The Seventh Seal (Det sjunde inseglet 1957) dir Ingmar
Bergman, starring Max von Sydow

Like many Modernist iconoclasts, Ingmar Berman choose
to set an apposite tale in a rather unapposite time
and place. Medieval Sweden is hardly a place or time
on the tip of everybody’s tongue, in fact, apart from
a few experts safely cossetted in academe, very few
people know anything about it at all. But that isn’t
important. In fact the film is hardly factually or
historically accurate, although there is an actual
icon or painting portraying a man playing chess with
Death in the form of a skeleton in Taby kyrka, Sweden,
dating from 1480 or thereabouts. What Bergman has
created is a startling existentialist metaphor for his
own era, traumatised as it was by the horrors of WW2,
wedged inbetween that conflict, the Cold War, the
conflicts to come, the possibility of nuclear
annihilation. The Knight Antonius Block, played by
Max von Sydow, plays an intellectual game with death,
knowing that he cannot defeat or cheat death, but
merely delay the inevitable. Of course, medicine,
law, philosophy might also be regarded as other kinds
of extended metaphors for such a game. The film seems
to originate in a society that is absolutely certain
that change will come, and that this change will
almost certainly entail unbelievable horrors or chaos.

But the film is more than a single shocking,
overwhelming, wonderful or engaging metaphor. The era
is portrayed as a nightmarish descent into ignorance,
whether it is the trial and torture of a witch,
medieval flagellants (which did not exist in Medieval
Sweden), the ravages of the Bubonic plague. Violence
is used to adumbrate the trauma engendered by
ignorance, but the Knight seems a powerfully cold
adversary for Death, just as he seeks to protect his
Queen. But ultimately we know that a certain
worldview is passing away, as Block, his friends and
family, are led away by Death, performing an eerie
Dance of Death but Jof, his wife Mia and their child
are still able to escape.

For some time now Ingmar Bergman has largely been
forgotten about or marginalized. His obituary in The
Guardian came as a surprise to this reviewer, who
thought that he had died sometime in the mid-80s.
What had actually happened was that Modernism in
literature, theatre and cinema had died: the truth is
that Bergman’s work became intensely unfashionable, as
had seriousness of any kind. In it’s place, anything
shallow, flippant, simplistic without form or force
had overtaken Bergman’s powerful, modernising
consciousness. That’s a great tragedy or a great
farce, however you regard it, but hasn’t Berman had
the last laugh after all? His film has been
re-released at a time similarly charged with
momentedness, momentous apocalypse, momentous
upheaval, as authority seems ill-equipped or inept in
the face of overwhelming political or climactic
movements. The years inbetween were clearly filled
with hollow, insubstantial, unreal laughter. But
Bergman himself is now dead too, his film lives as a
portent, a monumental, singular metaphor evoking
hideous squalor, pity, the redundancy of culture and
history. But we also feel, however unsentimental we
happen to be, however encased in ice our feelings,
soul, spirit happen to be, that there is hope.

The film was often parodied. Woody Allen, Monty
Python, even Bill and Ted’s Bogus Adventure (bogus
film?) where Bill and Ted beat Death at Battleship,
Clue, electric football and Twister made a stab at
sending up this portentous arthouse masterpiece.

Paul Murphy, The Barbican, London