The Seventh Seal Ingmar Bergman (Swe; 1957) Max von Sydow; Gunnar Bjornstand, Nils Poppe, Bibi Anderson, Bengt Ekerot
viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 6th July 25; ticket: £7
At the dawn of the new idols
Bergman set ‘The Seventh Seal’ in fourteenth century Europe against the background of the Black Death. The depicted spectacles of flagellant processions and witch hunts contrast fear induced superstition with ‘The Knight’s’ demand for a knowable ‘God’. But although the Medieval scenes – including the painting and sculptures – work as effective cinematic contrivances, Bergman’s film today points to the concerns of his own time, the 1950’s and the consequences of the living in a techno rational world.
To see Ingmar Bergman’s ‘The Seventh Seal’ some 70 years after it was made is to reflect on how the psychic mood of Europe has changed. At the time Bergman made his movie, Europe could still be seen as Christian continent. True that for many ‘belief’ was somewhat mechanical but the idea of a big man ‘God’ was a dominating part of the ‘Western’ condition. ‘God’ was an idea that could shape life and give it an overarching meaning that we exist enveloped within a moral metaphysical context.
The events of the twentieth century caused many Europeans to hold the Christian God to account both in terms of the disasters that had been experienced in Europe and the growing fear of a portended world wide catastrophe. During WWll under the Nazis, Germany (that most devout of European countries) had committed mass murder on an industrial scale in the attempted genocide of the Jewish people: so where was God? And by 1957 the world’s two super powers had developed hydrogen bombs and effected means for their delivery. The human race had attained to a power that in the Book of Revelation (a quotation from which bookends the movie) was reserved to God alone: the capacity to destroy all life on the planet. ‘Man’ had become ‘God’.
The collectivist ethos of the 19th and first part of the twentieth century enabled religion in general and Christianity in particular to survive both the First World War and Darwin’s reframing of the origins of life. But the 20th century’s explosive dissemination of science based technologies created generations capable of independent thought based on: knowledge. Bergman’s ‘Knight’ asserts he wants ‘knowledge’; but there is no empirical knowledge of God: only – faith. The attempt by the Marxist-Leninist dialectic to ground meaning in a socio-historical paradigm, lost credibility as it reduced humankind to being pawns in the race to the end of time, a concept in itself that had no meaning. To Bergman humankind was entering an existential void.
By 1957 both Europe and the USA were undergoing a complete revolution in the way people lived. This was brought about by the transmutation of the material and biological sciences into technologies which changed the everyday facts of life. Automobiles, labour saving devices, communication, increased automation allied with anti-biotics and a range of medicines (contraceptive pills were introduced in 1957 but initially as medication to regularise ovulation) started to remove many of the chance factors previously endemic to being alive. Alongside this disposable incomes increased leading to the burgeoning development of the leisure ethos for a large percentage of Western people. Fashion, long holidays, the entertainment industry: it was as if paradise had developed and occupied its own earthly niches. Heaven had come down to Earth; who had to wait for death to have the good life?
Max von Sydow as ‘the Knight’ is cast as a noble Medieval archetype; but of course he’s a stand-in for Bergman asking the questions that for Bergman had urgency in the 1950’s: “What will happen to those of us who want to believe but aren’t able to?” The rip tide of history the tsunami of invention put Europe in a place where it was difficult to accept the idea of ‘God’. ‘The Knight’ like others of Bergman’s generation demands to some sort of proof for the existence of God…
In the scripting of ‘The Seventh Seal’ Bergman captures that time in the 1950’s when accelerated changes in life conditions gave questions about the relationship of man to God, an immediacy. As voiced by ‘The Knight’ there is urgency to his despair as he realises he lives in a ghost world – he wants to confess but his heart is empty. Bergman has chronicled that point in time from which there is no turning back, in which belief in God is now unsustainable and humankind living off the wealth of systematic exploitation of the world’s resources, is happy to believe only in itself, discarding its irrational protective and restrictive carapace of belief.
Viewing the film today, it comes across as an historical document of a time from which Europe has moved on. The demands of the Knight seem abstract in the sense that in the West ‘personal identity’ has now overtaken collective belief, both religious and political, as the fulcrum about which life revolves. To a greater extent the assertion of ‘I’ as an imperative now dominates discourse. Accelerated by the tide of the digital revolution and the concomitant societal throughwash of social media, society has atomised into individuated units that revolve about identity nuclei. On viewing ‘The Seventh Seal’ the feeling that comes is that we enjoy the film enjoy being part of ‘The Knight’s’ chess playing journey; we understand his concerns about Man’s relation to God and are interested that there should be such concerns; but by and large we find them irrelevant to today.
The film works because it is carried by the statuesque performance of
Max von Sydow, superbly established, along with Ekerot’s ‘Death’ by Bergman in the opening beach/chess scenes. It is Sydow, in body and mien, who sustains the tensions endemic in the script, posing questions to which he knows there are no answers and increasingly at one with his own mortality. He sits down with Mia and Joff to enjoy that greatest gift of being alive and open the to world, a plate of freshly gathered wild strawberries. Meanwhile his the chess party with Death continues through to the end game.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk