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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For the Biblical concept, see Seven seals. For the Rakim album, see The Seventh Seal (Rakim album).

Det sjunde inseglet
Original Swedish poster
Directed by	Ingmar Bergman
Produced by	Allan Ekelund
Written by	Ingmar Bergman
Starring	Max von Sydow Gunnar Björnstrand Bengt Ekerot Nils Poppe
Music by	Erik Nordgren
Cinematography	Gunnar Fischer
Editing by	Lennart Wallén
Distributed by	Svensk Filmindustri Palador Pictures Pvt. Ltd. (India)
Release date(s)	16 February 1957 (Sweden) 13 August 1958 (U.S.)
Running time	96 min.
Country	Sweden
Language	Swedish Latin
Budget	$150,000 (estimated)

The Seventh Seal (Swedish: Det sjunde inseglet) is an existential 1957 Swedish film directed by Ingmar Bergman about the journey of a medieval knight (Max von Sydow) across a plague-ridden landscape, and a monumental game of chess between himself and the personification of Death, who has come to take his life. The film is spoken in Swedish, and is shown with subtitles in local languages (quotations below are from English subtitles). The film has been regarded since its release as a masterpiece of cinematography.^[1]

The title refers to a passage about the end of the world from the Book of Revelation, used both at the very start of the film, and again towards the end, beginning with the words "And when the Lamb had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour" (Revelation 8:1). Bergman developed the film from his own play Wood Painting.

Contents 1 Synopsis 2 Cast 3 Production 4 Portrayal of Middle Ages 5 Interpretation 6 Impact 7 Parody 8 See also 9 References 10 Bibliography 11 External links

[edit] Synopsis

Antonius Block (Max von Sydow), a knight, returns with his squire Jöns (Gunnar Björnstrand) from the Crusades and finds that his home country of Sweden is being ravaged by the plague. To his dismay, Death (Bengt Ekerot) has come for him, as well. In order to buy time to be reunited with his wife after ten years of war, he challenges Death to a chess match. Death agrees to the terms: as long as Block resists, he lives. If he wins, he shall go free.

During a brief respite from the game, Block and Jöns continue on the journey. Jöns walks into an abandoned farm looking for water, where he saves a mute servant girl (Gunnel Lindblom) from being raped by a robber. He threatens to brand the robber on the face if he catches him again. Shaken, the girl agrees to come along with Jöns as his house keeper.

Shortly thereafter, Block goes to a church and confesses to a priest that his faith is weathered and that he doubts if God actually exists. He tells the priest that he is playing chess with Death and reveals his strategy, only to find that the priest is Death in disguise. Block is angry and swears to find a way out. Before he and Death continue their game, Block finds solace in a quiet, pleasant picnic of milk and wild strawberries with a family of traveling actors. He invites them to his castle, where they will be safe from the plague.

Halfway through their journey, they come across a witch who is to be burned at the stake. Jöns is sympathetic to the girl and contemplates killing her executioners, but decides against it as she is almost dead. Block asks her both at their first encounter in a village and as she is at the actual stake to summon Satan for him; he wants to ask the Devil about God. When in what Block describes as her "terror" she claims to have done so, Block (and the audience) cannot see him, leaving his dilemma unanswered. Strongly atheistic and cynical, Jöns later tells Block that the witch did not see God or Satan because neither exists. The knight refuses to acknowledge his own emptiness despite his doubts; he would rather be broken in faith, suffering doubt, than recognise a life without meaning.

Ultimately, Block loses the chess game, distracting Death so the actors can slip away. Yet Death grants him one more reprieve. The knight is reunited with his wife at his castle, where the party shares one "last supper" before Death comes for them. At the final moment, Block pleads desperately to God for help, while Jöns's girl smiles and announces, "It is finished," breaking her silence. The next morning, the family of actors awaken and the father sees a vision of the knight and his followers being led away over the hills in a solemn dance of death. The young family continues on their journey; they will live on, and, in saving them, Block has left behind a life that was not without meaning.

[edit] Cast

• Gunnar Björnstrand - Jöns, squire
• Bengt Ekerot - Death
• Nils Poppe - Jof
• Max von Sydow - Antonius Block, knight
• Bibi Andersson - Mia, Jof's wife
• Inga Gill - Lisa, blacksmith's wife
• Maud Hansson - Witch
• Inga Landgré - Karin, Block's wife
• Gunnel Lindblom - Girl
• Bertil Anderberg - Raval
• Anders Ek - The Monk
• Åke Fridell - Blacksmith Plog
• Gunnar Olsson - Albertus Pictor, church painter
• Erik Strandmark - Jonas Skat

[edit] Production

Bergman originally wrote the play Trämålning (Wood Painting) in 1953/1954 for the acting students of Malmö City Theatre. The first time it was performed in public was in radio in 1954, directed by Bergman. He also directed it on stage in Malmö the next spring, and in the autumn It was staged in Stockholm, directed by Bengt Ekerot who would later play the character Death in the film version.^[2]

In interviews and in his autobiography, The Magic Lantern, Bergman has said that The Seventh Seal was a low-budget affair^{[citation needed]} . Bergman had been given the go-ahead for the project from Carl-Anders Dymling at Svensk Filmindustri only after the success at Cannes of Smiles of a Summer Night, and was given a schedule of only thirty-five days, a short time for a film of this nature^{[citation needed]} .

All scenes except two were shot in or around the Filmstaden studios in Solna. The exceptions were the famous opening scene with Death and the Knight and the ending with the dance of death, which were both shot at Hovs Hallar, a rocky, precipitous beach area in north-western Scania.^[3] The movie was inspired by a painting by Albertus Pictor in Täby kyrka.

[edit] Portrayal of Middle Ages

Much of the film's images are derived from medieval art. For example, Bergman has stated that the image of a man playing chess with a skeletal Death was inspired by a medieval church painting from the 1480s in Täby kyrka, Täby, north of Stockholm, painted by Albertus Pictor.^[4]

However, the medieval Sweden portrayed in this movie is not totally accurate. It is extremely unlikely that a knight returning from the Crusades would arrive home in the middle of the Black Death, for the last crusade (the Ninth) ended in 1271, and the Black Death hit Europe in 1348. In addition, the flagellant movement was foreign to Sweden; large-scale witch persecutions only began in the 1400s.^[5]

Generally speaking, historians Johan Huizinga and Friedrich Heer and Barbara Tuchman have all argued that the late Middles Ages of the 14th century was a period of "doom and gloom" similar to what is reflected in this film, characterized by a feeling of pessimism, an increase in a penitential style of piety that was slightly masochistic, all aggravated by various disasters such as the Black Plague, famine, the Hundred Years' War between France and England, and papal schism. This is sometimes called the crisis of the Late Middle Ages. Barbara Tuchman regards the 14th century as A Distant Mirror of the 20th century in a way that echoes Bergman's sensibilities. Nonetheless, the period of the Crusades is well before this era; they took place in a more optimistic period.

On a more technical note, at one point in the film Death captures the queen in the chess game between Antonius and himself, and this is portrayed as a major setback. However, the queen was not as powerful as it currently is until many centuries after this film, when a chess-variant initially called "chess of the mad queen" became more popular than the traditional game.

With regard to the relevancy of historical accuracy to a film that is heavily metaphorical and allegorical, John Alberth, writing in A Knight at the Movies, holds

the film only partially succeeds in conveying the period atmosphere and thought world of the fourteenth century. Bergman would probably counter that it was never his intention to make an historical or period film. As it wrote in a program note that accompanied the movie's premier "It is a modern poem presented with medieval material that has been very freely handled"..The script in particular---embodies a mid-twentieth century existentialist angst....Still, to be fair to Bergman, one must allow him his artistic license, and the script's modernisms may be justified as giving the movie's medieval theme a compelling and urgent contemporary relevance...Yet the film succeeds to a large degree because it is set in the Middle Ages, a time that can seem both very remote and very immediate to us living in the modern world....Ultimately The Seventh Seal should be judged as a historical film by how well it combines the medieval and the modern.^[6]

Even less equivocally defending it as an allegory, Aleksander Kwiatkowski in the book Swedish Film Classics, writes

The international response to the film which among other awards won the jury's special prize at Cannes in 1957 reconfirmed the author' high rank and proved that The Seventh Seal regardless of its degree of accuracy in reproducing medieval scenery may be considered as a universal, timeless allegory.^[7]

[edit] Interpretation

Gerald Mast writes,

“Like the gravedigger in “Hamlet”, the Squire [...] treats death as a bitter and hopeless joke. Since we all play chess with death, and since we all must suffer through that hopeless joke, the only question about the game is how long it will last and how well we will play it. To play it well, to live, is to love and not to hate the body and the mortal as the Church urges in Bergman's metaphor.”^[8]

[edit] Impact

The Seventh Seal was Bergman's breakthrough film. When the film won the Special Jury Prize at the 1957 Cannes Film Festival,^[9] the attention generated by it (along with the previous year's Smiles of a Summer Night) made Bergman and his stars Max von Sydow and Bibi Andersson well-known to the European film community, and the critics and readers of Cahiers du Cinéma, among others, discovered him with this movie. Within five years of this, he had established himself as the first real auteur of Swedish cinema. With its reflections upon death and the meaning of life, The Seventh Seal became somewhat emblematic for "serious" European films.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Parody

The representation of Death as a white-faced man in a dark cape has been a popular object of parody in other films. One that is exclusively focused on Bergman is a 15-minute parody of Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries entitled De Düva (mock Swedish for "The Dove"), which contains a final scene in which the protagonist plays badminton with Death and Death is defeated when a dove swoops from the sky and drops faeces in Death's eye. The photography imitates Bergman's style throughout.

Also of note is Woody Allen's Love and Death, a film which broadly parodies 19th-century Russian novels with a closing "Dance of Death" scene imitating Bergman. Woody Allen is a huge fan of Ingmar Bergman and references his work in his serious dramas as well as his comedies.

Notable parodies of Bergman's Death also occur in Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, where Death is a major character whom the protagonists beat at Battleship, Clue, electric football and Twister, and the film The Last Action Hero, where the character of Death (played by Ian McKellen) walks out of a movie screening of The Seventh Seal into the real world.

[edit] See also

• Middle Ages in film
• Knight of faith in Soren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling

[edit] References

[edit] Bibliography

• Ingmar Bergman and the Rituals of Art by Paisley Livingston. Cornell University Press, 1982.

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: The Seventh Seal

• Det Sjunde inseglet at the Internet Movie Database
• Det sjunde inseglet at Allmovie
• The Seventh Seal at Rotten Tomatoes

Preceded by The Mystery of Picasso

Special Jury Prize, Cannes 1956 tied with Kanał

Succeeded by Mon Oncle

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v • d • e The films of Ingmar Bergman 1940s Crisis • It Rains on Our Love • A Ship to India • Music in Darkness • Port of Call • Prison • Thirst 1950s To Joy • This Can't Happen Here • Summer Interlude • Secrets of Women • Summer with Monika • Sawdust and Tinsel • A Lesson in Love • Dreams • Smiles of a Summer Night • The Seventh Seal • Wild Strawberries • Brink of Life • The Magician 1960s The Virgin Spring • The Devil's Eye • Through a Glass Darkly • Winter Light • The Silence • All These Women • Persona • Hour of the Wolf • Shame • The Rite • The Passion of Anna 1970s The Touch • Cries and Whispers • Scenes from a Marriage • The Magic Flute • Face to Face • The Serpent's Egg • Autumn Sonata 1980s From the Life of the Marionettes • Fanny and Alexander • Karin's Face • After the Rehearsal 1990s In the Presence of a Clown 2000s The Image Makers • Saraband