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."

Prince Andrei's Dream

Over the past several weeks, I have had the immense pleasure (tinged with some disappointment) of seeing once again the twenty-episode BBC adaptation of Tolstoy's War and Peace, made in 1972. I first watched the programmes, one episode per day, on summer afternoons in 1974, and it is one of my most cherished memories of television viewing. I was 16 and had yet to read Tolstoy's novel. Since I didn't know the novel's plot, nor how it would end, every new episode held me in suspense until the next one arrived. When it finally did arrive, I felt exactly as I did upon finally reading the novel in 1979 - not that it was too long, but that it was too short, so vivid and real were Tolstoy's characters - at least as real to me as people I had actually met.

The BBC production cast the young Anthony Hopkins as Pierre, Alan Dobie as Prince Andrei, and a large cast of marvelous supporting actors. (Morag Hood, who was cast as Natasha, bore the unenviable burden of having to embody Natasha Rostova, and doesn't quite pull it off.) But the staging and costumes and the patience of the script (by Jack Pulman) provides plenty of room for the viewer to settle into the splendor of Tolstoy's tale. And it actually spares us those - to my mind - superfluous history lessons that Tolstoy occasionally indulges in once Napoleon enters the story. 

Of course, everyone has their own favorite scenes, like Prince Andrei's sight of the old oak tree stubbornly resisting the tumult of spring just before he meets Natasha, or the great battle set-pieces that Tolstoy handles so brilliantly, like Austerlitz and Borodino. One of my own favorite scenes, that I wrote about in a blog post from 2014 (see Look to the Sky), involves Andrei in a near-death experience at Austerlitz.

But much later in the novel, Andrei is mortally wounded at the battle of Borodino, and finds himself, half-conscious, caught up in the evacuation of Moscow. Also among the evacuees is Natasha, who was engaged to Andrei before it was called off. Natasha does her best to help Andrei convalesce, until it becomes clear that his condition is hopeless and he dies in one of the most moving scenes ever written:

He dreamed that he was lying in the room he really was in, but that he was quite well and unwounded. Many various, indifferent, and insignificant people appeared before him. He talked to them and discussed something trivial. They were preparing to go away somewhere. Prince Andrei dimly realized that all this was trivial and that he had more important cares, but he continued to speak, surprising them by empty witticisms. Gradually, unnoticed, all these persons began to disappear and a single question, that of the closed door, superseded all else. He rose and went to the door to bolt and lock it. Everything depended on whether he was, or was not, in time to lock it. He went, and tried to hurry, but his legs refused to move and he knew he would not be in time to lock the door though he painfully strained all his powers. He was seized by an agonizing fear. And that fear was the fear of death. It stood behind the door. But just when he was clumsily creeping toward the door, that dreadful something on the other side was already pressing against it and forcing its way in. Something not human — death — was breaking in through that door, and had to be kept out. He seized the door, making a final effort to hold it back — to lock it was no longer possible — but his efforts were weak and clumsy and the door, pushed from behind by that terror, opened and closed again.

Once again it pushed from outside. His last superhuman efforts were vain and both halves of the door noiselessly opened. It entered, and it was death, and Prince Andrei died.

But at the instant he died, Prince Andrei remembered that he was asleep, and at the very instant he died, having made an effort, he awoke.

"Yes, it was death! I died — and woke up. Yes, death is an awakening!" And all at once it grew light in his soul and the veil that had till then concealed the unknown was lifted from his spiritual vision. He felt as if powers till then confined within him had been liberated, and that strange lightness did not again leave him.

When, waking in a cold perspiration, he moved on the divan, Natasha went up and asked him what was the matter. He did not answer and looked at her strangely, not understanding. [Book Twelve: 1812, Chapter XVI]


As I mentioned, I was reading War and Peace in 1979 for a seminar college course in Russian Literature. I was reading the passage above one evening in my bedroom with my door closed, and when I came to the exact point at which "the door noiselessly opened" and death entered, my father opened my bedroom door. The timing couldn't have been more perfect, and I leapt to my feet and cried out in fright. But it was only my father - and not death - who had come through the door.

Looking at the same scene in the BBC television production, in Part Seventeen, with Alan Dobie playing Prince Andrei, I was surprised to find that they omitted the dream altogether. Andrei drifts in and out of sleep, with Natasha sometimes there, or his sister Maria. They even bring his little son, Nikolai, to see him. And then he awakes from a dream, tells Natasha that he loves her and . . . dies. It's a moving scene all the same, but I was waiting to see the dream in vain.

There is a great deal to be said in praise of the BBC production of War and Peace, as well as all such adaptations of literary classics. The careful, exceedingly patient dramatization of a big 19th-century novel, from the casting of actors to the creation of sets and costumes is one of the most respectful and faithful approaches to literature imaginable. But whether it was my age at the time I first watched the BBC production, or the expectations that an intervening lifetime of television and film viewing have inspired in me, but seeing each episode again after a  interval of 44 years, I found the re-encounter with the BBC's War and Peace disappointing. The faces of the actors, which I carried over in my imagination as I was reading the novel - so that I saw Anthony Hopkins face in Tolstoy's scenes of Pierre Bezuhov, or Alan Dobie's face when I read about Prince Andrei Bolkonsky - were still there, but the awfully flat television lighting of every scene seemed so unreal to me and the movement from one scene to the next felt so studio-bound, and the occasional outdoor scenes, especially the battles (which were shot in the former Yugoslavia) seemed almost silly in their lack of any real scale. I will always cherish the memory of watching the series when I was 16, but there lies the greatest hazard of trying to recapture the past, unless one applies some Proustian intellectual effort of recollection.

I have also recently had a chance to see the four parts of Sergei Bondarchuk's landmark film adaptation of War and Peace, produced at enormous cost in the former Soviet Union in the mid 1960s. I think I will write at greater length about the film, it is so extraordinary - so epic at precisely those points at which the BBC production couldn't hope to succeed on the small screen - namely, the great battle scenes that Tolstoy himself described so bravely. While the BBC was better at depicting the peace half of the novel, Bondarchuk is reported to have had thousands soldiers of the Red Army at his disposal with which to re-create Austerlitz and Borodino. 

Unfortunately, what Bondarchuk's War and Peace proves, with a breathtaking finality, is how a big budget can be an even greater liability to a filmmaker than a low budget. Bondarchuk started to shoot Andrei's dream exactly as Tolstoy described it. Andrei (played by Vyacheslav Tikhonov) is in the same room in which he had fallen asleep or into a delirium, but he is dressed in full military regalia. There is a large white wall and at its bottom left corner is a small door. A crowd of people, all dressed as at a ball or on military parade (and appearing to be transparent as phantoms) are coming towards him. They are talking but he can't hear what they're saying. The crowd of people are suddenly gone, and Andrei rises from his bed.  There is a sudden disruption, like an earthquake - the camera lurches and the whole room tilts to one side. Andrei - phantom-like - walks in slow motion toward the door of the room and presses with both hands against it, trying to prevent it from opening. But it opens. Only the look of fear on Andrei's face suggests to us what it could be that has entered the room. All Tolstoy needed to do was call it Death - death entered the room. But how could Bondarchuk show death to us? He could simply have cut to Andrei opening his eyes - but before he does so, he shows that the doors have become enormous and Andrei is a tiny figure walking into the darkness beyond. Which is it to be - does death break in on Andrei in his room or does Andrei enter the darkness beyond the opened door? Why is Andrei leaving? Where is he going? Bondarchuk's contribution to Tolstoy's simple dream doesn't quite work.