I remember seeing this for the first time in Los Angeles and emerging from the theater shocked, scared, and thrilled, as if I'd just viewed my first autopsy. There had never been anything like this allegory before, although there have been imitations and parodies since -- Monty Python, Woody Allen.
A thoughtful knight (Max von Sydow) and his tough, cynical squire (Gunnar Bjornstrand) return from the Crusades to find their Scandinavian state in a terrible mess. The plague is sweeping the land. The plagues all seem far away now, but one of them knocked off about a third of the population of Europe. That would be more than a hundred million Americans today. The deaths were horrible.
Death comes for the knight and squire, dressed in a black cloak and hood, with a pasty white face. (Only Ingmar Bergman could pull of a cliché like that.) Death is proud of his talent at playing chess and agrees to the knight's challenge to play a game over the next couple of days. If the knight wins, he goes free, and if Death wins, the knight goes with him. Of course, at the end of the game of life, the same player always wins. Or, as Walsh McDermott put it in a slightly different context, "the dice of the gods are loaded."
Along the way, the knight and squire pick up some fellow travelers, including a family of cheerful itinerant players, a blacksmith and his unfaithful wife, and a young lady of the village who may or may not be retarded. They witness flagellants parading through a village lashing themselves and lugging crosses made of heavy logs, smothered in smoke from swinging iron censers. They watch an insane girl burned at the stake for a witch. Some of the incidents are comic, some are violent, all are revelatory. You know, kind of like real life.
What a movie. It begins with a vulture almost stationary against an overcast, and it ends with a dance of death. In between Death saws down a tree in which a man is trying to hide. We see the trunk fall and the camera fixes on the raw white stump, then a squirrel with hairy ears leaps onto the stump and begins to chatter. I can't imagine that you'll ever forget some of these images.
But then, I don't know. "The Seventh Seal", like the Bergman films that flooded the theaters in the following years, was a product of its time. I'm not at all sure that many of today's viewers would have the patience to sit through a black-and-white movie with subtitles. In the 1960s Stanley Kaufman wrote an article predicting that future students would know the history of film the way that they had always known literary history. Twenty years later, he took it back. Maybe too much MTV, too much immediate gratification, too low a threshold for boredom. In another comment, the complaint was made that Bergman didn't supply any answers, just questions. That's an example of what I'm getting at.
A thoughtful knight (Max von Sydow) and his tough, cynical squire (Gunnar Bjornstrand) return from the Crusades to find their Scandinavian state in a terrible mess. The plague is sweeping the land. The plagues all seem far away now, but one of them knocked off about a third of the population of Europe. That would be more than a hundred million Americans today. The deaths were horrible.
Death comes for the knight and squire, dressed in a black cloak and hood, with a pasty white face. (Only Ingmar Bergman could pull of a cliché like that.) Death is proud of his talent at playing chess and agrees to the knight's challenge to play a game over the next couple of days. If the knight wins, he goes free, and if Death wins, the knight goes with him. Of course, at the end of the game of life, the same player always wins. Or, as Walsh McDermott put it in a slightly different context, "the dice of the gods are loaded."
Along the way, the knight and squire pick up some fellow travelers, including a family of cheerful itinerant players, a blacksmith and his unfaithful wife, and a young lady of the village who may or may not be retarded. They witness flagellants parading through a village lashing themselves and lugging crosses made of heavy logs, smothered in smoke from swinging iron censers. They watch an insane girl burned at the stake for a witch. Some of the incidents are comic, some are violent, all are revelatory. You know, kind of like real life.
What a movie. It begins with a vulture almost stationary against an overcast, and it ends with a dance of death. In between Death saws down a tree in which a man is trying to hide. We see the trunk fall and the camera fixes on the raw white stump, then a squirrel with hairy ears leaps onto the stump and begins to chatter. I can't imagine that you'll ever forget some of these images.
But then, I don't know. "The Seventh Seal", like the Bergman films that flooded the theaters in the following years, was a product of its time. I'm not at all sure that many of today's viewers would have the patience to sit through a black-and-white movie with subtitles. In the 1960s Stanley Kaufman wrote an article predicting that future students would know the history of film the way that they had always known literary history. Twenty years later, he took it back. Maybe too much MTV, too much immediate gratification, too low a threshold for boredom. In another comment, the complaint was made that Bergman didn't supply any answers, just questions. That's an example of what I'm getting at.