Det sjunde inseglet

Ingmar Bergman (1957)

Trying to write about The Seventh Seal is especially difficult.  I can’t do justice to the film – can’t do more than jot down a few thoughts about it.   It’s a work on a huge scale.  I feel that a note of appreciation somehow needs to be small in order to respect that stature.

This is one of the best films that I’ve seen – perhaps the best.  As far as I know, there isn’t another like it:  The Virgin Spring is its nearest relative in realising a medieval world far removed from the present day yet sufficiently connected to persisting human preoccupations to be thoroughly and powerfully believable.  Bergman developed the screenplay from his stage play Wood Painting (Trämålning):  The Seventh Seal is both essentially cinematic and intensely theatrical.  There are so many memorable elements.  The seascape, an epic visualisation of ‘time not our time’, is the setting for the grimly amusing chess game between Death and the knight, Antonius Block.  As Block, recently returned from the Crusades, Max von Sydow is truly iconic.  He looks to be carved – perhaps from wood (recalling the title of the source material), perhaps, like the chess pieces, from ivory.  On dry land, the Sweden to which Block has returned is being ravaged by plague.  Bergman and his cinematographer Gunnar Fischer create a succession of images which illustrate bestial vitality and post-mortem rot.  Some of these images are shocking, like the fully-dressed corpse the knight’s squire, Jons, comes upon.   As the atheistic Jons, Gunnar Björnstrand supplies a phenomenally witty commentary on the squalid life and pervasive death through which he and the knight travel.  Block and Jons, some of whose verbal exchanges are genuinely funny, are an entirely complementary twosome.  They represent opposing attitudes to life – the squire is an Everyman sceptic, his master is heroic and a believer (or determined to be a believer).  They are also both fully human.  It’s also the human ordinariness of Bengt Ekerot’s features that, in combination with the nerveless suavity of his voice, makes his black-cloaked, white-faced Death such a disturbing figure

The Seventh Seal is famous for its description of the ubiquitous irresistibility of death and (like several subsequent Bergman films) the silence of God yet the very dominance of these elements heightens your appreciation of the sights and sounds of everyday life in the film.  The tonal range of these is considerable.   There’s the riotous, dissonant soundtrack of the world-out-of-joint folk song performed by the travelling actors (‘mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles’ proceed from their lips).   There’s also the beautiful, quiet interlude in which Block enjoys a simple outdoor meal with the actors Jof (Nils Poppe) and Mia (Bibi Andersson) and their infant son Mikael (Tommy Karlsson):  the knight expresses his awareness that he will treasure this transient calm and happiness and the viewer shares his gratitude.  It’s one of the loveliest scenes that I know.   Bergman’s juxtaposition of death and life in the conclusion to the film is masterly – not only in the great dance of death but in the ambiguous ending.  Jof, a simple man yet a religious visionary, Mia and Mikael survive.  The family walks off into the sunrise.  Yet they may be heading in the same direction that the plague is travelling.

Ingmar Bergman made clear how frightened of death he was when he made the film and, in spite of its brilliant theatricality, The Seventh Seal doesn’t disguise that fear.  It’s interesting to compare Bergman’s candour with the way in which his admirer Woody Allen has repeatedly rendered fear of death – entertainingly, but with an awareness that to present the fear comically is ultimately an evasion if you’re truly scared of death (which many people claim not to be).   In The Seventh Seal, the unanswerableness of death is reflected by thunder and lightning in apocalyptic skies, by the accompaniment of the Dies Irae, by the great emptiness of the shoreline, by the skulls decorating the landscape.  These elements are melodramatic but, for Bergman, nothing less will serve his thematic purpose and their cumulative effect is unique.  The characters in the film live in the particular shadow of death through a terrible plague but their awareness of their eventual fate persists through different times and places.  Bergman is uncompromising too in his presentation of human cruelty and its effects – whether that cruelty consists of making fun of someone (as when Jof, in an inn, is made to imitate a dancing bear and flames lap round him) or killing them (the burning of a witch).

Although I knew about Bergman’s preceding films, I hadn’t realised, until I listened to Ian Christie’s introduction for this BFI screening in December 2013, how startlingly he changed tack and style with The Seventh Seal.   (And, although it’s very obvious, it hadn’t occurred to me before how much Interiors, the homage to Bergman which represented a comparable shift in Woody Allen’s work, specifically recognises The Seventh Seal with its seaside setting.)   Christie’s introduction was a reminder too that the making of the film was a wonder in itself.   The chess game and the dance of death were shot at Hovs Hallar, a rocky beach area in north-western Scania.  Otherwise, the medieval world was recreated in a small studio overlooked by a 1950s apartment block.

2 December 2013