john stubbs- the seventh seal

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The Seventh Seal Author(s): John C. Stubbs Source: Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 9, No. 2, Special Issue: Film IV: Eight Study Guides (

Apr., 1975), pp. 62-76Published by: University of Illinois PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3331735Accessed: 29-06-2015 19:49 UTC

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The Seventh Seal

JOHN C. STUBBS

Ingmar Bergman is a man of great intensity. His movies, in the main, deal with a body of problems that seem almost to obsess him: the unsuccessful search for a God believable to rational men; the attempt to substitute the value of love for the missing God; the mixture of love, hate, and egotism that exists in relationships where we might hope or expect to find solely love; and the incapacity of our words and outer shells to reflect accurately what we sense ourselves to be inside. Berg- man's stature as a writer and a director will probably rise and fall de- pending on the extent to which audiences feel these problems accurately reflect their own anxieties. Yet it would be a mistake to consider Bergman a purely intellectual filmmaker, or one who deals solely with abstract problems. In his best movies he always succeeds in transposing his abstract problems into what Swedish critic Jorn Donner calls "individual human drama." Donner puts it this way: "Although the dis- cussions among actors may concern abstract events, we can always measure the importance of these problems for the persons themselves, their inner life, their happiness or lack of it."

Much of Bergman's strength comes from his ability to dramatize his scenes in visual compositions that are striking and often shocking. In his black and white films, Bergman used high contrasts between dark shadows and brightly lit areas, a technique he had seen in the old, silent horror films of Germany and Scandinavia. For instance, Berg- man's character of Death in The Seventh Seal wears a black monk's robe. He is usually shot against a dark background, but his face is highly made up in "white face," and it is lit by small spotlights, often

JOHN C. STUBBS is associate professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He has written The Pursuit of Form: Hawthorne and the Romance and has had articles in such magazines as Literature and Psychology, PMLA, and Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction.


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the only illuminated area in the frame. More recently in color films, Bergman has been using settings that are predominantly monochro- matic. Psychologists tell us color creates emotion or mood - warm colors, intensity; cool colors, serenity. Bergman exploits this phenome- non. In one vision in Cries and Whispers, the three sisters and the maid move about in a parlor with deep red walls, furniture, and rug. The effect is claustrophobic. Always Bergman pares his scenes down to a few dominating visual elements; this tendency is helped by the fact that he does not locate many of his films in the urban centers of contempo- rary Sweden. The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring are set in the Swedish countryside of the Middle Ages. The Magician and Cries and Whispers take place on the estates of well-to-do nineteenth-century or turn-of-the-century families. The action of Winter Light is in and around a small, rural church; the action of Persona in an isolated summer house on the beach; and The Silence mainly in a hotel of a fictional East European country. Bergman's interests do not much lie with the social complexities of the modern Swedish welfare state or with its cosmopolitan areas. Therefore, he goes most often to simple, almost elemental locales, the better to make clear his individual human dramas. The visual result is most often powerful starkness.

Several elements in Bergman's background help clarify his interests. The son of a Lutheran pastor, he was born in 1918 in Uppsala, fifty miles north of Stockholm. He has said concerning his childhood, "When one is born and reared in the home of a minister, one has a chance at an early age to catch a glimpse behind the scenes of life and death. Father conducts a funeral, father officiates at a wedding, father per- forms a baptism, acts as a mediator, writes a sermon. The devil became an early acquaintance." His childhood was steeped in Protestantism. When he reached nineteen, while he was vacationing on an island near Stockholm, Bergman had a crisis of religious faith and turned against the church. Perhaps as important as Protestantism in Bergman's background was the strict, paternal family structure he grew up in. Bergman has said, "That strict middle-class home gave me a wall to pound on, something to sharpen myself against." His father was by no means a cruel man, but he was reserved and could on occasion be stern. Berg- man's movies abound with such family heads, and they are never treated flatteringly- they are invariably shown as men incapable of love. In Through a Glass Darkly, the father studies his daughter's relapse into schizophrenia in order to gain material for his novels; in Cries and Whispers, the coldness and the reserve of Karin's husband lead her, in what is perhaps a fantasy, to mutilate her vagina and


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smear the blood defiantly across her face in his presence. Coldness and reserve are also the major problems of the Knight in The Seventh Seal and Isak Borg in Wild Strawberries.

Bergman came to prominence in the theater before he did in the movies, and he continues to direct for the stage. Debts to theatrical staging abound in his movies. Bergman's interest in the stage surfaced during his student days at the University of Stockholm. He directed amateur plays and wrote his thesis for the A.B. degree on Swedish play- wright August Strindberg. After leaving the university, Bergman took a series of jobs as director in various city theaters; eventually he became the head of his country's national theater, the Royal Dramatic Theater, for three years. Early in the 1950s, while directing in the small city theater of Malmo, Bergman began assembling the repertory group of actors he was also to direct and write for in his movies- Max von Sydow, Ingrid Thulin, Harriet Andersson, Bibi Andersson, and Gun- nar Bjornstrand. On writing for this group, Bergman has said: "I'm actually unable to begin writing until I've made up my mind which actor is going to play the part. Then I suddenly see the actor masked in the part. The part takes on his skin, his muscles, the intonation of his voice, and above all his rhythm, the way he is."

Bergman's first film script was accepted in 1944, and in 1945 he was given a chance to direct a film adaptation of a play. His apprenticeship was long; he directed fifteen movies in ten years. Most of them were bad, but at least one was outstanding: The Naked Night, made in 1953. This is the story of the director of a seedy, small-time circus and the director's mistress. Arriving in a small town, his troupe's costumes im- pounded, the director takes his mistress to the town's theatrical group to ask for costumes. In the same town lives the director's former wife. He visits her, finds her well established as a shopkeeper, and asks her to take him back. She turns him down, gently but firmly. The mistress in the meantime has returned to the theater and is quickly seduced by an actor on the promise of a necklace, which is, of course, fake stage jewelry. At the evening performance, the actor mocks the mistress during her equestrian act, and the circus director challenges the actor by snapping off the actor's hat with a whip. The actor then enters the ring and in a series of quick, nimble moves beats the bigger, stumbling director to his knees. He humiliates the director before his audience. At this point - and not before - the mistress rushes to the director's aid. The circus ring sequence is excellent; at first comic, it grows by degrees more painful. The quick editing of the fight is a masterpiece.


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Yet there is another sequence in the film that is even better - a flash- back given early in the movie as a kind of parallel to the main action. The sequence is shot on a rocky, white beach. The film is slightly overexposed, and the beach is shown glaringly white. A group of soldiers on maneuvers persuade the wife of the circus clown to take off her clothes and frolic in the water while they watch. Word is then sent to the clown. He comes to the beach, takes off his clothes, and tries to bring his wife in from the water. But he is deathly afraid of the water, and his wife, thoroughly enjoying the soldiers' interest, splashes at him and moves away from him. Eventually the clown brings his wife to shore and carries her across the stones, trying to hide her nakedness. When he falls, the wife comforts him. The sequence is shot in a style resembling silent film. No dialogue is heard, although the characters move their lips. The only sound is a slow, martial drumbeat that approximates the sound of the cannon firing which is part of the soldiers' maneuvers. This unusual use of sound and the unusual use of lighting give the sequence the kind of powerful effect that we now expect in a Bergman film. Furthermore, The Naked Night, more clearly than any of the other first fifteen movies he directed, reveals Bergman's attitude about the mixture of betrayal and consolation in love relationships.

Bergman's mature period began with his comedy of manners, Smiles of a Summer Night, in 1955. The movie was awarded a special prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and it made Bergman known to wide audiences in Europe and America. Often ironical, to be sure, it is nevertheless Bergman's most optimistic hymn to love. After careful build-up, four men and four women are brought together in a lavish turn-of-the-century manor house on a midsummer's night. The couples are improperly aligned, and it is the strategy of the movie (and the strategy of the woman who organizes the evening) to realign them happily. Suffice it to say that the realignment involves a bed which can be made to glide through a panel into a different bedroom, a wager made by the wife of one man that she can seduce the husband of her friend in fifteen minutes, and a game of Russian roulette played with a cartridge filled with soot. At the end of the movie, with the couples properly matched, the spirit of love reigns, at least for a little while. Those afraid of love have conquered their fear, and those too aggressive in their attitudes about love have been chastened.

After the success of Smiles of a Summer Night, Bergman was able to get financial backing for the kind of more serious and searching movies he wanted to make. The Seventh Seal (1956) and Wild Straw-


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berries (1957) are two such movies. Into them Bergman was able to pour everything he knew about filmmaking, and he was able to explore the themes that were important to him. Both movies are organized as journeys. As the protagonists advance spatially, the adventures and visions they encounter either help them toward self-understanding or help us to a greater understanding of their natures. The variety of ex- periences that occur on the journeys allows Bergman to work with a range of human experience from the farcical to the frightening and from moments of gentleness to moments of psychological pain.

The Seventh Seal is an adaptation of a one-act play Bergman wrote some years earlier, called Painting-on-Wood. The play is a series of black-outs showing various characters and groups from the Middle Ages and allowing each character or group to reveal its particular brand of religious faith. The cynical Squire is the most important character. The role of the Knight, so important in the movie, is small in the play. Prominent is a witch who speaks of her relations with the Devil. The separate tableaux are meant to "play off" against each other ironically, and certainly the ironic juxtaposition of scenes of very different tones is an important part of the overall effect of The Seventh Seal. A source further back in Bergman's life is the medieval wall paintings which he saw in rural churches as a boy listening to his father preach. Berg- man has written, "There was everything that one could desire - angels, saints, dragons, prophets, devils, human beings.... In a wood sat Death, playing chess with the Crusader. Clutching the branch of a tree was a naked man with staring eyes, while down below stood Death, sawing away to his heart's content. My mind was stunned by the extreme cruelty and the extreme suffering." The title of the movie derives from the Book of Revelations in the Bible. God's book of secrets is de- scribed as a scroll with seven seals. On the day of last judgment, the seventh seal will be broken, and man will know the secrets of God. After the opening of the scroll, however, there will come great destruc- tion, in seven vials of wrath, and then a voice from heaven will pro- claim, "It is done." These words are, of course, the only words spoken in the movie by the strange girl Squire Jons befriends. The title of the movie indicates that Bergman wants to take his characters up to the point of last judgment. Whether or not they learn God's secrets is debatable; Bergman himself has implied that they do not. In a pro- gram note he said, "The Seventh Seal is an allegory with a theme that is quite simple: man, his eternal search for God, with death as his only certainty."


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The tension between the idealistic, questing Knight and his cynical Squire is the element of the movie that probably does the most to make Bergman's allegory a human drama. They are quickly set up as oppo- sites in the opening sequence. Long shots establish the two men on the beach. The Knight rests in a graceful pose, awake and thinking, his cape spread over his arm. By his side is his chess set, emblem of his intellectuality. The Squire, on the other hand, sprawls on the stones, trying to keep the light out of his eyes so he can catch the last moments of sleep. When we come in for close-ups of the two men, we find them still further contrasted. The face of the Knight (Max von Sydow) is made up to accent its length; the forehead is lined, the cheeks sunken. The face of the Squire (Gunnar Bjornstrand) is round and chubby; his hair is clipped to the length of bristles, and we can see a long scar on his head. The unsuccessful, silent attempt of the Knight to pray establishes him as a man of troubled faith. The song sung by the Squire - "Between a strumpet's legs to lie/Is the life for which I sigh"-- establishes him as a much earthier character. Friction exists between the two men. The Squire sings his song in order to irritate the Knight, and the Knight works hard to ignore the singing. But there seems also to be a certain tolerance or understanding between the two. When the Knight asks the Squire to stop his singing, he does so amicably enough. He has made his point -enough is enough. And the Knight passes bread to the Squire almost unthinkingly. These are men used to getting on together despite their different outlooks. The rest of the movie plays on their interrelationship - their clashes that can flare up bitterly, and their moments of accord.

At the wayside chapel the Knight confesses two things. First, he wants hard knowledge of God's existence - not faith, not superstitions, but real knowledge. Coming back from the bloodbath of the crusades to find his native country afflicted with the plague, he can only doubt the existence of a benign God. Second, he admits that in his questing he has grown isolated from other human beings. He would like to perform "one meaningful deed." He will try to hold off Death in a chess battle to gain time so that he can perform such a deed. The Knight then has two different quests. The first he pursues with his questions of Death and of the witch; the second he pursues with his act of kindness for the family of actors, Jof, Mia, and their son, Mikael.

Jof and Mia are not the Holy Family, but they are comparable to Joseph and Mary in a way similar to the way Rembrandt's contempo- rary Dutch family is in his painting, "The Holy Family." Jof tells tall tales and even steals a bracelet. Mia doubts her husband's visions. But


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the family does have a kind of holiness; it resides in their capacity to love and comfort each other and in their simple, naive faith, he in his visions and she in the goodness of life. Always Jof and Mia are photo- graphed in full noon light; their scenes are slightly overexposed. They are flooded with light, compared to the dark, shadowy scenes where the Knight encounters Death. Bergman has never done a gentler scene than the one in which Mia offers milk and strawberries to the Knight. A breeze blows the canvas of the wagon; the actor's horse stands still on the rise behind the group, and Jof plays softly on his lyre. The Knight catches the mood perfectly when he says, "I'll carry this mem- ory between my hands as carefully as if it were a bowl filled to the brim with fresh milk." Failing to find God, the Knight has at least found an earthly equivalent - the capacity for love and kindness. It is this human capacity which the Knight can try to serve before he loses to Death, as he must eventually.

This capacity for love and kindness is precisely what Professor Isak Borg, the protagonist of Wild Strawberries, finds lacking in himself. The journey in this film is a motor ride from Stockholm to Lund under- taken by Borg and his daughter-in-law Marianne. Professor Borg, who is seventy-eight, makes the trip to receive an honorary degree for service in the field he taught, bacteriology. What should be a day of tri- umph is exactly the reverse. Borg is forced to confront the fact that he is a lonely, isolated individual who has spent much of his life in retreat from emotional involvement with others. Marianne points this out to him by reminding him of his abrupt refusal to be drawn into her marital problems with his son. The journey takes Borg through the area in which he grew up, and dream reconstructions of the past rush back. With painful clarity Borg can see solidifying the pattern of his retreat from emotional involvement. He has been betrayed by two women, but these betrayals, as he can see now, were brought on in large measure by his own fear of sexuality and of emotion in general. The most moving part of the film, though, may be the clarity with which Borg comes to see his weaknesses. No man, we might feel, should have to see himself that clearly - it is too painful.

The idea for the movie, Bergman has stated, came to him on a journey he himself took by car to Uppsala. He drove to the section where he had grown up, went up to the door of his former house, and thought that if he were to open the door he would find himself back in the world of his childhood.

Throughout Bergman's career, the close-up was to become a more


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important part of his technique, and it is very important in Wild Straw- berries. Bergman was fascinated with the face of Victor Seastrom, a former director in Sweden and America, who played Borg. Bergman wrote in his diary, "I never stop prying, shamelessly studying this powerful face. Sometimes it is like a dumb cry of pain, sometimes it is dis- torted by mistrustful cruelty and senile querulousness, sometimes it dis- solves into self-pity and astoundingly sentimental effusions." Close-ups of Borg's face do much to tell us the impact the dreams of the past have on him. Yet one critic, Vernon Young, has objected to the close-ups on the grounds that Seastrom's face is too gentle, too benign a face for one who is supposed to be as cold and egotistical as Borg at the film's be- ginning. The point is a good one. For the main effect of registering hurt from the dreams, however, all critics agree that the close-ups of Sea- strom are extremely effective.

Wild Strawberries contains four dreams. Three of them are overexposed slightly and are glaringly bright, as we might expect; they may have been shot on faster film stock than the rest of the movie. The first is a nightmare warning of approaching death. The second is Borg's reconstruction of a scene in the patch of wild strawberries where his fiancee, Sara, finds herself attracted to Borg's brother and confesses she is made uneasy by Borg's aloofness and seriousness. Especially painful is the separation of Borg, the dreamer, from the characters of his dream. He calls out to them as if he would stop the events or change them, but he can not make the dream characters hear him. The third dream is clearly masochistic. Borg dreams he is subjected to an examination in the classroom and fails it hopelessly (the scene was inspired by a similar inquisition in Strindberg's Dream Play); he then looks on the seduction of his wife by her lover and listens, as he did in real life, to her say that Borg will not really care because he is incapable of emotion. The last dream, which comes to Borg after he has made an attempt to help his son, shows him in a more peaceful relationship with the figures of his past. Wild Strawberries tries to get at the inner life of a man. Normally we would expect such subject matter to be material for a novel, rather than for a film which must deal with photo- graphed surfaces. Indeed, there is a great deal of voiceover narration in the movie as Borg recounts his feelings as a novelist would. Mainly, however, Bergman, like Fellini in Italy and Resnais in France, tries to find the visual images that will externalize his character's inner emotional life.

In the 1960s Bergman turned away from movies with large casts and began to make movies which he called "chamber" films, a term


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he got from Strindberg. It refers to dramas that take place in a re- stricted locale with a small number of characters. In his chamber films Bergman concentrated particularly on women who are subtle in their interrelationships. Bergman's best in this genre is Persona (1965).

The close-up is even more dominant in Persona than it was in Wild Strawberries; over half of the shots in the film are close-ups. Bergman asks us to look at the outer mask (which is what the word persona means) and try to see through it to the interior motives of his characters. In the sixties Bergman took on a new cinematographer, Sven Nykvist, in place of the man he worked with in his earlier films, Gun- nar Fischer. As a result, the Bergman style shifted. Contrasts of shadow and light were still important, but the contrasts were no longer between pitch black and glaring white but between grey and dappled white. Some viewers find the style of Bergman and Nykvist in Persona more subtle than that of Bergman and Fischer in The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries. Others find it less dramatic.

Bergman calls Persona a film about a tension that exists between two women. Almost surely the movie derives from Strindberg's short play, The Stronger. In the play two characters appear on stage, but only one speaks. The silence of the one drives the other to talk compulsively, to attack the other, and to launch into a revealing self-confession. In Bergman's movie an actress, Elizabeth Vogler, suddenly refuses to speak any more. It would seem to be a case of hysteria. The doctor, however, tells us Elizabeth has discovered that her outer shell - her words and actions - do not match her inner feelings. Rather than lie, Elizabeth refuses to talk or go on with her life. But the doctor adds that the silence could be also a fearful retreat from life. A nurse, Alma, is assigned by the doctor to take Elizabeth to a summer home on the beach and lead her back to health. The silence drives Alma to talk about herself. At first, she presents herself as an orderly person: she likes nursing; she will marry her fiance; she will have children. But soon she confesses to a sexual escapade that does not seem to fit the smooth picture of herself. Elizabeth writes a letter to the doctor, mocking Alma's confession. Alma reads the letter and turns on Elizabeth with a ferocity that again does not match the smooth picture of herself she likes to present. Eventually Alma grows so much like Elizabeth that she can take Elizabeth's place in a dreamed love scene with Elizabeth's husband, and she can describe to her patient Elizabeth's feelings about her son. At this point, Bergman flashes on the screen a composite face, one half Elizabeth's and one half Alma's. Throughout the film up until


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this point he had constantly juxtaposed the faces so that the audience could notice the resemblances between the two actresses, Liv Ullmann (Elizabeth) and Bibi Andersson (Alma). Here, in the one shot, they merge. Alma has pierced the shell of Elizabeth; the result for her is a harrowing education. For Elizabeth, the fearful contact seems a re- lease. After the contact with Alma, she gradually comes to speak and finally to return to her life on stage. Between the two women there is a fierce struggle for survival and for dominance, and there is also an erotic attraction. Bergman's description of the movie as a "tension" is surely the best summary of the relationship.

Shortly after Persona, Bergman and Nykvist began to experiment with color. Their first movies in color were not particularly distin- guished. However, their success with color as a means to strong emotional impact in Cries and Whispers in 1972 indicates that there still exists an area of filmmaking for Bergman to explore, and that he still has the curiosity to explore it.

Bergman has always liked to think of himself as a conjuror who can surprise and entertain an audience with his illusions. Paradoxically, many critics consider him to be one of those directors- along with Antonioni and Resnais - who have brought into being the contempo- rary intellectual film. Bergman is a thoughtful man. Separateness is the state he has his characters fear most - separateness from God in some films, and separateness from the people around them in others. The capacity to touch another is what they seek. But in working with such concerns Bergman will stop at no device, no trick, to make his films startle and interest an audience. He borrows from the stage and from early horror films, and he invents from his own imagination - all to the end of drawing a gasp from the audience. When he fails, it is often because he is too dramatic or too stagey for a given situation. When he succeeds, it is usually because he has found the means to make his situation stunning. Bergman is a mixture of the thoughtful intellectual and the shameless entertainer.

CREDITS THE SEVENTH SEAL

Released Sweden and USA, 1957. Produced by Svensk Filmindustri. Directed by Ingmar Bergman. Screenplay by Ingmar Bergman. Photog- raphy: Gunnar Fischer. Music: Erik Nordgren. Sound: Aaby Wedin and Lennart Wallin. Sets: P. A. Lundgren. Costumes: Manne Lind-


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holm. Make-up: Nils Nittel and Carl Lundh. Editor: Lennart Wallen. Running time: 96 minutes. Black and white.

Cast Knight, Antonius Block .............. Max von Sydow Squire Jons .....................Gunnar Bjomstrand Death .............................. Bengt Ekerot Jof ................................... Nils Poppe M ia ...............................Bibi Andersson Lisa

....................................Inga G ill Skat ............................. Erik Strandmark Plog ..................................Ake Fridell Raval ............................Bertil Anderberg Silent Girl ........................Gunnel Lindblom Witch ..............................Maud Hansson Monk ................................. Anders Ek Knight's Wife ............................Inga Gill Church Painter ......................Gunnar Olsson Leader of Soldiers ................... Ulf Johansson

16mm distributor: Janus Films, 745 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022, (212) 753-7100.

SEQUENCE OUTLINE 1. The beach. Morning. Death appears to the Knight, who holds him

off with the challenge of the chess game. The Knight and the Squire begin their journey to the Knight's castle.

2. The wagon of the actors. Jof sees the Virgin. Mia scoffs at his vision. They discuss with Skat the play about Death they are to perform at the saints' feast in Elsinore.

3. The wayside chapel. The Knight confesses to Death his religious doubts and his tendency toward aloofness. Unknowingly, he reveals his chess strategy. The Squire talks with the church painter about the worthlessness of religion and the folly of the crusades. Together the Knight and the Squire discover the witch.

4. A group of peasant cottages. The Squire rescues the silent girl from Raval.

5. The outdoor stage at the inn. Jof, Mia, and Skat perform a play about a marriage triangle. While Jof and Mia are on stage, Skat begins an affair behind the stage with the smith's wife, Lisa.


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6. The same stage. The procession of flagellants arrives. The monk denounces the people at the inn. He tells them that their sins have brought on the plague.

7. The interior of the inn. Noon meal. Raval tries to sell Jof the bracelet Raval has stolen. Plog, the smith, asks Jof about the actor who ran off with Lisa. Raval tortures Jof by making him dance like a bear. The Squire rescues Jof and scars Raval. Jof steals the bracelet.

8. The wagon of the actors, near the inn. The Knight is attracted by Mia and her child. Jof returns and is comforted by Mia. The Squire joins the circle. Mia offers milk and strawberries. The Knight in- vites the actors to come with him through the forest and to visit his home. Death resumes the chess game with the Knight.

9. The yard of the inn. Sundown. The Squire and Plog discuss marriage.

10. The trail in the forest. Night. The travelers encounter the soldiers who are taking the witch to the area where she'll be burnt at the stake. The Knight questions her. He gives her a vial to ease her pain. The Squire considers killing the soldiers. The pyre is lit.

11. Further in the forest. The travelers discover Skat and Lisa. Skat pretends to kill himself with a stage knife. He climbs a tree, and Death claims him by sawing down the tree.

12. A clearing. Near dawn. The travelers rest. Raval, dying of the plague, comes toward the group to ask for water. The Squire keeps back the silent girl. Raval dies. Death wishes to end the chess game with the Knight. The Knight diverts Death's attention by knocking over the chess pieces, and Jof and Mia escape.

13. The road in the forest. Dawn. Jof and Mia huddle in the wagon as the cold wind passes over them.

14. The Knight's castle. The Knight greets his wife. At breakfast, she reads to the group from the Book of Revelations. Death comes for the travelers.

15. On the road in the open countryside. Morning. Jof sees the Dance of Death.

STUDY QUESTIONS 1. This film has been called a composite of medieval miracle play

and modern drama of skepticism and doubt. What elements in the film belong to the Middle Ages, and what ones to modern times?

2. How do the Knight and Squire complement each other? How


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does Bergman shift the audience's attention from one to the other? How does the Squire provide comic relief to the Knight, and how does the Knight provide emotional relief from the Squire? What are the key sequences for each?

3. It has been said that the best ghosts are the most realistic. Do you think that Bergman has chosen the best means (or compromise) in portraying Death? How is Death characterized? Is he cruel, without sympathy or humor?

4. What effect is created by Death's discovery in the chapel of the Knight's chess strategy? What does the Knight finally achieve through the chess match?

5. Describe the positive attributes of the "Holy Family" - Jof, Mia, and the baby. What negative attributes or lackings do you find in them, especially Jof? Why is the vision of happiness granted to him alone?

6. The former theology student is perhaps the nearest thing the film has to a villain. What characteristics has Bergman chosen to give him?

7. Comment on the structural balance of the sequences in which the stage players offer their farce, the actor seduces the smith's wife, and the procession of flagellants passes by. How do the sequences comment on each other?

8. What is the spiritual message of the flagellant monk, and how does his facial expression affect the audience and us?

9. In the scenes involving the girl about to be burned to death, ex- plain the reasons why the Knight, otherwise so moder-minded, seems to accept the ritual murder, and even seems to believe in the witch's power to see the devil.

10. The implications of the Knight's conversations with the witch are that one can come to know good through evil, God through the devil. How are these scenes counterbalanced by the wild strawberry scene with the juggler and his wife?

11. What kind of overall depiction of the institution of the church does the movie offer?

12. In the final sequence, comment on the restraint of the meeting of the Knight and his wife. Is their meeting too restrained? Are we to believe that they were happy before he left for the crusades? What possible subtleties or ambiguities could be concealed behind the long silences and looks between them?

13. The young girl rescued by the Squire remains a background figure throughout most of the film. Why does Bergman single her out


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for the last long look at Death, in a scene where she speaks her first words in the film? (She says, "It is done.")

14. Are the Knight's questions answered in the film? What does he learn by the end of the film? The necessity of a "leap of faith"?

15. How does Bergman use the sea and the forest as major visual symbols in this film?

16. In the juxtaposition of the Dance of Death and the escaping wagon of the juggler's family at the end, what is Bergman trying to say about life and death?

17. Bergman has been accused of staginess--indeed, he has wide experience as a theater director. On the stage, certain exaggerated actions and visual effects are necessary if everyone in the audience is to see. But in movies, where the camera easily records the smallest gesture, the general rule is: less is more. Are there shots where the visual effect is too exaggerated for the film medium?

18. Film theoretician Siegfried Kracauer says that all historical pic- tures are uncinematic because they are false to photographic reality, that all we see are actors in costumes. In terms of the realistic power of setting and locale, how do you rate the scenes on the deserted farm, the tavern scenes, and the final castle scene?

19. What shots, scenes, or sequences seem to be lit in a particularly effective way?

20. Comment on the effectiveness of the two-shots used in the scene where the Knight confesses to Death in the chapel.

21. Why does Bergman balance the family of Jof and Mia with the marital triangle of Plog, Lisa, and Skat?

22. As the above questions indicate, the film tries to fuse widely scattered elements: moder skepticism and medieval faith; the super- natural, stage illusion, and straightforward reality; sexual farce and tragic sacrifice. There are many groups of characters with different concerns. Is the film too diffuse? Does Bergman hold it all together?

SUGGESTIONS FOR ADDITIONAL READING

Bergman, Ingmar. Four Screenplays. Trans. Lars Malmstrom and David Kushner. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960. Contains the original manuscripts of The Seventh Seal, Smiles of a Summer Night, Wild Straw- berries, and The Magician. In the actual shooting, the movies have diverged slightly from the screenplays. Useful, however, because Bergman often de- scribes precisely the mood or effect he wants certain sequences to have.

. "Interview." Playboy 11, no. 6 (June 1964), 61-68. General attitudes about filmmaking.


76 JOHN C. STUBBS

. The Seventh Seal. Trans. Lars Malmstrom and David Kushner. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960. The "literary script" of the movie; that is, the dialogue actually spoken in the film.

"What Is Film Making?" Film Makers on Film Making. Ed. Harry Geduld. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967, pp. 177-90. General attitudes about filmmaking.

Bjorkman, Stig; Manns, Torsten; and Sima, Jonas. Bergman on Bergman. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974. Bergman is drawn out in an interview on his life and on filmmaking. The closest thing we have to an auto- biography.

Bobker, Lee. Elements of Film. 2nd ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovano- vich, 1974, pp. 48-53, 55-56, 66-68, 103-4, and 182-84. A textbook on technical aspects of the film medium. Bobker uses Bergman to illustrate his ideas about composition, lighting, film stock, and color. A brief but very helpful commentary on Cries and Whispers.

Cowie, Peter. "Ingmar Bergman." Sweden 2. New York: A. S. Barnes & Co., 1970, pp. 95-197. Cowie is probably the best English-speaking critic of Bergman. A film-by-film analysis of Bergman's work, noting major trends. Good on Bergman's treatment of women. Good bibliography.

Donner, Jom. The Films of Ingmar Bergman. Trans. Holger Lundbergh. New York: Dover Publications, 1972. Donner is a Swedish reviewer and director. Along with Cowie's book, Donner's work is the best general introduction to Bergman.

Mellen, Joan. "Bergman and Women." Women and Their Sexuality in the New Film. New York: Horizon Press, 1973, pp. 106-27. Mellen is an ardent women's liberationist, and she attacks the notion that Bergman is a moviemaker sympathetic to women. His women, she finds, are unable "to choose a style of life independent of the female sex role" and often they are shown as repulsed by sex. A counterbalance to Cowie's viewpoint.

Simon, John. Ingmar Bergman Directs. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovano- vich, 1972. An interview with Bergman and essays on Naked Night, Smiles of a Summer Night, Winter Light, and Persona.

Steene, Birgitta. Focus on "The Seventh Seal." Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Pren- tice-Hall, 1972. An excellent collection of reviews and critical essays on the film.

.Ingmar Bergman. New York: Twayne Press, 1968. A general introduction to the man and his work, with emphasis on Bergman's existential- ism. Not quite as thoughtful a work as those of Cowie and Donner.

Young, Vernon. Cinema Borealis: Ingmar Bergman and the Swedish Ethos. New York: David Lewis, 1971. A cranky, eccentric book. Young discusses Bergman in the context of Swedish society. However, Young detests Swedish society and never gets far beyond easy stereotypes. Nevertheless, he does offer an intelligent attack on Wild Strawberries, intelligent praise of The Virgin Spring, and a useful section on The Seventh Seal. The book contains a lot of background material on Bergman.

NOTE: Special mention must be made of a very good film parody of the typi- cal Bergman movie. The parody is called The Dove, and it was written and directed by Renee Taylor and Joseph Bologna. It runs fifteen minutes and is available on loan from the film section of many public libraries.


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Issue Table of ContentsJournal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 9, No. 2, Apr., 1975Front Matter [pp. 1 - 3]Griffith Biograph Shorts [pp. 5 - 17]Stagecoach [pp. 18 - 31]Citizen Kane [pp. 32 - 49]Bicycle Thieves [pp. 50 - 61]The Seventh Seal [pp. 62 - 76]North by Northwest [pp. 77 - 95]8 1/2 [pp. 96 - 108]Blow-Up [pp. 109 - 122]Book Reviewsuntitled [pp. 123 - 124]untitled [pp. 124 - 126]untitled [pp. 126 - 127]

Briefly Noted [pp. 127 - 128]Back Matter

john stubbs- the seventh seal

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