I have long walked by your side ✵ The Seventh Seal - FEAR AND WONDER ✵ 1950–1959 - The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

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IN CONTEXT

GENRE

Drama

DIRECTOR

Ingmar Bergman

WRITER

Ingmar Bergman (from his play Wood Painting)

STARS

Max von Sydow, Gunnar Björnstrand, Bengt Ekerot, Nils Poppe, Bibi Andersson

BEFORE

1955 Bergman’s first hit, Smiles of a Summer Night, is a partner-swapping comedy.

AFTER

1957 Bergman’s next movie, Wild Strawberries, is a tale of an old man preparing for death.

1966 In Persona, Bergman directs a bleak fable about death, illness, and insanity.

The Seventh Seal (Det sjunde inseglet) takes the form of a medieval morality play. A knight returns from the Crusades to find his native land devastated by plague. He goes to confession in a church surrounded by corpses. “I want God to put out his hand, show his face, speak to me,” he says to the hooded figure on the other side of the grille. “I cry out to him in the dark but there is no one there.” The figure reveals itself as Death, who has been following the knight on his journey from the Holy Land.

Having fought for God in the desert, the knight, Antonius Block (Max von Sydow), is experiencing a crisis of faith. Whereas the Almighty refuses to show Himself, Death (Bengt Ekerot) turns out to be a certainty with a fondness for morbidly funny one-liners. “Appropriate, don’t you think?” says the Grim Reaper when he chooses black in a game of chess—a game that the knight must win if he wants to live. It is Antonius who suggests the contest, a battle between black and white, darkness and light, death and life.

What will happen to us who want to believe, and cannot?”

Antonius Block / The Seventh Seal

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The movie’s original Swedish poster shows death waiting impassively at the bottom, with the human characters on the black squares of a chessboard.

Playing for his life

The image of the knight and Death playing chess on the beach has become one of the most iconic—and imitated—in the history of cinema. It is a starkly monochrome vignette, the absence of color symbolic of the absence of God. The world of Ingmar Bergman’s movie is drained of life and vitality: the water that laps the shore is slate gray, the sky above it smudged with dark clouds; the faces of God’s abandoned subjects are flinty, bloodless, and unsmiling, while Death’s is chalk white. Antonius already resembles the carved stone effigy on a Crusader’s tomb.

There are two flickers of hope in this miserable landscape: Jof (Nils Poppe) and his wife Mia (Bibi Andersson). They are traveling players, and they have a baby son, Mikael, who is their hope for the future. Jof and Mia are creators—of both art and life—and as such they are the enemies of Death, who only knows how to destroy. When the knight encounters them on the road to his castle, Death not far behind, he finds comfort in the couple’s laughter and lust for life. In fact, he is reminded of Joseph and Mary from the Bible—could these performers be emissaries of God?

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The knight Antonius Block offers Death a game of chess for his life. Death agrees to the game, to which they will return several times during the movie, but which Block cannot win.

Where is God?

The grim, austere imagery and obsession with biblical allegory in The Seventh Seal (the title was taken from the apocalyptic Book of Revelation) has its roots in Bergman’s childhood: as the son of a Lutheran pastor, he was surrounded by religious art from a young age. The director was haunted by memories of the crude yet graphic representations of Bible stories that could be found in the woodcuttings of rural churches and households. As a filmmaker, he dedicated his career to asking the same, unanswerable question over and over again: where is God?

The knight searches, but he finds nothing. At one point he happens upon a girl (Maud Hansson) imprisoned in a cage, who is about to be burned at the stake. She is accused of sleeping with the Devil and bringing the plague upon the people. Antonius is hopeful: if the Devil exists, then so must God. “Look in my eyes,” the girl says, as she tells him that the priest would not come near her. “I see nothing but terror,” the knight replies, sadly. The girl is burned, and the knight’s squire, Jöns (Gunnar Björnstrand), can see no meaning in her murder. “Look into her eyes,” he echoes. “She sees nothing but emptiness.” The squire is scornful of people’s fears and the ignorance that leads them to burn the witch.

Feel, to the very end, the triumph of being alive!

Squire Jöns / The Seventh Seal

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Squire Jöns (Gunnar Björnstrand) saves a girl (Gunnel Lindblom) from a rapist. He is a just man, but tires of the venality of human beings.

Self-flagellation

If all of this sounds somewhat earnest, that’s because it is. The Seventh Seal is concerned with the soul and damnation; with man’s masochistic relationship with his Creator; and with the howling wilderness that awaits each of us at the end of the road. Bergman communicates his vast ideas in the simplest and most striking of images. In one extraordinary sequence, a group of self-flagellating monks lurches past the camera, some staggering under the heavy weight of crosses, others whipping themselves. The plague, which they believe to be a punishment from God, has driven them insane. Bergman cuts to the faces of Jof and Mia as they watch this spectacle from their wooden stage, which suddenly resembles the platform of a gallows. They have been singing a comical song about death, which they stop as the penitents appear. Death spreads all around them, like the fog of incense spread by the monks, infecting and transforming everything in the frame. Many onlookers fall to their knees in prayer. It is a powerful, wordless metaphor for the human condition, blackly comic in its surreal grotesquery.

There are light touches of dark humor all over The Seventh Seal, and its final image is a cruel joke. “The master leads with scythe and hourglass,” says Jof, pointing to the horizon, where the Grim Reaper leads his latest victims—including the knight—in a danse macabre against the gray sky. “They move away from the dawn in a solemn dance, toward the dark country, while the rain washes over their faces and cleanses their cheeks of salt.”

Jof is mesmerized by the parade of the dead dancing beneath the darkening skies, but for some reason Mia cannot see the phantoms. She tuts affectionately at her husband. “You and your dreams and visions,” she smiles, and the two of them shake their heads, turn their backs on Death, and return to the business of living.

"Regardless of whether I believe or not, whether I am a Christian or not, I would play my part in the collective building of the cathedral."

Ingmar Bergman

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Death leads the dead in a dance that only Jof can see. The scene was improvised at the end of a day’s filming on the coast at Hovs Hallar, using crew members and a couple of passing tourists.

INGMAR BERGMAN Director

Born in Uppsala, Sweden, in 1918, Ingmar Bergman was the son of a Lutheran chaplain and was raised in a strict household. Invariably bleak, his movies deal with the major conflicts at the heart of human existence: madness versus sanity, death versus life, nothingness versus God. The human spirit rarely triumphs in these battles. The Seventh Seal was followed by Wild Strawberries and, later, a trilogy that explored the effects of human isolation: Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence. His celebrated Persona was the first in a series inspired by Farö, a remote island in the Baltic Sea. Bergman died in 2007.

Key movies

1957 The Seventh Seal

1957 Wild Strawberries

1961 Through a Glass Darkly

1966 Persona

What else to watch: Death Takes a Holiday (1934) ✵ The Virgin Spring (1960) ✵ Through a Glass Darkly (1961) ✵ The Silence (1963) ✵ Winter Light (1963) ✵ Hour of the Wolf (1968) ✵ Cries and Whispers (1972) ✵ Love and Death (1975)