whose existence he can no longer quite believe;
the cynical squire has learned to take life as it
comes, without the prop of divinity. Together they
are Everyman (and Bergman), and together they
face the questions that vexed and haunted the
Fourteenth Century and our own: In a world beset by evil, in
a world that God has seemingly deserted, in the face of cer-
tain annihilation, how does one live one’s life with value, and,
without the goodness of God, whence does that value come?
The film’s opening montage thrusts us immediately – and
nearly wordlessly – into the heart of the matter. A gorgeous
shot of a sea eagle, floating aloof, predatory, and majestic in a
storm sky; a picturesque cusp of mountainous beach; a brief
silence in heaven following the Lamb’s opening of the Seventh
Seal; and then the shingle where the knight and his squire lie
sleeping among the rocks, looking as if they’ve been tossed
up,
chess set sits on the stones by the knight’s kit. The knight tries
to pray, perhaps for his safe deliverance and return, but can-
not complete his prayer. Getting to his
feet, he awakens his squire who grouses at
him mockingly, and out of nowhere there
is
black cassock come to claim what is final-
ly and always his.
As in the Church emblems that
Bergman daydreamed over when he was a
boy, where Death and a Knight (represent-
ing Mankind) confront each other over a
chessboard, the knight seeks to delay his
doom by challenging Death to a game of
chess. Although the knight doesn’t fear
Death, he fears a death without meaning,
without the judgment of a God he can’t
quite believe in or forsake. He plays for
time – to do one last meaningful thing, and
continue his search for grace. The film is
ostensibly about this quest to do good –
about the very possibility of good in an evil
world where all but death is uncertain.
In other films that attempt allegorical effects, the symbol-
ic values of characters and events are meanings derived from
the action as it unfolds – not essences from which we start.
Bergman simply presents us with Types – Death, Spirit, Rea-
son – as if we were watching a
only later goes on to give them human dimensions. Even
those who appreciate the film’s ambitiousness may find the
opening allegory rather too portentous, and wonder whether
such blatant symbolism can sustain an entire movie.
Not content to present us with an allegory of the eternal
contest between Death and Man, Bergman quickly tries some-
thing that is in some ways even more delicate and dangerous
–and potentially just as prone to travesty. He gives us Inno-
cence in the form of a family of itinerant players, also jour-
neying through Sweden: a father called Jof or Joseph (Nils
Poppe), a mother called Mia or Mary (Bibi Andersson), and
their infant child. This grouping is clearly meant to suggest
the Holy Family (or the “holiness of the human spirit,” as
Bergman has it). But the literalness of the allegory begins to
break down here, and something more personal to make its
way in.
To begin with, Jof is scarcely a holy personage. He is an
acrobat, a singer, a performer – albeit a bad one – a charming
and persistent liar, a writer of sweet
songs, a bit of a thief, a childlike braggart, and a
seer blessed with second sight (although no one else truly
believes in his visions). In short, he is in show business. His
innocence, though sweet and real enough, is not the Inno-
cence of the Lamb of God, but the innocence of the artist,
whose childlike imagination isolates him from the
of the world of the knight and the squire – but, just as impor-
tantly and vitally, reflects the world of the knight and the
squire back to them, turning its terrors and wonders into play.
While the mask of Death that Skat, the “director” of the small
troupe of actors, wears and then hangs from a tree limb is a
symbolic reminder that death is everywhere present in the
brutal world of this film, it is also a reminder that not even
this fearsome mystery is beyond the ken of imagination.
Indeed, the entire film is an illustration of this.
Jof and Mia reflect something else that troubled Bergman
throughout his life and in this period particularly: his intellec-
tual’s isolation from other people. Of
all the characters in The Seventh Seal,
Jof and Mia are the only two who
express love for one another, the only
two who make a family. Everyone
else is alone; after ten years’ separa-
tion, even the knight and his wife,
when they finally meet again, are
strangers to each other. Although
there is something infantile about
Jof’s love for Mia – closer to the love
of a child for his mother than an erot-
ic attachment – it is an attachment (or
an acceptance) that Bergman explic-
itly says he hungered for.
Allegory has an inner movement
of its own, dictated by the dialectic of
its ideas. It can work itself out like a
straightforward argument, as in Pil -
grim’s Progress, or it can cloak its
meanings in mystery, like The Pearl.
The Seventh Seal is somewhere between. Bergman has clear-
ly invested his symbolic characters with fundamental aspects
of his own personality. But he has set them on a broad public
highway that leads past tableaux of the downfall of civiliza-
tion and culture, through a wasteland of medieval horrors that
have very modern parallels. The ghastly fascistic parade of
flagellants, which interrupts the players’ whimsical play about
death and suffering with the terrible reality of death and suf-
fering, the senseless burning of the girl witch, who after tor-
ture can only, and rightly, see the devil right beside us, are in
the film because they must be in the film – the allegory of
good and evil demands it. Bergman does all he can to make
these scenes memorable, including the superb lighting and
photography and the marvelous set design. But there remains
a formality in them that sets them off as separate episodes,
like frames in a diorama, without the naturalistic probability
of realistic narrative. This is not a complaint, but an observa-
tion. Allegory is the route Bergman chose, and episode is how
allegory works itself out.
Robin Wood notwithstanding, there are many scenes in
The Seventh Seal where the strength of Bergman’s personal
