Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (Det sjunde inseglet, 1957) is not the first movie I was asked to think critically about. As far as I can tell, that was Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) in fifth grade and our collective critical assessment was that it was best analyzed from behind the classroom's peeling pleather couch. But I was shown The Seventh Seal in the fall of my freshman year at Brandeis as one of the final items on the syllabus of Andrew Swensen's USEM 68a "Heaven, Hell, and the Space in Between" and I loved it. I loved it instantly, the way I loved the music of Gian Carlo Menotti or the fiction of Tanith Lee. For a long time I said it might be my favorite movie, before it was maybe edged out by A Canterbury Tale (1944); even after that I returned to it and it stayed its weird, wry, humane, existentialist self. I meant to watch it last month in honor of Max von Sydow. Now I think I might have watched it in honor of the fourteenth century, which didn't deserve this terrible mashup with the twentieth it's been getting lately. If you have to fuse the two, I like Bergman's take better.
"Oh," the knight returned from the Crusades says casually as a gambit when asked how he knows that Death likes a game of chess, "I have seen it in paintings and heard it in ballads." The Seventh Seal might be one of those paintings or ballads itself—the one-act play from which Bergman elaborated it was even called A Painting on Wood (Trämålning, 1954). Its numinous images are legendary, archetypal as if its writer-director had merely turned his camera on a book of hours: the knight at his chess-game with Death between a baleful dawn and a metallic sea, a confession of doubt in a church decorated with fear, the grace of fresh milk and wild strawberries, the Dance of Death silhouetted against the storm-clearing sky. As the questioning knight Antonius Block, Max von Sydow looks as sparely carved as an icon in wood, his hair bleached white as sand against his hard-tanned face, harrowed as I have since seen other soldiers returned from other deserts, other self-serving calls to God and arms. It seems impossible that I am older now than Bengt Ekerot when he played Death on the grey shingle beach of Hovs Hallar: how can anything mortal be older than Death? His face is so dry and enigmatic in its clown-monk's white and black, it is obviously the truth, neither consoling nor cruel, when he tells the knight, "I have no secrets." Beyond the black furl of his cloak might after all be nothing, though the plague-stricken world through which he moves—collecting a ham actor here, the scapegoat of a witch there, apocalyptically cast as the crowned reaper of the world by people who have never seen him working diligently away with a frame saw—teems with metaphysical convictions, the intentions of God, the intervention of the Devil, or equally active rejections of the same. Like its presiding Death, the film gives little away; its one unambiguous glance beyond the matter of this world raises almost more questions than it answers. The half-hour of silence invoked by its introductory quotation of Revelations 8:1 lasts its runtime and beyond. But to treat it then as some austere titan of arthouse cinema or a stereoscope of medieval pageantry would miss its serious strangeness, which more than half a century of allusions, parodies, and instant canonicity has not yet worn off. The past in The Seventh Seal is as messy as it is iconic; it's full of sweat and grime and sex and folk songs and hypocrisy and gentleness and fart jokes. In the afternoon-hot courtyard of an inn, a pair of traveling players perform a whimsical song of the Devil while the third member of their company steals off behind the backcloth for a preposterously overheated tryst with an inviting local wife. The next minute all lusts and diversions are upstaged by a procession of flagellants in a pest-fire smoke of incense, as terrifying with their cries and whip-snaps and crowns of thorns as the end of the world truly come in the ashes and judgment of the Dies Irae. The townsfolk fall and cross themselves; a priest delivers himself of a sermon of wrath that sounds more like the venom of a dying man. The chant rises wearily and terribly again. It is a scene of appalling awe and no sooner has its shadow faded from the outskirts of the town than on blunders the blacksmith as if we'd just watched his wife lead her lover off behind the bushes, doleful as the horned cuckold of the interrupted play. Life goes on as if it isn't stopping all the time. The film is similarly anything but static or somber. Cruelty chases comedy chases philosophy until they all tangle up into things that simply happen, the world in its indivisible contradiction. The chess-game is the fulcrum of a human soul and both the knight and Death cheat like blazes. It's a breathtaking piece of art, but on some level it amazes me that The Seventh Seal became the calling card of world cinema rather than a beloved cult movie. Then again, I have never questioned how much I love the film, considering how alien its world is to me.
I'm not talking about the fourteenth century. I mean Bergman's Christian modernity with its anguish of faith and doubt. "Faith is a torment," Antonius Block confides to Bibi Andersson's Mia as they sit together in the warm evening light of the summer hillside beneath the players' caravan, her husband's music playing quietly behind their shoulders. "It is like loving someone who is out there in the darkness but never appears, no matter how loudly you call." To his black-cowled confessor Death, he mused even more bitterly, "In our fear, we make an image, and that image we call God." And yet he has not ceased to believe, even after ten disillusioning years in the Holy Land; he's caught under a terrible burden of proof, unable to accept either the supposed presence or the apparent absence of God without evidence either way. "I want knowledge," he repeats fiercely, a doubting credo. "Not faith, not supposition, but knowledge." I understand the urgency of his asking, cut adrift in a world where God's name is everywhere and signs of his justice and protection and lovingkindness so thin on the ground; I too have read Sutzkever's "Unter dayne vayse shtern." (?און איך זוך: װוּ ביסטו, װוּ) I don't feel it. In that I am more in tune with Gunnar Björnstrand's Jöns, the scarred, stubbled squire who follows his master with the wariness of an especially skeptical Sancho Panza with an especially angsting Don Quixote. "Our crusade," he declares to the church painter whose latest commission foregrounds the plague-swelled retinue of the Dance of Death, "was so stupid that only a true idealist could have thought it up." If it left his master doubting God, it left the squire in no doubt of humanity, its folly, its cupidity, its endless gullibility, and most of all its aloneness in a world overseen not by God or even the Devil but the horror of "emptiness under the moon." His self-portrait is a caricatured anti-Everyman, "meaningless to Heaven and of no interest to Hell." At its best, his cynicism gives him a caustic efficiency—if no one is coming to save us, we are damn well obliged to save one another as we can—but when it corrodes past atheism into nihilism it can get harder to take, not to mention kind of misogynist. Even if it's mostly talk, I still can't follow it down. I can't even identify entirely with Nils Poppe's Jof, whom I loved as deeply and immediately as his movie—second-sighted liar, light-fingered juggler, protesting truthfully to his wife after a brutal humiliation, "I swear to you that I didn't say a word about angels!" In a film in which religious confidence is almost universally regarded as misguided at best and at worst malevolent, his visions are as crystalline as the camera, his faith as instinctive and secure as the hands of the naked Christ child in the "small brown hands" of the Virgin as she teaches her Son to walk. Jöns rejects, Antonius doubts, but Jof doesn't even have to think about it: there's the barefoot Madonna, there's chessmaster Death, there are all the high and low company whom Death claimed in the knight's castle in one final check and mate, not allegorical devices but factual as the grass they tread, the chess pieces they move, the stormy sky under which they dance away. There is Mia, radiant in the sea-wind with their young son Mikael in her arms, the old horse's bridle under his hand and the wagon's canvas flapping behind them and the sunlit road before them. There is the world. In Gunnar Fischer's illuminated cinematography, it's all the same. It's a trick as much of theater as metaphysics, but it means that The Seventh Seal bears out the truth of Jof's "reality . . . not the reality you see, but a different kind," the reality the knight tapped into when he looked up from rummaging in his saddlebags and found a white-faced, black-cloaked man standing before him on the shore, saying matter-of-factly, "I am Death." It means that for all of the answers Antonius does not receive, there is something in this earthly space between that he might recognize as God, whose sacraments are milk and strawberries instead of wine and bread, whose face is tender and holy, not merely obscure. And that is not the world I live in yet again. Mine is not a universe oriented toward or against faith. None of the traditions in which I was raised encouraged it; my own habits of mind do not incline that way.
And it doesn't matter, because the questions the film is asking are the ones a crisis of faith or an apocalypse only throws into higher relief, the ones we ask ourselves if we're any good at all at being human: if a life is all we get, what kind of a life do we make it? Frankly, we should all be so lucky as Antonius Block, who may not get his sign from God but dies in the knowledge that he accomplished his "one meaningful deed," one compassionate act that made a difference. Or even Jöns, who goes out as he came in, irrepressibly perverse in the face of eternity. Jof dreams his son will surpass him in the juggler's art, mastering the miraculous, impossible trick of making a ball "stand absolutely still in the air." The film knows the house always wins; the ball falls, the king is toppled, nothing and no one escapes Death who has nothing to tell. So what? Here, now, time stands still: hold the moment between your hands and drink it. "And it will be an adequate sign—it will be enough for me." I know The Seventh Seal did not translate itself mysteriously off a church wall in fourteenth-century Sweden; it was shot in thirty-five low-budget days in the summer of 1956, almost entirely at the studios of Filmstaden, and most of its cast and crew have since followed den stränge herren Döden over that dark ridge, their own games done. It still doesn't feel to me like a film, or even the ghost story all film eventually turns into. It feels like a folk tradition. Twenty-one years ago, I loved it so much, I could hardly tell why; in the middle of a pestilence, I'm still figuring it out. Perhaps its steadfast championing of love over fear. Perhaps its holy fool. Perhaps its Death. I watched it on the Criterion Channel in a memorial bundle of Max von Sydow, but it's also available from Criterion on Blu-Ray/DVD if you'd like something a little more enduring. I hope Bergman was right that it is the artists who survive. This grace brought to you by my playful backers at Patreon.
"Oh," the knight returned from the Crusades says casually as a gambit when asked how he knows that Death likes a game of chess, "I have seen it in paintings and heard it in ballads." The Seventh Seal might be one of those paintings or ballads itself—the one-act play from which Bergman elaborated it was even called A Painting on Wood (Trämålning, 1954). Its numinous images are legendary, archetypal as if its writer-director had merely turned his camera on a book of hours: the knight at his chess-game with Death between a baleful dawn and a metallic sea, a confession of doubt in a church decorated with fear, the grace of fresh milk and wild strawberries, the Dance of Death silhouetted against the storm-clearing sky. As the questioning knight Antonius Block, Max von Sydow looks as sparely carved as an icon in wood, his hair bleached white as sand against his hard-tanned face, harrowed as I have since seen other soldiers returned from other deserts, other self-serving calls to God and arms. It seems impossible that I am older now than Bengt Ekerot when he played Death on the grey shingle beach of Hovs Hallar: how can anything mortal be older than Death? His face is so dry and enigmatic in its clown-monk's white and black, it is obviously the truth, neither consoling nor cruel, when he tells the knight, "I have no secrets." Beyond the black furl of his cloak might after all be nothing, though the plague-stricken world through which he moves—collecting a ham actor here, the scapegoat of a witch there, apocalyptically cast as the crowned reaper of the world by people who have never seen him working diligently away with a frame saw—teems with metaphysical convictions, the intentions of God, the intervention of the Devil, or equally active rejections of the same. Like its presiding Death, the film gives little away; its one unambiguous glance beyond the matter of this world raises almost more questions than it answers. The half-hour of silence invoked by its introductory quotation of Revelations 8:1 lasts its runtime and beyond. But to treat it then as some austere titan of arthouse cinema or a stereoscope of medieval pageantry would miss its serious strangeness, which more than half a century of allusions, parodies, and instant canonicity has not yet worn off. The past in The Seventh Seal is as messy as it is iconic; it's full of sweat and grime and sex and folk songs and hypocrisy and gentleness and fart jokes. In the afternoon-hot courtyard of an inn, a pair of traveling players perform a whimsical song of the Devil while the third member of their company steals off behind the backcloth for a preposterously overheated tryst with an inviting local wife. The next minute all lusts and diversions are upstaged by a procession of flagellants in a pest-fire smoke of incense, as terrifying with their cries and whip-snaps and crowns of thorns as the end of the world truly come in the ashes and judgment of the Dies Irae. The townsfolk fall and cross themselves; a priest delivers himself of a sermon of wrath that sounds more like the venom of a dying man. The chant rises wearily and terribly again. It is a scene of appalling awe and no sooner has its shadow faded from the outskirts of the town than on blunders the blacksmith as if we'd just watched his wife lead her lover off behind the bushes, doleful as the horned cuckold of the interrupted play. Life goes on as if it isn't stopping all the time. The film is similarly anything but static or somber. Cruelty chases comedy chases philosophy until they all tangle up into things that simply happen, the world in its indivisible contradiction. The chess-game is the fulcrum of a human soul and both the knight and Death cheat like blazes. It's a breathtaking piece of art, but on some level it amazes me that The Seventh Seal became the calling card of world cinema rather than a beloved cult movie. Then again, I have never questioned how much I love the film, considering how alien its world is to me.
I'm not talking about the fourteenth century. I mean Bergman's Christian modernity with its anguish of faith and doubt. "Faith is a torment," Antonius Block confides to Bibi Andersson's Mia as they sit together in the warm evening light of the summer hillside beneath the players' caravan, her husband's music playing quietly behind their shoulders. "It is like loving someone who is out there in the darkness but never appears, no matter how loudly you call." To his black-cowled confessor Death, he mused even more bitterly, "In our fear, we make an image, and that image we call God." And yet he has not ceased to believe, even after ten disillusioning years in the Holy Land; he's caught under a terrible burden of proof, unable to accept either the supposed presence or the apparent absence of God without evidence either way. "I want knowledge," he repeats fiercely, a doubting credo. "Not faith, not supposition, but knowledge." I understand the urgency of his asking, cut adrift in a world where God's name is everywhere and signs of his justice and protection and lovingkindness so thin on the ground; I too have read Sutzkever's "Unter dayne vayse shtern." (?און איך זוך: װוּ ביסטו, װוּ) I don't feel it. In that I am more in tune with Gunnar Björnstrand's Jöns, the scarred, stubbled squire who follows his master with the wariness of an especially skeptical Sancho Panza with an especially angsting Don Quixote. "Our crusade," he declares to the church painter whose latest commission foregrounds the plague-swelled retinue of the Dance of Death, "was so stupid that only a true idealist could have thought it up." If it left his master doubting God, it left the squire in no doubt of humanity, its folly, its cupidity, its endless gullibility, and most of all its aloneness in a world overseen not by God or even the Devil but the horror of "emptiness under the moon." His self-portrait is a caricatured anti-Everyman, "meaningless to Heaven and of no interest to Hell." At its best, his cynicism gives him a caustic efficiency—if no one is coming to save us, we are damn well obliged to save one another as we can—but when it corrodes past atheism into nihilism it can get harder to take, not to mention kind of misogynist. Even if it's mostly talk, I still can't follow it down. I can't even identify entirely with Nils Poppe's Jof, whom I loved as deeply and immediately as his movie—second-sighted liar, light-fingered juggler, protesting truthfully to his wife after a brutal humiliation, "I swear to you that I didn't say a word about angels!" In a film in which religious confidence is almost universally regarded as misguided at best and at worst malevolent, his visions are as crystalline as the camera, his faith as instinctive and secure as the hands of the naked Christ child in the "small brown hands" of the Virgin as she teaches her Son to walk. Jöns rejects, Antonius doubts, but Jof doesn't even have to think about it: there's the barefoot Madonna, there's chessmaster Death, there are all the high and low company whom Death claimed in the knight's castle in one final check and mate, not allegorical devices but factual as the grass they tread, the chess pieces they move, the stormy sky under which they dance away. There is Mia, radiant in the sea-wind with their young son Mikael in her arms, the old horse's bridle under his hand and the wagon's canvas flapping behind them and the sunlit road before them. There is the world. In Gunnar Fischer's illuminated cinematography, it's all the same. It's a trick as much of theater as metaphysics, but it means that The Seventh Seal bears out the truth of Jof's "reality . . . not the reality you see, but a different kind," the reality the knight tapped into when he looked up from rummaging in his saddlebags and found a white-faced, black-cloaked man standing before him on the shore, saying matter-of-factly, "I am Death." It means that for all of the answers Antonius does not receive, there is something in this earthly space between that he might recognize as God, whose sacraments are milk and strawberries instead of wine and bread, whose face is tender and holy, not merely obscure. And that is not the world I live in yet again. Mine is not a universe oriented toward or against faith. None of the traditions in which I was raised encouraged it; my own habits of mind do not incline that way.
And it doesn't matter, because the questions the film is asking are the ones a crisis of faith or an apocalypse only throws into higher relief, the ones we ask ourselves if we're any good at all at being human: if a life is all we get, what kind of a life do we make it? Frankly, we should all be so lucky as Antonius Block, who may not get his sign from God but dies in the knowledge that he accomplished his "one meaningful deed," one compassionate act that made a difference. Or even Jöns, who goes out as he came in, irrepressibly perverse in the face of eternity. Jof dreams his son will surpass him in the juggler's art, mastering the miraculous, impossible trick of making a ball "stand absolutely still in the air." The film knows the house always wins; the ball falls, the king is toppled, nothing and no one escapes Death who has nothing to tell. So what? Here, now, time stands still: hold the moment between your hands and drink it. "And it will be an adequate sign—it will be enough for me." I know The Seventh Seal did not translate itself mysteriously off a church wall in fourteenth-century Sweden; it was shot in thirty-five low-budget days in the summer of 1956, almost entirely at the studios of Filmstaden, and most of its cast and crew have since followed den stränge herren Döden over that dark ridge, their own games done. It still doesn't feel to me like a film, or even the ghost story all film eventually turns into. It feels like a folk tradition. Twenty-one years ago, I loved it so much, I could hardly tell why; in the middle of a pestilence, I'm still figuring it out. Perhaps its steadfast championing of love over fear. Perhaps its holy fool. Perhaps its Death. I watched it on the Criterion Channel in a memorial bundle of Max von Sydow, but it's also available from Criterion on Blu-Ray/DVD if you'd like something a little more enduring. I hope Bergman was right that it is the artists who survive. This grace brought to you by my playful backers at Patreon.
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