The Seventh Seal (1958)


 

"Ingmar Bergman's dark masterpiece effortlessly sees off the revisionists and the satirists; it is a radical work of art that reaches back to scripture, to Cervantes and to Shakespeare to create a new dramatic idiom of its own. It was released 60 years ago, but it's as fresh as a glass of ice-cold water.Even after half a century, The Seventh Seal is an untarnished gold-standard of artistic and moral seriousness."
A knight returning from the Crusades finds a rude church still open in the midst of the Black Death, and goes to confession there. Speaking to a hooded figure half-seen through an iron grill, he pours out his heart: "My indifference has shut me out. I live in a world of ghosts, a prisoner of dreams. I want God to put out his hand, show his face, speak to me. I cry out to him in the dark but there is no one there.” The hooded figure turns, and is revealed as Death, who has been following the knight on his homeward journey.
Images like that have no place in the modern cinema, which is committed to facile psychology and realistic behavior. In many ways, Ingmar Bergman's "The Seventh Seal" (1957) has more in common with the silent film than with the modern films that followed it--including his own. Perhaps that is why it is out of fashion at the moment. Long considered one of the masterpieces of cinema, it is now a little embarrassing to some viewers, with its stark imagery and its uncompromising subject, which is no less than the absence of God.
The knight (Max von Sydow) shares the story with many other characters, not least his squire (Gunnar Bjornstrand), a realistic, down-to-earth man who has a lively dislike of women, and a sardonic relationship with his master. (He has a silent little snarl to show his discontent.) As the two of them travel home to the knight's castle, the knight is challenged by Death ("I have been at your side for a long time”). He offers Death a bargain: They will play chess for the knight's soul. The game continues during the entire film




Some filmmakers are born. Ingmar Bergman was made. Self-made. Born in Uppsala in 1918, he was the son of a Lutheran minister whose strict upbringing included the punishment (recalled in the films) of the small boy being locked in a cupboard “with things that will eat your toes.” His first postwar films, not much seen today, are uneasy mixtures of Italian neorealism and Hollywood social drama, and even the titles ("It Rains on Our Love," "Night is My Future”) suggest their banality. He was not at ease in the world of small realistic gestures and everyday behavior, and only when he drew back into more serious issues did he begin to find his genius, in films like "To Joy” (1949) and "Sawdust and Tinsel” (1953). "The Seventh Seal” and “Wild Strawberries,” both released in 1957, mark his coming of age as an artist. Both are about men near the ends of their lives, on a journey in search of meaning.



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