death is death
by
Douglas Messerli
Ingmar
Bergman (screen play, based on his play Trämålning) Ingmar Bergman
(director) Det sjunde inseglet (The Seventh Seal) / 1957
Although
I greatly admire the films of Ingmar Bergman, and have seen a number of them
many times, my fourth visit to his 1957 classic The Seventh Seal had
more to do with my attempt to honor the acting of Max von Sydow, who died in
France on March 8th of this year.
I realized in watching this film yet again
that a lot of my prejudice against it had to do with how the critics of the day
reacted to it, describing it as a symbolist, allegorical, and even spiritual
work.
Except
perhaps for latter, The Seventh Seal, this time around did not at all
appear to me as a symbolist work, based on the use of symbols, defined in Webster’s
New World Dictionary as “something that stands for or represents another
thing; especially an object that is used to represent something abstract.”
In Bergman’s work, nothing is really
abstract: Death is death, the Knight just back from the Crusades, Antonius
Block (Sydow’s role) is nothing more or less than a knight. Jöns (Gunnar
Björnstrand), Block’s squire is just a squire, even if he is highly intelligent
and creates, like the actor Jof (Nils Poppe), original songs. The rich natural
world surrounding these and Bergman’s other characters, although filled with
sometimes frightening events, an impending thunderstorm, the silence of all
animal life, and a forest possibly filled with thieves, never stands for
anything other than what it is; any other qualities attributed to it, as
Bergman’s script makes clear, are simply projected upon them, without truly.
The woman who bore a “calf’s head”—a tale doubted by all except for the most
simple-minded of Bergman’s peasant folk—is only a imaginary revelation of the
horrors the natives are suffering, the Great Plague, who somewhat resemble the
flagellants who seek in self-punishment an end to the plague—not a symbol of
the tradition of offering up calves to appease the gods.
Similarly, I now saw no allegorical images
in this work, which posits just the opposite. For me, to quote Webster’s
once more, “an allegory is a story [or poem] in which people, things, and
happenings have another meaning.” In Spenser’s long poem The Faerie Queene is
allegorical because this queen and much of her court stand also for Elizabeth I
and her court. Here once more Death is death, the knight is a knight—even if he
is about to go “tender” into that good night. In Bergman’s hands these and the
other figures of the work stand for none other than themselves, figures of the
Medieval era in which religious believers’ visions of Mary (who Jof claims to
have witnessed) and encounters with Death were closer to natural events than to
symbolic or allegorical representations. Perhaps only Block’s chess game with
Death is slightly symbolic in that the game may determine how close to death he
truly is. But even Death is rather straightforward here, in his tricks, having
to pretend to be a priest in order to discover Block’s planned moves. Bergman’s
solidly-grounded characters do not represent others—except perhaps for the
entire human race who must each, at some point, encounter the emblematic “man
with a scythe”—but stand for no one but their own temporary being.
As to being spiritual, one could argue
that, particularly for Block, his voyage from the sea-landing with which this
tale begins followed by his visits to the seemingly empty church wherein he
again encounters Death, his pleasant hiatus with the loving and caring Jof, his
wife Mia (Bibi Andersson), and their child Mikael, his later travels through
the forest, and his final arrival at his castle where he wife, Karin (Inga
Landgré), awaits him, represent a kind of spiritual search.
In so many of Bergman’s films, the hero
(often played by Sydow) undergoes a loss of faith, which leads him only to
despair and the total loss of his enjoyment of life. Throughout this work,
Block seems almost indifferent to death; he battles for more time simply to be
able to search for the proof of God’s existence that he is seeking, but which
is also something he knows he will never be able to find.
He does come close to that, however, in
his brief time with the young actors, who immediately share their humble meal
of wild berries and milk with him, while he observes the energetic beauty of
the new life they have created. Is it any wonder that when the unlikely
visionary Jof spots the knight playing chess with Death, he immediately pulls
his wagon away from his fellow travelers to pursue his and his family’s own way
through uncharted territory? In short, Bergman suggests, these naturally
faithful beings do not even have to believe in God since they themselves are a
manifestation of His love at work.
They too, at their journey’s end, wind up
at the edge of the ocean, turning back into the forest to move on to Elsinore
(a name created by Shakespeare to stand for the real Kronborg castle in
Helsingør, Denmark) where they may or may not—particularly given the director’s
own use of anachronistic elements (the flagellants never visited Sweden and the
movement did not happen until the next century, the Crusades were over long
before the 14th century world Bergman portrays, and Block’s “dread”
is far closer to modern existentialist concerns than to the mind-thought of the
Medieval world)—encounter another dead world brewed up by Hamlet’s plots of
revenge from another century.
I love the revelation that when Bergman
actually filmed that scene, the actors had already decamped, so that he had to
enlist “assistants, electricians, and a make-up man and about two summer
visitors, who never knew what it was all about,” in order to create the famed
penultimate panorama. No magic symbols or allegorical tropes at work here;
these were the clueless people behind the making of the film and representing
his potential audience.
I argue, accordingly, that Bergman’s film
is truly none of the above, but is much more a blend of Medieval theatrical
forms such as morality plays, farces, and masques than being an amalgam of any
of the more Renaissance and Modernist genres often suggested. The more emblem-like
scenes—the chess game with Death and the “Dance of Death”—which became popular
in the 16th and 17th centuries, which critics such as Aleksander
Kwiatkowski have used to argue for the work being allegory,are simply overlaid
on these earlier genres to give the film a greater visual force.
And when one loosens this work up from the
far weightier genres imposed upon, it The Seventh Seal opens itself up
to being a far more pleasurable narrative about different groups of people
trying to live out their lives while having to face the terrible plague that
loomed always in the near distance.
When I told my husband, Howard that I was
about to rewatch Bergman’s classic on July 4th, he laughed. “What a wonderful
movie of watch on a holiday,” he quipped.
Yet, actually, on an Independence Day in
the US that I was not at all proud to celebrate, one that had long excluded
blacks and now was brutally being consumed for his own purposes by an
apparently mad-man president, not to mention the fact that we too were now daily
facing a seemingly out-of-control plague in the Covid-9 pandemic, this may have
been the perfect moment to rethink Bergman’s 1957 film. Like its character,
Block, I too was charmed by Jof’s jump out of bed to discover a new morning, feeding
his horse what appears to be string beans, and his hugging and holding of those
he loved so dearly. The spectacular scenes of doubt and terror embedded in this
work now seem as mere pageants that momentarily interrupt the pleasures of the
little family at the center of this film, as they play out from the back of
their wagon more domestic comedies.
Moreover, for the first time, I became
aware of just how many elements of Bergman’s work had later crept into Andrei
Tarkovsky’s great masterwork, Andrei Rublev, in which a boy who wants to
make bells and a man who desires just to paint icons join forces to defeat all
of those around them who stand against creation during the same time-period of
the 1400s.
Seeing this early Bergman success which
helped him to realize the many brilliant films that came after, made me far
more appreciative of The Seventh Seal than I ever previously been.
Los
Angeles, July 5, 2020
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (July 2020).
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