written and directed by Ingmar Bergman

Criterion Collection #11.

i.e. The Seventh Seal. As you can plainly see above. Why, one must ask, was the Criterion edition made from a version of the film where the original title cards had been replaced with English ones? That doesn’t seem right.

I feel much as I did about the Rilke. This is a thing of beauty but not redemptive. It does end on a vague mystical note of redemption, but that’s hard to swallow, I’m afraid, after this movie about the implacable reality of death and the desperate, hopeless illusions we use to try to fight it off. The meaning of life, I think it tells me, is to go on living, try to be good, eat strawberries, enjoy yourself, and help other people if you can. That’s all well and good. But that’s just in the negative space: the movie is principally about the struggle against death, and the answer is: you will lose.

I KNOW, MAN. I’d like to place a request for more cute babies and less horror-of-nothingness-while-being-burned-at-the-stake in my art, please.

I am not asking for the right to bury my head in any sand. I am already fairly dedicated to the elimination of sand; I don’t need some movie dustbusting on me.

Really: I am not espousing escapism over relevance and substance. I want relevance and substance. In fact what I am saying is, to me, in keeping with the philosophy that art has a social obligation. What you put in your art is what you are putting into society. So why fatalism? Why try to lower that temperature when it’s already freezing cold out there?

Fear of death is not a social ill, a cause that can benefit from public airing, Dickens-style. It is simply the essence of human sadness. You can choose that as your subject but who’s going to want to watch that? People starved for candor, I guess. I for one am not starved for candor on this subject.

But who is, truly? Who out there can learn from this movie? Nobody is going to recognize themselves in the flagellants or the witch-burners and realize their error. Nobody is going to be surprised that, yes, man is mortal. Isn’t it a little self-congratulatory for us to say that this movie is profound because we’ve imagined it inspiring philosophical epiphanies in some flimsy straw men? What about me? Where’s my epiphany, Ingmar? We’re all of us that knight in the movie, fighting the good fight. Well, guess what-all he gets out of it.

YES. I KNOW, DUDE. And so does Ingmar, at this point.

I guess art like this serves not as a lesson or even a statement, but as a conversation-starter, which I realize is a ridiculous coffee-table term for what I mean. Casting this material into poetry and film and placing it in front of people gives them a way in on it if they need one, and gives them cues to explore it. I’ve just been there already. Haven’t most people?

Or: a movie like this is meant to be a comfort because it is a commiseration. If you look out your window and see this, fear not, for you are not alone. But I don’t buy that justification. I the individual say, “I am afraid of death.” A comforting, commiserating work of art would say “We all are. But that’s why you at least don’t need to feel alone.” This movie, on the other hand, says, “Afraid of death, eh? Here’s a story about a man who was afraid of death. He died, of course.”

I must acknowledge that the film, because it is thoughtful, makes space to address some of what I’m saying here. The film was inspired by a real medieval painting on a church wall, and within the film we actually see the cynical squire (representing me) asking the painter (representing Ingmar Bergman) why he paints death and disease on the wall instead of nicer things. Here’s his answer. You tell me whether or not this is satisfying:

1: Why all this daubing?
2: To remind people of death.
1: That won’t make them any happier.
2: Why make them happy? Why not scare them?
1: Then they won’t look at your picture.
2: Yes, they will. A skull is more interesting than a naked woman.
1: If you scare them…
2: They’ll think.
1: …then they think.
2. And are still more scared.
1: And fall into the arms of the priests.
2: That’s not my business.
1: You’re only painting your picture.
2: I paint life as it is. Then folk can do as they like.
1: That makes people angry.
2: Then I paint something funny. A man must live. At least till the plague takes him.
1: The plague. Ugh!

That’s fine as dialogue, but I want my artist to be coming from somewhere higher than that.

The painting that inspired Bergman was relevant to him but also quaint. But this movie is not quaint to me, so it needs more than a quaint justification.

And perhaps that’s my problem – I was reluctant to see it as quaint. Even though in nearly every respect other than subject matter it makes clear that it is something small, gentle and homey. Maybe the problem is simply that I am personally too afraid of death to savor this movie, which was never meant to be felt to the bone; just held in the hands and tasted like a piece of bread.

This was a lovely poem on the subject, rich and humane and satisfying to look at. But it’s a downer, and, being very much with it and feeling it insisting that I look annihilation in the eye, I kept having to ask why.

I’m writing this very raw as I think it. A couple of hours interval after the above I have this to say: I would have felt it was more wholesome if it hadn’t reached the ending. The conception of the knight, forever questing and resisting, and his squire, doing his cynical best to remain engaged with earthier things, was rich and gave me food for thought because it was about ways of living; ways of contending with the knowledge of death. If the film had ended while they were still alive, the moral to take away would have been about life. But the end of a film is the answer to a film. A story that begins is already teasing us with the question of how it will end; a closed narrative is at least as much about where it is going as it is about what happens on the way. A story about a man who wants not to die, but in the end dies, is not a story about living. Whereas the stories of our actual lives are indeed stories about living.

You can say: “The movie is exactly like life, in that the point is not where it’s going, because that’s a foregone conclusion; the point is what happens on the way there,” but if you say that, I disagree. Because what happens on the way there? Some scenes and vignettes relating obliquely to the question of the meaning of life and the inevitability of death. The drive of the film, the mechanism that makes it go, is simply a drive toward death, with the brakes on to no avail, as scenery goes by. I need to see life as more than that.

The central event of the plot, such as it is, doesn’t make philosophical sense. The knight saves the young family by distracting Death at the moment that they flee. This, we are led to understand, is the “one meaningful act” he hoped to make. But what can this act possibly represent? Doing good for others, obviously, but if that’s all we were to understand, shouldn’t the knight have, say, saved the witch’s life instead of just walked away and let her burn? Done some social good in the face of the crazed medieval culture of cruelty? Seemingly, the act of knocking over the chess pieces to buy the happy family some time to sneak away from death is supposed to represent something more specific than mere “good,” but in fact it can’t really represent anything. One’s chess game with Death is a completely personal affair, and Death’s attention is everywhere at once. Misdirecting Death so that someone else can sneak away simply makes no sense. If the Death of this film is the Black Death, the plague, there’s no saving another by getting the disease yourself. So what has the knight actually done, with his one meaningful act? It seems like a phony moment of drama, one that requires us to reduce the visual metaphor to a literal fantasy.

Which, incidentally, is how I very much wanted to watch this movie when it was shown in high school. A guy playing chess against Death is cool, right? But I ended up frustrated by the movie because it absolutely refuses to be watched as a ghost story.

Really, what it needs is to be seen as both at once. We must be thinking of “man vs. death” and also of a knight from a fairy tale up against a spook in a cape. It is allegory, but not pure enough allegory to actually watch as allegory. And it certainly can’t be watched as a story. It wants interpretation on levels that shift constantly. I find that very difficult. Perhaps a movie like this needs to be watched even more than the three times I gave it before one gets good at playing along with it. Well, that’s a lot to ask.

Commentary by Peter Cowie was smart and pleasant enough for what it was.

Soundtrack by Erik Nordgren – no, never released or rerecorded – is, like the film, rather theatrical in approach. Mostly made up of very short cues for transitions. The only longer pieces were heavily sound-effected up, so here’s the 24-second Main Title. Dies Irae!