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The
Seventh Seal (Swedish: Det sjunde inseglet) is an existential 1957 Swedish film
directed by Ingmar Bergman about the journey of a medieval knight (Max von Sydow)
across a plague-ridden landscape. Its best-known scene features the knight
playing chess with the personification of Death, his life resting on the outcome
of the game. The film has long been regarded a masterpiece of cinema. 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 he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven
about the space of half an hour" (Revelation 8:1). Bergman developed the film
from his own play Wood Painting.
Antonius
Block (Max von Sydow), a knight, returns with his squire Jöns from the Crusades
and finds that his home country is ravaged by the plaque. To his dismay, he
discovers that Death (Bengt Ekerot) has come for him too. In order to reach his
home and be reunited with his wife after ten years of war, he challenges Death
to a chess match, although the result is unavoidable. The knight's faith is
war-weathered, and this theme is stressed in one of the scenes in the movie: the
knight gives confession to a priest about his doubts whether God actually
exists; he tells the priest how he challenged Death to a game of chess and
reveals his strategy, only to find that the "priest" is actually Death. In
another powerful scene—of a witch-burning—the knight asks the witch to see Satan
in order to ask from him whether God exists or not. When the witch summons
Satan, the knight (or the audience) can't see him and the knight's dilemma is
left unanswered. When the witch is burned, the squire says that the witch
doesn't see God or Satan because neither exists and that the witch's eyes are
only filled with emptiness. The disquieted knight refuses to acknowledge the
victim's emptiness (and, in a way, his own) despite his doubts about God. The
knight realizes that he would rather be broken in faith, constantly suffering
doubt, than recognize a life without meaning.
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.
During the fateful journey, Block and the squire encounter several features of
medieval society and the way it dealt with the fear of death: the penitence of
flagellants, the burning of a witch, and traveling actors. Bergman is
particularly critical in his depiction of the clergymen, who profit from the
atmosphere of terror engendered by the plague. They offer no spiritual comfort
to their people, and are represented as little better than thieves. The 'witch'
is burnt at the stake for 'having caused' the plague, in the community's
“grotesque effort to put an end to the contagion” (Livingston 1982: 61). The
witch-burning and the painful ritual that Jof is subjected to at the inn can be
viewed as archaic rituals which aim at the purification of the community through
sacrifice; violence is used to stabilize the order. Bergman contrasts the
despairing unbelief of the knight and the bitterness of his squire with the
simple spiritual faith of the acrobat player Jof (Nils Poppe) and his young wife
Mia (Bibi Andersson), who, together with their infant son Mikael, may be
symbolic of the Holy family. The squire, while forcefully atheistic and cynical,
displays a sensitivity that drives him to protect and aid those he can, and to
sympathize with those (like the witch) he cannot. Critics have suggested that
Bergman identifies most closely with this character. Although the knight tells a
"priest" (Death in disguise) that he is going to defeat Death by "a combination
of the knight and the bishop", he will eventually still lose. But the knight
achieves one significant act that gives his life meaning: he allows the young
couple and their child to escape. While the knight and his followers are led
away over the hills in a medieval dance of death, the young family live to
continue their journey.
Historical accuracy
The illustration of Death playing chess from Taby kyrka
The
medieval Sweden portrayed in this movie is not totally accurate. It is extremely
unlikely that a knight returning from the Crusades would arrive home in the
middle of the Black Death, for the last crusade (the Ninth) ended in 1271, and
the bubonic plague hit Europe in 1348. In addition, the flagellant movement was
foreign to Sweden, large-scale witch persecutions only began in the 1400s, and
the theme of life and death as portrayed in the movie is more typical of
existencialism in the 1950s than of the beliefs of medieval Swedes. A key
turning point in the film is when Death captures the Queen in the chess game
between Antonius and himself. But the Queen was not a superpowerful piece until
centuries later when a recent chess-variant initially called "chess of the mad
queen became more popular than the classic game.
Production
In
interviews and in his autobiography, The Magic Lantern, Bergman has said that
The Seventh Seal was a low-budget affair. Bergman had been 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 nights, and was given a schedule of only
thirty-five days, a short time for a film of this nature. The famous opening
scenes with Death and the Knight were shot at Hovs Hallar, a rocky, precipitous
beach area in north-western Scania.
Impact
Death
The
Seventh Seal was Bergman's breakthrough film. When the film won the Special Jury
Price at the Cannes Film Festival in 1957, the attention generated by it 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 Cinema, 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
reflections upon death and the meaning of life, The Seventh Seal became
something of a figurehead for "serious" European films and, as such, has often
been parodied in film and television. The representation of Death as a
white-faced man in a dark cape has been the most popular object of parody, most
notably in Woody Allen's Love and Death, and in the film Bill and Ted's Bogus
Journey, in which the protagonists beat Death at Battleship, Clue, electric
football and Twister. In the movie Last Action Hero, the film character of Death
walks out of a movie screening of "The Seventh Seal" into the real world. The
character of Anton Chigurh in the film No Country for An Old Man has been
compared to Bergman's character of Death, with their shared indestructibility,
games of chance with their intended victims, and even similar dialogue.
Review Of The Seventh Seal
One of the things that separates a great
artist from a lesser one is his ability to switch forms, themes, and the like,
yet still imprint that unmistakable essence that lets a viewer know which artist
they are dealing with immediately. Rarely has there been a greater and more
vivid example of this reality than in comparing the two films Swedish filmmaker
Ingmar Bergman released in 1957: The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries.
The first film, which is the subject of
this essay, is stark, cosmic, spare, allegorical, and unremitting in its view of
life, whereas Wild Strawberries is rich, personal, realistic (even if it uses
symbolism), and open to several viable interpretations. Both films starred many
of Bergman’s ‘stock actors from the 1950s: Max Von Sydow as Knight Antonius
Block, Bibi Andersson as Mia, the wife of Jof the jester (and utterly gorgeous,
as opposed to mere cuteness in Wild Strawberries), and Gunnar Björnstrand as
Block’s squire Jöns, a pragmatic Sancho Panza to Block’s spiritual Don Quixote.
While Björnstrand is nominally the third lead in the film, behind Sydow and
Bengt Ekerot as the personification of Death, in truth he is the dominant lead
character, with by far the most, and the best, lines of dialogue. And while this
film is an allegory loaded with symbolism, it is also a very simple story of a
middle 14th Century knight’s return to Sweden from the Crusades of
the Middle Ages.
Block and Jöns have been gone a decade, and
while the knight was a zealous believer in the Christian cause, the squire was
not. A decade has taken its toll on both, physically, but more so psychically.
The knight has started to lose faith in the existence of God, who would send men
off to the folly of war, then strike them down with the Black Death. The squire
is an atheist, openly mocking his Master’s beliefs, and loathing all the men who
represent the church. Early in the film, Death- black hooded and white-faced
(all the more heightened by the gorgeous black and white cinematography of
Gunnar Fischer)- confronts the knight, who challenges him to a game of chess.
Death is an old man, not evil, merely a perfunctory servant of Nature. Block
asks ‘Who are you?’ Death says, ‘I am Death.’ Block counters, ‘Have you come for
me?’ Death says, ‘I have long walked by your side.’ Block replies, ‘So I have
noticed,’ with a grim humor that shows just how great a writer of dialogue
Bergman is, and to which his detractors, who complain of his literary heft
drowning his cinematic vision, are oblivious to. If Block loses the game, he
must go with Death. If he wins, he gets off. But, Block is not so much
interested in living as he is in something greater, leaving an impact for
posterity- some tangible act that will perdure where he feels his belief in God
has failed. Death preys upon Block’s fears, and tricks him into revealing his
game strategy after the knight is initially routing Death.
As the knight and squire journey back to
his wife and castle, not unlike Odysseus, they meet a handful of other people,
including Mia and her acting troupe, run by Jonas Skat (Erik Strandmark), Mia’s
husband Jof (Nils Poppe)- who has ecstatic visions no one else can see- and
their infant son Michael (the allusions to Christ are manifest as Mia means Mary
and Jof Joseph. Along the way, comic relief is provided by the interplay and
antics of Jof and Skat with Plog the blacksmith (Åke Fridell) and his wife Lisa
(Inga Gill), who cuckolds Plog with Skat, who ends up the first of the group to
fall victim to Death. The knight likes the actors, but the squire gets to
indulge his savage hared for the church when he rescues a beautiful girl (Gunnel
Lindblom) from the possible sexual ravages of a seminarist named Raval (Bertil
Anderberg) who seems intent on looting the home of her family, now all dead from
the plague. First, the squire threatens Raval, then he disfigures him, then he
allows the seminarist to die from the Plague, as the girl, wanting to help Raval,
looks on.
Jöns’ cruelty, or indifference, and whole
demeanor (such as his blasphemous mockery of the church with a church painter
named Albertus Pictor (Gunnar Olsson)) contrasts sharply with Block’s pious but
creeping doubts. Early on, the duo comes across a young village girl (Maud
Hansson) soon to be burned at the stake for being a witch. The squire thinks
it’s ignorant cruelty, but Block, while doubting her evil nature, tries to ask
her queries of evil, life, the Devil, only to be taunted by the deluded girl. In
her, he sees only vacancy, and this only fuels his apostasy, especially when he
asks her to ask the Devil if God exists. It shows Block as pitiable and absurd,
but strangely human and weak. When, finally, she is burned alive, seemingly on
the orders of Death, himself, the two men look at her eyes, and see the void
that is reality. It is a chilling moment as Sydow’s face twists and we know
Antonius Block has reached a point of no return. Later, he plays the final moves
of the game with Death, but Jof sees them, and the knight knows Jof does.
Quietly, Jof sneaks out of camp with his family, leaving Death to deal with the
others. In his arrogance, Death, wanting to take the knight and his companions
so badly that he needed to resort to trickery to defeat Block, gets his
comeuppance, as Block distracts Death from noticing the escaping family, by
knocking over the chess pieces, pretending he was desperate to avoid losing. He
claims he cannot recall where the pieces were, but Death does, and he shoots the
knight an almost sadistic look, feeling that the knight is now truly fearing him,
unrealizing that Block has merely accomplished his great existential act-
allowing the ‘Holy Family’ life, even as he is resigned to death for himself and
the rest. It’s a very subtle, yet very complex, moment.
Eventually, the knight’s party arrives at
his castle, and he is confronted by his wife Karin (Inga Landgré), who
recognizes him, but sees that he does not immediately recognize her. Like the
others, she is alone at the castles, surrounded by memories and death. She feeds
them, and quotes from the book book of Revelations, from where the film gets its
title, and with which the film opened: ‘When he broke open the seventh seal,
there was silence in heaven for about half an hour’ (Revelations 8:1). Then, a
knock comes. The squire answers the door, but says no one was there. But, it is
Death, and eventually all see and try to make peace with him. The knight,
meanwhile, begs for God’s intrusion, only to be, yet again, let down. The film
ends the next morning, with Jof and Mia, and their son, waking up. Jof claims
that he sees many of the others doing a Danse Macabre in the distance, as they
hold hands with each other, and with Death (a scene famously parodied by Woody
Allen in his Love And Death), and Mia teases him about his silly visions, as she
has the whole film. They then go about their lives.
Some interpret great and deep meaning into
the fact that Raval, the evil seminarist who dies of the Plague, is said to be
dancing with Death, and not the squire’s girl nor Block’s wife, as cited by Jof,
but it could merely be that Bergman had Jof colloquially ticking off only a few
of the names, or merely, himself, not being certain. I do not think it really
matters, and it may very well have been a continuity error that Bergman never
caught while shooting the scenes out of sequence. After all, the way Bergman
actually films the scene, against a stormy sky, does not allow the audience a
definitive count of the dancers, much less their identities. They are too far
away and in silhouette for that, so we must rely on Jof’s take, which the film
has shown to be unreliable, if somewhat greater than the average man’s. The film
is by no means gloomy and dismal, as many Bergman detractors despair. The squire
Jöns is a powerful figure for he is the self-realized man of the later Western
World, all the more admirable for his ability to question and challenge his
Master, and not merely be servile. His banter with Plog, in a tavern, about
marriage and love is both very funny and quite profound, again proving Bergman
is not only a master of the visual elements of film, but its underlying written
infrastructure. Block is a noble figure, who despite his weaknesses and folly,
achieves what he set out to do- a significant act of selfnessness, after much
passive selfishness in his inner quest. Jof is also a positive character who,
while weak and sniveling, can also see beyond what others miss, and that he and
his family survive, makes him the best part of the human spirit, emblemic of
Man’s will to go on in the face of great adversity. The very fact that Death,
himself, needs to trick the knight in order to win the game of chess, and does
so in the very underhanded way of using the knight’s confessional moment to win,
speaks volumes for Bergman’s inner optimism, despite what most myopic critics
feel. If even Death must resort to base human trickery to succeed in his mission,
then the human that can transcend such base impulses, and not fall prey to them
in others, must truly be the ideal for which we all strive, for he can even
defeat Death, who seems to be far less frightening, for even he admits he knows
nothing of higher ideas. He is merely a force of nature, not a sentient thing.
Whether or not God exists is simply a query even Death cannot answer, nor does
it concern him in the least.
The acting is uniformly excellent. Sydow is
utterly transparent as Block. We see every cranny of doubt and belief written on
his face. Poppe, as Jof, shows what Roberto Benigni might be like, if he had a
dram of depth, Ekerot's Death is frightening only in his pomp and banality, but
Bjornstrand gives a truly great performance in the
most difficult of the roles- treading between comedy and drama, realism and
absurdism, as the squire who seems to be the wisest of all the characters. While
this film was made at the height of the early Cold War, and many early reviewers
took the Plague as an allegory for nuclear war, the film is far more than a
simplistic political screed. At 96 minutes it also is not tool long that it
batters the viewer with its message, nor too short that it slips quickly by.
This film proves why black and white is still a vital tool in filmmaking. Had it
been shot in color its dreamy quality would be rent, for shadows and depth are
far easier to portray in black and white, and are far more suggestive of
moodiness and inner turmoil. One problem is that the DVD version of the film I
have, from The Criterion Collection, errs in allowing the black and white
English words to be used, rather than colorizing them for clearer and speedier
reading, thus detracting from the visual cornucopia onscreen. This is why
watching the film, a second time, with or without comments, is recommended, for
many visual subtleties are revealed that are lost in a first viewing’s necessity
to read the dialogue
All in all, it’s little wonder why
speed-addicted, and Lowest Common Denominator afflicted American viewers have
never taken to films like this, of such high quality. Yes, the writing is spare,
but it is not meant to be realistic, and some of the imagery, and acting is
straight out of silent German Expressionism, which only reinforces the
revery-like feel of the film. And while Americans are noted for cherishing their
dreams as hopes, how few ever recall their dreams as theater?