Sony G90 manual From Art to Cult, N a T H a N V a L I N

From Art to Cult

. . . . . . . . .

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,

showy, 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

1 Robin Wood, Ingmar Bergman (Praeger,

1970). [Hereafter, Wood.]

J O N A T H A N V A L I N 2 Wood, p. 87.