I love The Seventh Seal: I saw it for a class my first semester of college and promptly made all of my family and friends within reach watch it. I would buy it on DVD, if I had any idea which translation Criterion used. (When it existed on tape, there were two versions, one of which was much, much better than the other. The names "Jof" and "Mia" should not be translated as "Joseph" and "Mary," for God's sake.) Of the rest, I've only managed to see Wild Strawberries, which I did not instinctively love, but which I did recognize as very good, and The Devil's Eye, which was decidedly weird, and therefore I remember it fondly.* I think either The Magician or Winter Light was next up on the list, but that was seven years ago. Clearly, it's mythological time to watch another.
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I love The Seventh Seal: I saw it for a class my first semester of college and promptly made all of my family and friends within reach watch it. I would buy it on DVD, if I had any idea which translation Criterion used. (When it existed on tape, there were two versions, one of which was much, much better than the other. The names "Jof" and "Mia" should not be translated as "Joseph" and "Mary," for God's sake.) Of the rest, I've only managed to see Wild Strawberries, which I did not instinctively love, but which I did recognize as very good, and The Devil's Eye, which was decidedly weird, and therefore I remember it fondly.* I think either The Magician or Winter Light was next up on the list, but that was seven years ago. Clearly, it's mythological time to watch another.
*I don't pretend to remember all the plot details, but the overwhelming impression was of a sex farce with metaphysics. Proverbially, "the chastity of a maiden is a sty in the devil's eye," and this particular sty is a minister's daughter in modern-day Sweden who has not yet had sex with her fiancé. The devil promptly dispatches the damned soul of Don Juan to seduce her, but what bowled over the ladies in seventeenth-century Spain does not work so well in Sweden in the 1960's: and the girl is both more and less innocent than she appeared. Meanwhile, Don Juan's servant is smitten with the minister's wife, who is tired of being patient and respectable after years of marriage to the same abstracted, unworldly man, and the minister himself is having a crisis of faith, exemplified by his envy of the vicarage's former occupant who was so holy, they say, he once locked a demon in his cupboard and wouldn't let it out until it repented. It's the kind of comedy where the potential for real hurt waits around the next screwball twist, and it is on these terms that the characters all discuss love. And much of it is, in fact, quite funny.