, Skat comes across a woman from the village, and is persuaded to run off with her.
At a public house, Jof comes across Raval and Plog, a blacksmith, who is grieving because his wife had recently left him for an actor (later revealed to have been Skat). Knowing that Jof is an actor, Raval accuses him of being the one, and attempts to humiliate the innocent performer by forcing him to dance on the tables like a bear. However, Jöns appears and stays true to his word, dealing a rough justice by cutting Raval with a knife from forehead to cheek.[6] Jöns then consoles Plog, and convinces the smith to come along with him.
The knight and Death continue their game, but Block sees the evening light move across a wagon to the actress Mia and her little child. She tells him that the actor Skat has run off and left them and that they plan to visit the saint's feast at Elsinore. He warns them against this as "the plague has spread in that direction... people are dying by the tens of thousands."[7] When Mia's husband Jof returns, the knight finds solace in a quiet, pleasant picnic of milk and wild strawberries with the family. Antonius Block explains how much he loved his own wife before he left her for the Crusades. He also shares with Mia his ongoing burden, the burden of faith, which he describes as loving someone in the dark who never comes. However, it is the simple and harmonious moments like this in which he states he is able to find comfort and which he wishes to remember: "I'll carry this memory between my hands as if it were bowl filled to the brim with fresh milk...And it will be an adequate sign -- it will be enough for me."[8] He invites them to his castle, where they will be safe from the plague.
Block, Mia, Jof, Mikael, Jöns and Plog head through the forest, and along the way they come across Skat and Lisa (Plog's wife). After being threatened by an enraged Plog, Lisa quickly leaves Skat and returns to him. Skat then stabs himself to avoid receiving the brunt of Plog's wrath. Shaken by the actor's sudden suicide, the group moves on. Skat sits up, having faked his death with the crew's prop knife; regardless, Death appears by his side, his "performance cancelled due to death".[9]
The final scene depicting "the danse macabre".
They next come across the young girl from the church, who had been declared a witch. The Knight demands of a monk: "What have you done with the child?" But the monk, like the priest in the confessional, again turns out to be Death hiding his face, who asks Block, "Do you never stop asking questions?" and Block answers, "No. Never." [10] Jöns' conscience is sympathetic to the girl and he contemplates killing her executioners, but decides against it as she is almost dead anyway. Block asks her again to summon Satan for him; he wants to ask the Devil about God. The girl, in a state that Block describes as her "terror", claims already to have done so, but Block (and the audience) cannot see him. He gives her an herb which he says will take away her pain, and then leaves, his dilemma unanswered.[11]
The robber Raval that Jöns branded later appears dying of the plague, pleading for water. The mute servant girl attempts to bring him some, but is stopped by Jöns, who exclaims, "It's meaningless. Can't you hear that I'm consoling you?"[12] The robber then dies. Jof, the actor tells his wife Mia that he can see the Knight playing chess with Death and decides to immediately escape with his family.[13]
Antonius Block pretends to be clumsy and knocks the chess pieces over, distracting Death long enough for the family of actors he has befriended to slip away. Once the pieces have been replaced on the board, Death then places the knight in checkmate, winning the game, and announces that when they meet again Block's time—and the time of all those still travelling with him—will be up. Before departing, Death asks if Block has accomplished his one "meaningful deed" yet; Block replies that he has. The knight is reunited with his wife at his castle, she having waited there alone for him. The party shares one "last supper" before Death comes for them through the twilight of the "large, murky room where the burning torches throw uneasy shadows over the ceiling and walls."[14] At the final moment, Block pleads to God: "Have mercy on us, because we are small and frightened and ignorant." Jöns's girl, on her knees, smiles and announces, "It is finished."[14]
Meanwhile, the little family of actors and jugglers have endured a strange light and roar in the forest which the father, Jof, interprets to be "theAngel of Death and he's very big." They now awaken listening to the rain tapping on the wagon canvas and crawl out, noticing "the dark retreating sky where summer lightning glitters like silver needles" over the ridges, forests, wide plains and sea.[15] Jof, with his second sight, sees a vision of the knight and his followers being led away over the hills in a solemn dance of death. "They bear away from their light, while their strict lord Death bids them to dance... and the rain washes, and cleanses the salt of their tears from their cheeks."[15] His wife, Mia, turns to him and says "You with your visions and dreams."

[edit]Cast

[edit]Production

Bergman originally wrote the play Trämålning (Wood Painting) in 1953/1954 for the acting students of Malmö City Theatre. The first time it was performed in public was in radio in 1954, directed by Bergman. He also directed it on stage in Malmö the next spring, and in the autumn it was staged in Stockholm, directed by Bengt Ekerot who would later play the character Death in the film version.[16]
In his autobiography, The Magic Lantern, Bergman wrote that "Wood Painting gradually became The Seventh Seal, an uneven film which lies close to my heart, because it was made under difficult circumstances in a surge of vitality and delight."[17] The script for the Seventh Sealwas commenced while Bergman was in the Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm recovering from a stomach complaint.[18] It was at first rejected[who?] and Bergman was given the go-ahead for the project from Carl-Anders Dymling at Svensk Filmindustri only after the success at Cannes of Smiles of a Summer Night[19] Bergman rewrote the script five times and was given a schedule of only thirty-five days and a budget of $150,000.[20] It was to be the seventeenth film he had directed.[21]
All scenes except two were shot in or around the Filmstaden studios in Solna. The exceptions were the famous opening scene with Death and the Knight playing chess by the sea and the ending with the dance of death, which were both shot at Hovs Hallar, a rocky, precipitous beach area in north-western Scania.[22]
In the Magic Lantern autobiography Bergman writes of the film's iconic penultimate shot: "The image of the Dance of Death beneath the dark cloud was achieved at hectic speed because most of the actors had finished for the day. Assistants, electricians, and a make-up man and about two summer visitors, who never knew what it was all about, had to dress up in the costumes of those condemned to death. A camera with no sound was set up and the picture shot before the cloud dissolved."[23]

[edit]Portrait of the Middle Ages

Death playing chess, from Täby kyrka
With regard to the relevancy of historical accuracy to a film that is heavily metaphorical and allegorical, John Alberth, writing in A Knight at the Movies, holds
the film only partially succeeds in conveying the period atmosphere and thought world of the fourteenth century. Bergman would probably counter that it was never his intention to make an historical or period film. As it was written in a program note that accompanied the movie's premier "It is a modern poem presented with medieval material that has been very freely handled...The script in particular---embodies a mid-twentieth century existentialist angst....Still, to be fair to Bergman, one must allow him his artistic license, and the script's modernisms may be justified as giving the movie's medieval theme a compelling and urgent contemporary relevance...Yet the film succeeds to a large degree because it is set in the Middle Ages, a time that can seem both very remote and very immediate to us living in the modern world....Ultimately The Seventh Seal should be judged as a historical film by how well it combines the medieval and the modern."[24]
Even less equivocally defending it as an allegory, Aleksander Kwiatkowski in the book Swedish Film Classics, writes
The international response to the film which among other awards won the jury's special prize at Cannes in 1957 reconfirmed the author' high rank and proved that The Seventh Seal regardless of its degree of accuracy in reproducing medieval scenery may be considered as a universal, timeless allegory.[25]
Much of the film's imagery is derived from medieval art. For example, Bergman has stated that the image of a man playing chess with a skeletal Death was inspired by a medieval church painting from the 1480s in Täby kyrka, Täby, north of Stockholm, painted by Albertus Pictor.[26]
However, the medieval Sweden portrayed in this movie includes creative anachronisms. The last crusade (the Ninth) ended in 1271, and the Black Death hit Europe in 1348. In addition, the flagellant movement was foreign to Sweden; large-scale witch persecutions only began in the 15th century.[27]
Generally speaking, historians Johan Huizinga and Friedrich Heer and Barbara Tuchman have all argued that the late Middle Ages of the 14th century was a period of "doom and gloom" similar to what is reflected in this film, characterized by a feeling of pessimism, an increase in a penitential style of piety that was slightly masochistic, all aggravated by various disasters such as the Black Plague, famine, the Hundred Years' War between France and England, and papal schism.[28] This is sometimes called the crisis of the Late Middle Ages and Barbara Tuchman regards the 14th century as "a distant mirror" of the 20th century in a way that echoes Bergman's sensibilities. Nonetheless, the period of the Crusades is well before this era; they took place in a more optimistic period.[28]

[edit]Chess in the film

The chess game opens with the knight holding out his two fists and Death choosing the black pawn ("You are black", says Block. "It becomes me well." replies Death). The first moves of each use the king's pawn.[29] In the confessional, the knight says "I use a combination of the bishop and the knight which he hasn't yet discovered. In the next move I'll shatter one of his flanks." Death (in disguise as the priest) replies "I'll remember that."[5] When they play by the beach, the knight says: "Because I revealed my tactics to you I'm in retreat. It's your move." Death takes the knight piece. "You did the right thing" states the knight "you fell right in the trap. Check! Don't worry about my laughter, save your king instead." Death's response is to lean over the chess board and make a psychological move "Are you going to escort the juggler and his wife through the forest? Those whose names are Jof and Mia and who have a small son." "Why do you ask?" says the knight. "Oh, no reason" replies Death.[30] Immediately after the death of the robber Raval, Death raises his hand and strikes the knight's queen. "I didn't notice that" says the knight.[31] This is portrayed as a major setback. However, the queen was not as powerful as it currently is until many centuries after the time period of this film, when a chess-variant initially called "chess of the mad queen" became more popular than the traditional game. In one of the last scenes, the knight pretends to knock over the pieces so the young family of jugglers can escape while Death is reconstructing the game. "You are mated on the next move, Antonius Block" says Death. "That's true" says the knight. "Did you enjoy your reprieve?" "Yes, I did" Block replies.[32]

[edit]Major themes

The title refers to a passage about the end of the world from the Book of Revelation, used both at the very start of the film, and again towards the end, beginning with the words "And when the Lamb had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour" (Revelation 8:1). Thus, in the confessional scene the knight states: "Is it so cruelly inconceivable to grasp God with the senses? Why should He hide himself in a mist of half-spoken promises and unseen miracles?...What is going to happen to those of us who want to believe but aren't able to?"[33] Death, impersonating the confessional priest, refuses to reply. Similarly, later, as he eats the strawberries with the little family of actors, Antonius Block says: "Faith is a torment – did you know that? It is like loving someone who is out there in the darkness but never appears, no matter how loudly you call."[8] Bragg notes that the concept of the "Silence of God" in the face of evil, or the pleas of believers or would-be-believers, may be influenced by the punishments of silence meted out by Bergman's father, a chaplain in the StateLutheran Church.[34] Interestingly, in Bergman's original radio play sometimes translated as A Painting on Wood, the figure of Death in aDance of Death is represented not by an actor, but by silence, "mere nothingness, mere absence...terrifying...the void."[35]
Strong influences on the film were Bibi Andersson who played the juggler's wife Mia (and with whom Bergman was in love), Picasso's picture of the two acrobats, Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, Strindberg's Folk Sagas and To Denmark, the frescoes at Haskeborga church and a painting by Albertus Pictor in Täby kyrka.[36] Just prior to shooting Bergman directed for radio the Play of Everyman by Hugo von Hofmannstahl.[36] By this time he had also directed plays by Shakespeare, Strindberg, Camus, Chesterton, Anouilh, Tennessee Williams, Pirandello, Lehár,Molière and Ostrovsky.[37]
Bergman grew up in a home infused with an intense Christianity, his father being a charismatic preacher (this may have explained Bergman's childhood infatuation with Hitler which later deeply tormented him).[38] As a six-year old child, Bergman used to help the gardener carry corpses from the Royal Hospital Sophiahemmet (where his father was chaplain) to the mortuary.[39] When, as a boy, he saw the film Black Beauty, the fire scene excited him so much he stayed in bed for three days with a temperature.[39] Despite living a Bohemian lifestyle in partial rebellion against his upbringing, Bergman often signed his scripts with the initials "S.D.G" (Soli Deo Gloria)-"To God Alone The Glory"-just as JS Bach did at the end of every musical composition.[40]
Gerald Mast writes,
"Like the gravedigger in Hamlet, the Squire [...] treats death as a bitter and hopeless joke. Since we all play chess with death, and since we all must suffer through that hopeless joke, the only question about the game is how long it will last and how well we will play it. To play it well, to live, is to love and not to hate the body and the mortal as the Church urges in Bergman's metaphor."[41]
Melvyn Bragg writes,
"[I]t is constructed like an argument. It is a story told as a sermon might be delivered: an allegory...each scene is at once so simple and so charged and layered that it catches us again and again...Somehow all of Bergman's own past, that of his father, that of his reading and doing and seeing, that of his Swedish culture, of his political burning and religious melancholy, poured into a series of pictures which carry that swell of contributions and contradictions so effortlessly that you could tell the story to a child, publish it as a storybook of photographs and yet know that the deepest questions of religion and the most mysterious revelation of simply being alive are both addressed."[42]

[edit]Reception

Upon its original release in Sweden, The Seventh Seal was met by very positive reviews although not without reservations. Nils Beyer atMorgon-tidningen compared it to Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc and Day of Wrath. While finding Dreyer's films to be superior, he still noted that "it isn't just any director that you feel like comparing to the old Danish master." He also praised the usage of the cast, in particular Max von Sydow whose character he described as "a pale, serious Don Quixote character with a face as if sculpted in wood", and "Bibi Andersson, who appears as if painted in faded watercolours but still can emit small delicious glimpses of female warmth." Hanserik Hjertén for Arbetaren started his review by praising the cinematography, but soon went on to describe the film as "a horror film for children" and that beyond the superficial, it reminds a lot of Bergman's "sophomoric films from the 40s."[16]
Bosley Crowther had only positive things to say in his 1958 review for The New York Times, and praised how the themes were elevated by the cinematography and acting: "the profundities of the ideas are lightened and made flexible by glowing pictorial presentation of action that is interesting and strong. Mr. Bergman uses his camera and actors for sharp, realistic effects."[43]
The film has been regarded since its release as a masterpiece of cinematography.[44] It was Ranked #8 in Empire magazines "The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema" in 2010.[45]

[edit]Impact

The Seventh Seal significantly helped Bergman in gaining his position as a world-class director. When the film won the Special Jury Prize at the 1957 Cannes Film Festival,[46] the attention generated by it (along with the previous year's Smiles of a Summer Night) made Bergman and his stars Max von Sydow and Bibi Andersson well-known to the European film community, and the critics and readers of Cahiers du Cinéma, among others, discovered him with this movie. Within five years of this, he had established himself as the first real auteur of Swedish cinema. With its images and reflections upon death and the meaning of life, The Seventh Seal had a symbolism that was "immediately apprehensible to people trained in literary culture who were just beginning to discover the 'art' of film, and it quickly became a staple of high school and college literature courses... Unlike Hollywood 'movies,' The Seventh Seal clearly was aware of elite artistic culture and thus was readily appreciated by intellectual audiences."[47]

[edit]Parody

Death
The representation of Death as a white-faced man in a dark cape who plays chess with mortals has been a popular object of parody in other films. One that is exclusively focused on Bergman is a 15-minute parody of Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries entitled De Düva (mock Swedish for "The Dove"), which contains a final scene in which the protagonist plays badminton with Death and Death is defeated when he is hit in the eye by the droppings of a passing dove. The photography imitates throughout the style of Bergman's great cinematographers Sven Nykqvist and Gunnar Fischer (who shot "The Seventh Seal").[48] The trailer to the 1975 film Monty Python and the Holy Grail also includes a game against Death being cut short, when the game of chess is interrupted by Death hitting the Knight's face with a pie.
The idea of Death playing games other than chess was further parodied in Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, in which he appears as a major character (played by William Sadler). During the film, the protagonists beat Death at Battleship, Clue, electric football and Twister. An episode of the television series The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy includes a similar theme, with Death becoming a major character tied to the main characters after they defeat him in a game of limbo. The 2001 Cinema Insomnia screening of The Seventh Seal included sketches in which the presenter and his co-host play chess while dressed as the film's characters.



Woody Allen is an enormous fan of Ingmar Bergman and references his work in his serious dramas as well as his comedies,[49] includingLove and Death, a film which broadly parodies 19th-century Russian novels with a closing "Dance of Death" scene imitating Bergman. Allen has even written a short, one-act play entitled "Death Knocks" (published in Getting Even), in which he depicts a man playing Death at gin rummy.

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