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But then again, the earth, and all things in it, had never seemed familiar or sane to her
Otherwise known as a massively overdue post on The Seventh Seal (1957), which it has now been almost exactly a month since I've seen, but I promise it means that a post on Fanny and Alexander is coming soon. Why am I always inspired to the wrong kind of creativity right before a deadline?
Anything I write about The Seventh Seal feels slightly like a cheat, since the film provided the impetus for my first all-nighter in college* and I have buttonholed friends about it ever since. But I still find it significant that while the story is filled with people either desperately hunting for certainties of the supernatural or convinced that they possess them already—or scornfully rejecting the idea of such a search, which is still a reaction—the only person to receive an unambiguous sign is the one who isn't looking for any, the player Jof (Nils Poppe). Three times he sees wonders or terrors, the Holy Virgin helping her Child to take his first steps, Death at his chess-game with the knight Antonius Block (Max von Sydow), the newly dead being danced away "towards the dark lands," and each time they are real. There is a clear explanation, within the framework of the film's questioning. "One day," the knight whispers to his confessor Death, "they will have to stand at the last moment of life and look toward the darkness . . . In our fear we make an image, and that image we call God." Out of fear, we populate the emptiness with gods and devils in hopes that one of them will save us. The plague only heightens the urgency. Pilgrims scourge themselves to apocalyptic sermons and their terrifying chant of the Dies Irae, church frescoes depict the frenzies of the dying and the Dance of Death, a young scapegoat is burned as a witch and those who rob the dead were once priests and professors; the world is mad and terrified. But all of Jof's fears are for the safety of his family, not the state of his immortal soul; their faith is founded in small immanences, the warmth of sunlight, a bowl of strawberries, a drink of milk. They love. And so unclouded by fear, without even thinking about it, Jof sees what is.
But I love also that while Jof is an archetypal holy fool, he is not wholly an innocent—he is a traveling player, which means that while he may be sweet and visionary, an adoring father and a delighted husband and immensely talented at tumbling, he's also a bit of a liar and not as steady as he might be. It is with unquestionable affection, but also some exasperation, that his wife Mia (Bibi Andersson) listens to his latest vision:
"You don't believe me! But it was real, I tell you, not the kind of reality you see every day, but a different kind."
"Perhaps it was the kind of reality you told us about when you saw the Devil painting our wagon wheels red, using his tail as a brush."
"Why must you keep bringing that up?"
"And then you discovered that you had red paint under your nails."
". . . I did it just so you would believe in my other visions. The real ones. The ones I didn't make up."
"You have to keep your visions under control. Otherwise people will think you're a half-wit, which you're not—at least not yet."
"I didn't ask to have visions! I can't help it if voices speak to me, if the Holy Virgin appears before me, and angels and devils like my company!"
—and if his unasked-for visions are what ultimately saves his family, he's still the one who unwittingly endangered them in the first place. Metaphysically, they are under Death's shadow because they have been traveling with Antonius Block ("When we meet again, you and your companions' time will be up"), but in practical, contagious terms, Jof should have thought twice before snatching a plague-looted bracelet and then presenting it to his wife as though he'd bought it for her. But this is more interesting than if the film divided up death and life between the deserving and the undeserving. The world is capricious: other characters commit crimes, or perform acts of kindness, and die all the same; Death will come round for everyone in the end. ("Are there no exceptions for actors?"—"Not in your case.") And such a Death! Bengt Ekerot's is my favorite personification, even past the Discworld's and the Princess of Jean Cocteau's Orphée (1950). He is omnipresent in The Seventh Seal and almost always misrepresented: "Death stands right behind you," a hellfire-and-brimstone priest intones to a frightened crowd. "I can see how his crown gleams in the sun. His scythe flashes as he raises it above your heads," a description that is first of all untrue, because he is nowhere to be seen, and secondly misleading, because we have already met Death and he is hardly this cruel king of the world. He's a wry, low-key, dispassionate presence, black-cowled as a monk, white-faced as a clown, who enjoys a game of chess (and is not above cheating) and knows his way around a frame saw and is nevertheless not human; he is instantly recognizable and he never feels familiar. And I have never been quite sure that he does not know very well what Antonius Block has done—knocking the chess pieces over with a clumsy furl of his cloak, a momentary distraction as Jof and Mia make their escape with their young son Mikael—and still allows it, because all the knight has wanted out of his brief reprieve from death was the chance to do something meaningful with his life. "Nothing escapes me. No one escapes me." He is not an unkind Death; he simply is.
I feel that I should have more to say about Antonius Block, who after all is clever enough to challenge Death to a game of chess and wise enough to know that it is not the winning that matters, but it seems to be the people he draws into his mythic orbit that take my attention. I was a little surprised to learn recently that of all the characters in the film, the one Ingmar Bergman most identified with was the sardonic squire Jöns (Gunnar Björnstrand), since I would have pegged Jof as the artist figure any day; but I suppose that Jöns is the character who interests me the most after the player and Death, because he's more brutally practical than his master and suffers none of the torments of doubt or faith or philosophy that assail Antonius Block, and yet he's the one whose humanity is surprising even to himself when it surfaces. The knight is still trying to demand answers from the dying child who believes that the Devil will save her from the earthly flame, and Jöns is so sickened with fury and helplessness that he can no longer watch. "You don't answer my question. Who watches over that child? The angels, or God, or the Devil, or only the emptiness? Emptiness, my lord . . . Emptiness under the moon!" His cynicism is corrosive. The hollowness of the symbols of religion grate more rawly on him than any other character, but he finds no particular comfort in his fellow mortals, either; he denies not only the institutions of the Church, but any impulses of human decency, or perhaps he just likes to hear himself talk. And when finally confronted with Death, his last words are not the nihilistic mock-prayer that he has muttered in rebellious counterpoint to Antonius Block's final plea for revelation, but a perversely affirmative reminder of "the immense triumph of this last minute when you can still roll your eyes and move your toes" and shut up, but only under protest. In another kind of film, I think, his atheism would have been shown to be mistaken and the knight's anguished, irresolvable faith proved right in the end. But here there are no answers: there is only Death, and he has no secrets to tell.** Silhouettes against a clearing sky. Visions and dreams.
Du med dina syner och drömmar.
*Technically it was a paper about Dante's Inferno and Goethe's Faust and the recurring theme of searching for knowledge beyond the bounds of the mortal world, but mostly it was an excuse to write about The Seventh Seal. I think we were supposed to produce seven to ten pages. I wrote about fourteen to twenty. The professor of the class eventually declared that he would stop reading any pages I wrote over the specified maximum. I learned to fool around with spacing and margins.
**Partly for the backdrop of the Black Death, partly for the enigmatic nature of the supernatural and its atmosphere of a morality play, I have a wholly unjustified association of The Seventh Seal with Tanith Lee's "Malice in Saffron," the middle novella in The Book of the Damned (1988). I keep thinking there must be some way I could someday teach a course on both of them, although I suspect I'm in the wrong field for it.
Anything I write about The Seventh Seal feels slightly like a cheat, since the film provided the impetus for my first all-nighter in college* and I have buttonholed friends about it ever since. But I still find it significant that while the story is filled with people either desperately hunting for certainties of the supernatural or convinced that they possess them already—or scornfully rejecting the idea of such a search, which is still a reaction—the only person to receive an unambiguous sign is the one who isn't looking for any, the player Jof (Nils Poppe). Three times he sees wonders or terrors, the Holy Virgin helping her Child to take his first steps, Death at his chess-game with the knight Antonius Block (Max von Sydow), the newly dead being danced away "towards the dark lands," and each time they are real. There is a clear explanation, within the framework of the film's questioning. "One day," the knight whispers to his confessor Death, "they will have to stand at the last moment of life and look toward the darkness . . . In our fear we make an image, and that image we call God." Out of fear, we populate the emptiness with gods and devils in hopes that one of them will save us. The plague only heightens the urgency. Pilgrims scourge themselves to apocalyptic sermons and their terrifying chant of the Dies Irae, church frescoes depict the frenzies of the dying and the Dance of Death, a young scapegoat is burned as a witch and those who rob the dead were once priests and professors; the world is mad and terrified. But all of Jof's fears are for the safety of his family, not the state of his immortal soul; their faith is founded in small immanences, the warmth of sunlight, a bowl of strawberries, a drink of milk. They love. And so unclouded by fear, without even thinking about it, Jof sees what is.
But I love also that while Jof is an archetypal holy fool, he is not wholly an innocent—he is a traveling player, which means that while he may be sweet and visionary, an adoring father and a delighted husband and immensely talented at tumbling, he's also a bit of a liar and not as steady as he might be. It is with unquestionable affection, but also some exasperation, that his wife Mia (Bibi Andersson) listens to his latest vision:
"You don't believe me! But it was real, I tell you, not the kind of reality you see every day, but a different kind."
"Perhaps it was the kind of reality you told us about when you saw the Devil painting our wagon wheels red, using his tail as a brush."
"Why must you keep bringing that up?"
"And then you discovered that you had red paint under your nails."
". . . I did it just so you would believe in my other visions. The real ones. The ones I didn't make up."
"You have to keep your visions under control. Otherwise people will think you're a half-wit, which you're not—at least not yet."
"I didn't ask to have visions! I can't help it if voices speak to me, if the Holy Virgin appears before me, and angels and devils like my company!"
—and if his unasked-for visions are what ultimately saves his family, he's still the one who unwittingly endangered them in the first place. Metaphysically, they are under Death's shadow because they have been traveling with Antonius Block ("When we meet again, you and your companions' time will be up"), but in practical, contagious terms, Jof should have thought twice before snatching a plague-looted bracelet and then presenting it to his wife as though he'd bought it for her. But this is more interesting than if the film divided up death and life between the deserving and the undeserving. The world is capricious: other characters commit crimes, or perform acts of kindness, and die all the same; Death will come round for everyone in the end. ("Are there no exceptions for actors?"—"Not in your case.") And such a Death! Bengt Ekerot's is my favorite personification, even past the Discworld's and the Princess of Jean Cocteau's Orphée (1950). He is omnipresent in The Seventh Seal and almost always misrepresented: "Death stands right behind you," a hellfire-and-brimstone priest intones to a frightened crowd. "I can see how his crown gleams in the sun. His scythe flashes as he raises it above your heads," a description that is first of all untrue, because he is nowhere to be seen, and secondly misleading, because we have already met Death and he is hardly this cruel king of the world. He's a wry, low-key, dispassionate presence, black-cowled as a monk, white-faced as a clown, who enjoys a game of chess (and is not above cheating) and knows his way around a frame saw and is nevertheless not human; he is instantly recognizable and he never feels familiar. And I have never been quite sure that he does not know very well what Antonius Block has done—knocking the chess pieces over with a clumsy furl of his cloak, a momentary distraction as Jof and Mia make their escape with their young son Mikael—and still allows it, because all the knight has wanted out of his brief reprieve from death was the chance to do something meaningful with his life. "Nothing escapes me. No one escapes me." He is not an unkind Death; he simply is.
I feel that I should have more to say about Antonius Block, who after all is clever enough to challenge Death to a game of chess and wise enough to know that it is not the winning that matters, but it seems to be the people he draws into his mythic orbit that take my attention. I was a little surprised to learn recently that of all the characters in the film, the one Ingmar Bergman most identified with was the sardonic squire Jöns (Gunnar Björnstrand), since I would have pegged Jof as the artist figure any day; but I suppose that Jöns is the character who interests me the most after the player and Death, because he's more brutally practical than his master and suffers none of the torments of doubt or faith or philosophy that assail Antonius Block, and yet he's the one whose humanity is surprising even to himself when it surfaces. The knight is still trying to demand answers from the dying child who believes that the Devil will save her from the earthly flame, and Jöns is so sickened with fury and helplessness that he can no longer watch. "You don't answer my question. Who watches over that child? The angels, or God, or the Devil, or only the emptiness? Emptiness, my lord . . . Emptiness under the moon!" His cynicism is corrosive. The hollowness of the symbols of religion grate more rawly on him than any other character, but he finds no particular comfort in his fellow mortals, either; he denies not only the institutions of the Church, but any impulses of human decency, or perhaps he just likes to hear himself talk. And when finally confronted with Death, his last words are not the nihilistic mock-prayer that he has muttered in rebellious counterpoint to Antonius Block's final plea for revelation, but a perversely affirmative reminder of "the immense triumph of this last minute when you can still roll your eyes and move your toes" and shut up, but only under protest. In another kind of film, I think, his atheism would have been shown to be mistaken and the knight's anguished, irresolvable faith proved right in the end. But here there are no answers: there is only Death, and he has no secrets to tell.** Silhouettes against a clearing sky. Visions and dreams.
Du med dina syner och drömmar.
*Technically it was a paper about Dante's Inferno and Goethe's Faust and the recurring theme of searching for knowledge beyond the bounds of the mortal world, but mostly it was an excuse to write about The Seventh Seal. I think we were supposed to produce seven to ten pages. I wrote about fourteen to twenty. The professor of the class eventually declared that he would stop reading any pages I wrote over the specified maximum. I learned to fool around with spacing and margins.
**Partly for the backdrop of the Black Death, partly for the enigmatic nature of the supernatural and its atmosphere of a morality play, I have a wholly unjustified association of The Seventh Seal with Tanith Lee's "Malice in Saffron," the middle novella in The Book of the Damned (1988). I keep thinking there must be some way I could someday teach a course on both of them, although I suspect I'm in the wrong field for it.
no subject
The Seventh Seal stands alone. There's nothing else like it. It's certainly not typical of Bergman. There's something essential about it. It's impersonal and mythic. It's as if it had to be made- as if its true author were Anon.
no subject
Yes. It's like one of those paintings or ballads the knight has heard.