Seal of Approval

What I’ve Been Watching: The Seventh Seal (1957).

Who’s Responsible: Ingmar Bergman (writer-director), Max von Sydow, Gunnar Björnstrand, and Bengt Ekerot (stars).

Why I Watched It: Remedial viewing for Madame BOF.

Seen It Before? Many times.

Likelihood of Seeing It Again (1-10): 10.

Likelihood the Guys Will Rib Me for Watching It (1-10): 1.

Totally Subjective BOF Rating (1-10): 10.

And? It is well beyond the scope of this post to do justice to Bergman in general and this film in particular, but I will offer a few of my trademark “cinematic musings” from when my Mom and I, both long-time Bergman fans, introduced my wife to it. Unlike with my other favorite foreign-language directors, Akira Kurosawa and François Truffaut, I don’t have a single favorite Bergman film, but if I did, this might be it. I was delighted to find that the laserdisc had an audio commentary by Peter Cowie, whose critical biography of Bergman was one of the two texts we used in the “Bergman and Hitchcock” course I took in college (along with Donald Spoto’s splendid Hitchcock bio, The Dark Side of Genius).

In addition to his five marriages, Bergman was romantically involved with many of his leading ladies (à la Charlie Chaplin and Woody Allen), including Liv Ullmann, Ingrid (no relation) Bergman, Harriet Andersson, and this film’s Bibi (no relation) Andersson. Co-star Gunnel Lindblom was also a Bergman regular, as were male leads von Sydow and Björnstrand, who between them appeared in a total of two dozen of his films, six of them together. Key members of Bergman’s cinematic repertory company, they each took roles of varying sizes during the peak of his career, and in that respect, the two resembled Kurosawa’s contemporaneous mainstays, the great Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura.

If you haven’t already seen The Seventh Seal by now, you should be doing that instead of reading this, but just to recap, the film is set in the Middle Ages as knight Antonius Block (von Sydow) and his squire, Jöns (Björnstrand), return home to Sweden after ten years in the Crusades. They find it ravaged by the Black Plague and attendant religious hysteria, which manifests itself in a procession of self-flagellating penitents and the burning of an apparently harmless girl (Maud Hansson) accused of witchcraft. Raval (Bertil Anderberg), a seminarian who steals from the dead and attempts to rape a mute servant girl (Lindblom), is one of the hypocrites who serve as Bergman’s answer to his harsh religious upbringing.

But there is still hope, embodied by the family at the heart of a traveling theatrical troupe: Jof (Nils Poppe), a juggler who sees visions; his wife, Mia (Andersson); and their toddler, Mikael (Tommy Karlsson). Block and Jöns fall in with this good-natured crew, and their innocence helps to lighten Block’s world-weariness, especially during an idyllic al fresco meal of wild strawberries and milk. Speaking of which, this came smack dab in between Smiles of a Summer Night (musicalized by Stephen Sondheim as A Little Night Music and spoofed by Allen as A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy) and Wild Strawberries, both shot for Bergman—as was The Seventh Seal—by Gunnar Fischer, who died on June 11 at 100.

To say that Death stalks the land is no mere figure of speech, for when they first hit the beach, looking like nothing so much as two pieces of jetsam, the Crusaders meet up with the Reaper himself (Ekerot). Knowing Death to be an enthusiastic chess player, Block challenges him to a game, with the agreement that he will remain alive as long as their match continues. It’s hard for those of us who weren’t yet born to imagine the power that these scenes (affectionately lampooned in The Dove, where a character plays badminton with Death, and in über-Bergman-fan Allen’s Love and Death), or those of the penitents, which helped inspire Monty Python and the Holy Grail, had on the film’s original release.

Jof and Maria’s colleague, Skat (Erik Strandmark), stirs up trouble by stealing Lisa (Inga Gill), the wife of blacksmith Plog (Åke Fridell). Learning that Jof is also an actor, Raval whips up the patrons of a local tavern against him, but Jöns intervenes, rescuing Jof as he had Lindblom (who thereafter remains at his side), this time making good on his threat to brand Raval’s face. When he senses Lisa’s affections beginning to turn back toward her husband, Skat fakes suicide to escape Plog’s wrath, but the joke is on him, for as he hides in a tree, Death calmly saws it down, sending Skat to his doom; in an unscripted moment, a squirrel suddenly leaped up on the freshly-cut trunk and began nibbling at the sawdust!

A decade of crusading has understandably left Block questioning the faith that sent him there (at Raval’s behest, no less), and his anguish at God’s silence forms the template for many a Bergman film to come. As Peter Cowie writes in his liner notes, “His characters manage to overcome the fear of Death, rather than the fact of Death, and if, as the knight discovers, one can achieve even a single gesture of goodwill, then the long struggle of life will be justified.” Block’s determination to make that gesture by helping Jof and Mia escape from Death forms the moral center of The Seventh Seal, a film whose rich images, potent performances, and thought-provoking script will endure as long as cinema itself.

“And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour.” –Revelation 8:1