The Seventh Seal

Listening to some considerably lesser filmmakers than Ingmar Bergman ridicule his film The Seventh Seal has compelled me to look at it again. It was my very first Bergman film, which was shown at some parent/teacher meeting in 1972 or '73 when I was attending a Catholic school. A nun (most of my teachers were nuns, which only became a problem when we were instructed in sex education) had seen the film and had given in to its religious implications. As I learned later on, Bergman had been preoccupied with the ultimate question - the great WHY of existence - when he made the film, but he came up with the novel approach of addressing it directly rather than obliquely. Not long after he made it, however, he lost interest in the subject, even though it continued to appear in several of his subsequent films. But it was no longer a problem to be solved for him, but only a problem without ready-made solutions. (It is in this respect that I am one of those critics who found Wild Strawberries unsatisfying, since it confronts Isak Borg's imminent death momentarily, but loses its nerve, probably because Bergman loved Victor Sjöström too much to see through with his quietus. He is given an utterly unconvincing contented ending instead.)

However much Bergman may have moved on from the issues he confronts in The Seventh Seal, it is a stimulating confrontation. He didn't settle the matter, he simply let go of it. The argument (put forward by Alexander Payne in the documentary Trespassing Bergman) that the film somehow no longer "holds up" is preposterous. What he meant to say, of course, is that filmmakers no longer have the balls to confront such unwieldy subjects. Barry Levinson includes a scene in his masterpiece, Diner, in which two of his characters are in a Baltimore movie theater watching The Seventh Seal. When Death appears, Steve Guttenberg asks Tim Daly who that's supposed to be. "Death," Daly replies. "Oh, come on," Guttenberg says. "I've been to Atlantic City a thousand times and I never saw Death walking on the beach." "It's symbolic," Daly tells him.

But, of course, it's NOT symbolic at all. It isn't a symbol of Death in The Seventh Seal, walking on that stony beach, but Death personified. After the typically terse opening credits, a title appears that reads: It is the middle of the 14th century. Antonius Blok and his squire, after long years as crusaders in the Holy Land, have at last returned to their native Sweden, a land ravaged by the Black Plague.

We then hear a voiceover intoning lines from the New Testament's Book of Revelation, Chapter 8: "And when the Lamb had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour. . . . And the seven angels which had the seven trumpets prepared themselves to sound." The opening scene is justly famous, but it has contributed to an image of Bergman that he had to work long and hard to escape. At dawn, the knight and his squire are lying on a deserted beach. A figure dressed in black with a pale white face appears suddenly and startles the knight, who asks him "Who are you?" "I am Death," the man in black replies matter of factly.

Two scenes, early in the film, make Bergman's intentions explicit. Jof awakes in his wagon and tumbles out into the brilliant morning. As he practices juggling, he sees a woman and a baby walking alone together. Jof smiles ecstatically and rubs his eyes. But when he opens them again the woman and child are gone. He climbs back inside the wagon and wakes Mia, his wife.

JOF: Mia, wake up. Wake up! Mia, I've just seen something. I've got to tell you about it!
MIA: (sits up, terrified) What is it? What's happened?
JOF: Listen, I've had a vision. No, it wasn't a vision. It was real, absolutely real.
MIA: Oh, so you've had a vision again!
MIA's voice isfilled with gentle irony. JOF shakes his head and grabs her by the shoulders.
JOF: But I did see her!
MIA: Whom did you see?
JOF: The Virgin Mary.
MIA can't help being impressed by her husband's fervor. She lowers her voice.
MIA: Did you really see her?
JOF: She was so close to me that I could have touched her. She had a golden crown on her head and wore a blue gown with flowers of gold. She was barefoot and had small brown hands with which she was holding the Child and teaching Him to walk. And then she saw me watching her and she smiled at me. My eyes filled with tears and when I wiped them away, she had disappeared. And everything became so still in the sky and on the earth. Can you understand...
MIA: What an imagination you have.
JOF: 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.
MIA: 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.
JOF: (embarrassed) Why must you keep bringing that up?
MIA: And then you discovered that you had red paint under your nails.
JOF: Well, perhaps that time I made it up. (eagerly) I did it just so that you would believe in my other visions. The real ones. The ones that I didn't make up.
MIA: (severely) You have to keep your visions under control. Otherwise people will think that you're a half-wit, which you're not. At least not yet as far as I know. But, come to think of it, I'm not so sure about that.
JOF: (angry) 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.

But Jof IS a fool - the kind whose truths are mistaken for jokes. The second scene that makes Bergman's intentions somewhat more explicit is in a church where Jons encounters a man painting inside.

To the right of the entrance there is a large fresco on the wall, not quite finished. Perched on a crude scaffolding is a PAINTER wearing a red cap and paint-stained clothes. He has one brush in his mouth, while with another in his hand he outlines a small, terrified human face amidst a sea of other faces.
JONS: What is this supposed to represent?
PAINTER: The Dance of Death.
JONS: And that one is Death?
PAINTER: Yes, he dances off with all of them.
JONS: Why do you paint such nonsense?
PAINTER: I thought it would serve to remind people that they must die.
JONS: Well, it's not going to make them feel any happier.
PAINTER: Why should one always make people happy? It might not be a bad idea to scare them a little once in awhile.
JONS: Then they'll close their eyes and refuse to look at your painting.
PAINTER: Oh, they'll look. A skull is almost more interesting than a naked woman.
JONS: If you do scare them...
PAINTER: They'll think.
JONS: And if they think...
PAINTER: They'll become still more scared.
JONS: And then they'll run right into the arms of the priests.
PAINTER: That's not my business.
JONS: You're only painting your Dance of Death.
PAINTER: I'm only painting things as they are. Everyone else can do as he likes.
JONS: Just think how some people will curse you.
PAINTER: Maybe. But then I'll paint something amusing for them to look at. I have to make a living, at least until the plague takes me.

For all the talk about God and the Devil, Bergman made The Seventh Seal to directly confront his fear of death. There is a scene, shot in just one day, in which a procession of flagellants passes through a village, led by a half-crazed monk who screams at the gathering of townsfolk.

MONK: God has sentenced us to punishment. We shall all perish in the black death. You, standing there like gaping cattle, you who sit there in your glutted complacency, do you know that this may be your last hour? Death stands right behind you. I can see how his crown gleams in the sun. His scythe flashes as he raises it above your heads. Which one of you shall he strike first? You there, who stand staring like a goat, will your mouth be twisted into the last unfinished gasp before nightfall? And you, woman, who bloom with life and self-satisfaction, will you pale and become extinguished before the morning dawns? You back there, with your swollen nose and stupid grin, do you have another year left to dirty the earth with your refuse? Do you know, you insensible fools, that you shall die today or tomorrow, or the next day, because all of you have been sentenced? Do you hear what I say? Do you hear the word? You have been sentenced, sentenced!

The monk (impressively played by Anders Ek) never mentions salvation or damnation. Why bother, when Death is much more imposing and terrifying? It is as if Bergman himself stood on a stage and addressed us in the audience directly. "You back there with the swollen nose ..." If I were in the audience, perhaps I would suddenly feel self-conscious about my nose.

The film was made on a tight budget with the expert resources of Gunnar Fischer's utterly raw black-and-white imagery, P. A. Lundgren's inventively economic design, and Erik Nordgren's evocatively authentic-sounding music. Max von Sydow is imposing as Blok. Gunnar Björnstrand is marvelous as the skeptical squire, Jons. Nils Poppe probably got fed up with comparisons to Chaplin, but, for once, they are earned. Bibi Andersson is captivating as Mia. And there was no better Death than Bengt Ekerot.

I have mentioned before that fewer people are reading and being enthralled by Dante's The Divine Comedy because, since hardly anyone continues to believe in personal immortality, heaven and hell have ceased to be interesting to readers even as abstract concepts. But death continues to be a perplexing problem - a problem that needs to be faced, rather than solved. When Bergman wanted to address the problem, he refused to face it in the usual philosophical or metaphysical terms. Especially since film is - as it should be - so damned literal. People in films are given visions, but they never appear to us the way they appear to the character in the film - as visions. Some special photographic or lighting effect may give them a strangeness that signals to us that what we are seeing, through the character's eyes, isn't supposed to be taken literally. When Henry James wrote The Turn of the Screw, he clearly wanted the reader to continually wonder if the ghosts that the children's governess sees are genuine ghosts or simply figments of her - presumably sexually - overheated imagination.

But in The Seventh Seal Bergman wanted to treat his subject in an utterly unambiguous, head-on manner. So why do so many responsible people respond to the film the same way Steve Guttenberg did in Barry Levinson's Diner? Could it be because they're made uncomfortable by it? Sneering at the film doesn't diminish its power or invalidate its argument. As Philip Larkin wrote,

Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.
("Aubade")

I think Larkin (and Bergman) would be incredulous of anyone who claimed that they weren't afraid of death. I think they would both have laughed at Woody Allen's line, "I'm not afraid of death. I just don't want to be around when it happens."