Ingmar Bergman Winter Survival Series: The Seventh Seal (1957) and wrap-up
StoryShed ends our five-film watch party over the winter of 2024-25. Happy spring!
There may have been a method to all this madness.
That is, what I first threw out into the void as a joke, well it got responded to, a challenge was taken up (okay, okay, it was me, I am the subject of that passive sentence: I took up the challenge. You happy now?).
Truth told, I’m grateful to wade through what became “movie watching memories.” Bergman as preservationist of history, time, meaning, cultural change, religious persuasions, sexual politics, ghosts and …
Well, Death.
Yikes, right? That thing that bites us all in the ass, at some point.
Well, when I think about Ingmar Bergman in my own personal history of watching movies, it includes nearly everything I saw on television in the late 1960s and early ’70s…the references accumulated as you went forward in your viewing. I can’t watch The Seventh Seal and not think about The Shuttered Room (1967) or The Red Balloon (1956) which altered my consciousness in ways I’m only now, as an old man, trying to understand. If I get there at all.
I’m grateful to
and especially for prodding me forward on this. Winter is time to reflect, and that was the gift they gave to me, and I hope I was able to share it with you.Thank you!
Final Thoughts on The Seventh Seal: “Don’t Play the Ferryman”
Death: Don’t you ever stop asking questions?
Antonius Block: No, I’ll never stop.
Probably Ingmar Bergman’s most widely recognized film, The Seventh Seal is actually a genre film.
The die was cast decades before (and decades after, as Keanu Reeves and friends have showed)…
The thing you never forget about it, unlike other Bergman movies, is the chess game. Hilariously, in Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey, Death offers to play the boys a game, and they choose Battleship, Clue, Electric Football and … Twister.
But hey, when you make an iconic film like The Seventh Seal, parody is a seal (literally) of achievement. I think Bergman’s 1957 film is of a different genre, and my choice might surprise you.
It’s a Western.
Yes it’s set in the West—Western Europe in the Middle Ages, duh—but I mean it’s a Western movie in the sense that Delmer Daves’ 3:10 to Yuma is a Western. You know, cowboys on a journey, trying to tackle a bad man and bringin’ ’em in!
That never occurred to me before I just watched Seal for the first time in a couple decades. Like all good films, it repays the effort. And like all Bergman, mesmerizing to watch and mull over.
Stick with me on this: The knight just back from the Crusades, Antonius Block, is on horseback with his squire, Jöns, whose penchant for wry commentary is—mmmmmmwah—chef’s kiss. So, already we have The Lone Ranger and Tonto riding into town and have a new baddie on their hit list: Death himself (wonderfully played by Bengt Ekerot).
Soon we get to know the Medieval world we’re thrust into, one that includes fear, isolation, betrayal, religious presecution, and a plague raging across the land.
So how is this a Western, and which one would I select as its sister film?
Well, in some ways, it’s a lot like John Ford’s The Searchers, where John Wayne’s Ethan is probably the tough-guy stand-in for Max von Sydow’s Antonius Block.
In the Ford film, Ethan is tracking down his neice, who’s been taken captive by Indians. Antonius Block just wants to get home to his wife and castle, but along the way meets a traveling band of players, a jealous smithy and his cheating wife, and Block’s squire Jöns befriends a young woman without a family, who joins them on their journey.
The Seventh Seal is also a dark comedy. My favorite scene has to be this exchange where the knight goes to confession, only to learn he’s confessed to Death himself.
Here’s the scene in full:
Antonius Block: Why can’t I kill God within me? Why does he live on in this painful and humiliating way even though I curse Him and want to tear Him out of my heart? Why, in spite of everything, is He a baffling reality that I can’t shake off? Do you hear me?
Death (as priest): Yes, I hear you.
AB: I want knowledge, not faith, not suppositions, but knowledge. I want God to stretch out His hand toward me, reveal Himself and speak to me.
Death: But he remains silent…
AB: We carve an idol out of our fear and call it God.
Death: You are worrying…
AB: Death visited me this morning. We are playing chess together. This repreive gives me the chance to arrange an urgent matter.
Death: What matter is that?
AB: My life has been a futile pursuit, a wandering, a great deal of talk without meaning. I feel no bitterness or self-reproach because the lives of most people are very much like this. But I will use my reprieve for one meaningful deed.
Death: Is that why you are playing chess with Death?
AB: He is a clever opponent, but up to now I haven’t lost a single man.
Death: How will you outwit Death in your game?
AB: I use a combination of the bishop and the know which he hasn’t yet discovered. In the next move I’ll shatter one of his flanks.
Death: I’ll remember that.
Ka-BOOM.
You sonufabitch. Tricked again.
But the knight takes a dark victory from the exchange:
Antonius Block: This is my hand. I can move it, feel the blood pulsing through it. The sun is still high in the sky and I, Antonius Block, am playing chess with Death.
For all the darkness one might attribute to The Seventh Seal, there’s an equal balance of sweetness and light, especially the scenes with the traveling players, Jof, Mia and their toddler son Mikael.
Love permeates this young family, and Bergman makes sure we see every bit of it.
Jof and Mia’s young family is exactly the “one meaningful deed” Antonius Block will complete before the story is over. By playing Death in a chess match until that family is able to escape the knight’s company, Block achieves his small victory, even unknown to Death at the time.
If you haven’t seen it, you can probably guess who wins the chess game.
I think it’s fitting to end the Ingmar Bergman Winter Survival Series with The Seventh Seal. And I found Melvyn Bragg’s comment about The Seventh Seal fascinating:1
It’s constructed like an argument. It is a story told as a sermon might be delivered: an allegory...each scene is at once so simple and so charged and layered that it catches us again and again...Somehow all of Bergman's own past, that of his father, that of his reading and doing and seeing, that of his Swedish culture, of his political burning and religious melancholy, poured into a series of pictures which carry that swell of contributions and contradictions so effortlessly that you could tell the story to a child, publish it as a storybook of photographs and yet know that the deepest questions of religion and the most mysterious revelation of simply being alive are both addressed.
Let’s allow Mia, Jof’s wife, to close it out with a benediction.
You with your visions and dreams! —Mia
Toward the Undiscovered Country…
Thank you to all the StoryShed subscribers and friends who’ve checked in with the Ingmar Bergman Winter Survival Series since the end of 2024.
It’s been a pleasure!
Notes
Bragg, Melvyn (1998). The Seventh Seal (Det Sjunde Inseglet). BFI Publishing.
Your Bergman winter survival guide is the perfect antidote to seasonal despair: part film criticism, part existential balm. The way you trace his glacial silences and sudden human warmth mirrors the very contradictions of the season itself. A masterclass in finding catharsis through art’s coldest comforts.
Reading this makes me itch to rewatch The Seventh Seal and other Ingmar Bergman movies. It is definitely my favorite, besides Fanny and Alexander and Wild Strawberries. I've watched most of the Bergman movies in Swedish without subtitles. If you are a die-hard fan, you must learn Swedish to fully appreciate his dialogues! (JK, although, in my youth, when I was at the post office mailing boxes to Sweden in preparation of moving there, the clerk told me that he had studied Swedish in college just so he could understand the Bergman movies. I was very impressed.) I looked through your curation of your winter survival series. They are excellent choices. The first one, Winter Light, is a bleak one... a great choice for surviving the winter, LOL!