Bergman Marathon :: The Seventh Seal (1957)

"Say anything you want against The Seventh Seal. My fear of death—this infantile fixation of mine—was, at that moment, overwhelming. I felt myself in contact with death day and night, and my fear was tremendous. When I finished the picture, my fear went away. I have the feeling simply of having painted a canvas in an enormous hurry—with enormous pretension but without any arrogance. I said, 'Here is a painting; take it, please.'"
— Ingmar Bergman, (1971)

In The Seventh Seal, a knight, Antonius Block (Max von Sydow, in one of his earliest roles), and his squire Jöns (Gunnar Björnstrand) return from the crusades to find medieval Sweden teetering on the brink of apocalypse. The plague ravages the land, the church scours the country with doomsday rhetoric and zealotry, and the common people live in squalor and fear. Block, like his country, faces the dark night of his soul as Death (eerily personified by Bengt Ekerot) comes to claim him. However, Block, though not surprised that Death should find him, is suffering a crisis of faith and so, wracked with doubts about life, death and God and seeking a stay of execution just long enough to find some answers, proposes to Death that they play a game of chess in order to delay the inevitable.

The Seventh Seal is a much more complex film than Smiles of a Summer Night; it is personal and yet mythic, harrowing and yet somehow cathartic. While neither Bergman nor the knight seem to really arrive at any of the answers that the Knight seeks, both of them seem to find some comfort along the way. While The Seventh Seal is not necessarily an atheistic or sacrilegious film, it does lean towards a a sense of frustrated agnosticism and, emerging out of this frustration, towards a sense of burgeoning humanism . The only real comfort Antonius Block ever finds during his journey is in the company of other people, such as the troupe of actors that eventually travel with him. These actors, Jof (Nils Poppe) and Mia (Bibi Andersson), along with their infant son Michael, seem to form Bergman's own version of the holy family, reconstituted in The Seventh Seal as common, earthy people, free from the vulgarities and pretenses of organized religion and politics. Like Petra and Frid in Smiles of a Summer Night, Jof and Mia seem to represent Bergman's ideal. The two films, in fact, end in similar fashions, with both happy young couples living freely and simply in nature while at the same time possessing a sobering insight into the condition of humanity.

Bergman is a master a human sympathy and he is able, seemingly out of the air, to conjure within his audience feelings of intense affection, startling terror, honour, anxiety, disgust and love. Max von Sydow, tormented by doubt, is at once both Bergman and the audience. However, almost every major character in Bergman's films are rich and human and so, depending upon the scene, audiences find themselves effortlessly identifying with each major character, now with the anxiety of Antonius Block, now with the cynicism and world-weary honour of Jöns, now with the the soft sensuality of Mia. In fact, the only major character unable to arouse sympathy at all is Death, a character without personality or temperament. He merely is and, like he himself says, is "unknowing." On top of all this, and enhancing the actors brilliant performances, is that fact that the film is utterly beautiful. Its stark and iconic images, its subtle and gentle camera moves, its steady and soft editing all combine to create a visually stunning experience. There are no extravagances here; the artifice is almost invisible, allowing the characters to simply be.

It is really quite possible to go on at great length about The Seventh Seal. Its tightly allegorical structure, its political and religious anxieties, its rich and metaphorical characters, all of these can inspire pages and pages of commentary. What resonates so timelessly, though, are the raw and basic questions that the film asks and, unlike most films, attempts to answer.

experto crede: an undeniable masterpiece

Bergman Marathon :: Smiles of a Summer Night (1955)

(As most people with even a passing interest in film already know, the legendary Ingmar Bergman recently passed away. It seems obscene, but I had never before seen a Bergman film. With his passing, and by way of tribute, I have decided that it's about time that I catch up with this auteur. This review will be the first of several reviews, or rather miscellaneous notes and comments, on several classic Bergman films. Whenever I begin to explore a new filmmaker, I like to begin close to the beginning in order to get a sense of the artistic trajectory of his or her career. Smiles of a Summer Night was one of Bergman's first international successes, so I will begin here.)

Smiles of a Summer Night is about love, sex and society and how the three interact, complicate or complement each other, and about what (if anything) can bring happiness to more-often-than-not unhappy people. Like most great films, there is no true precision when it comes to identifying the generic label of Smiles - it is a drama, a comedy, a period piece and a comedy of manners. It is all these thing, and it is seamlessly so. The film follows four perhaps mismatched couples as they try to understand their lives and their desires, all of whom find themselves exposed to each other and vulnerable during one weekend in the country. In its depiction of the dark waters of human emotion, Smiles of a Summer Night is not quite uplifting, not quite depressing, but gently straddles the line between the two, leaning sometimes towards a breezy sense of romantic ennui, sometimes towards a renewed sense of life and lust. None of this is to say that Smiles lacks focus, as if it cannot quite make up its mind about what it wants to be or say. Rather, the film seems to be saying that the enjoyment of love, sex and society is complicated and perhaps even foiled by imposed issues of class and morality and the anxieties, pressures and neuroses that are created by both.

Like Stanley Kubrick will later do, Bergman seems to suggest that much of society - with its rituals, rules and highly wrought codes of manners - is essentially sterile, mostly devoid of life and vigor. These rituals, instead of facilitating human enjoyment only seem to frustrate it. Smiles of a Summer Night, however, is not nearly as fatalist or as nihilistic as Kubrick's films. Bergman's bourgeoisie drift about, plagued by doubt and regret, seemingly content and yet haunted by past infatuations (like the character of Fredrik Egerman), they plot and scheme in order to get their own way (like Desiree Armfeldt and the Countess Malcolm), they are tormented by the strict morality imposed upon them by society and religion (like Fredrik's son, Henrik). It is the lower classes, the maids and the butlers who, like in so many Shakespearean plays, manifest a careless bawdiness and an innocent carnality, who live outside the strictures of polite society, who give themselves over to warm sensual pleasures, it is these who get any sort of enjoyment and fulfillment from life and yet even this enjoyment is coloured by a slightly melancholy tint of realism, by the awareness that life and love are rarely perfect and so one might as well make the best of it.

The internal conflict between the rituals of society and the desires of the flesh is vividly encapsulated in the character of Henrik, Fredrik's conflicted son who cannot find peace in the strict religious life he has chosen for himself. In one scene, Henrik, vexed by his own self- and church-imposed virtue, prepares to commit suicide while from a window he enviously watches the uninhibited Petra the Maid and Frid the Groom flirt, giggle and dance. Henrik, in spite of himself and his rigid sense of morality, is in love his his father's young virgin wife Anne (whom Fredrik, still in love with a former mistress, has not yet made love to). At the moment of despair and suicide, however, Henrik is saved by a chance turn of events that leads him, not only to a personal revelation, but also into the arms of Anne, who, young and eager and sexually ignored by her husband, has apparently been in love with him all the time. Mutually disregarding social convention, the new young lovers elope, leaving Fredrik not so much angry at the betrayal as simply bewildered that he has misunderstood love for so long (a betrayal, it is probably important to note, that goes against law and not flesh, since the marriage of Anne and Fredrik had never been consummated).

But perhaps the quintessential scene from Smiles of a Summer Night is the final one, in which Petra, while literally rolling in the hay, playfully forces Frid to swear that he will marry her. "Swear by everything you hold sacred," she demands, to which Frid happily replies, "I swear by my manhood!" Bergman, at least on this film, seems to have settled on lusty, rustic, full-bodied sensuality as the ideal pleasure in life. Here, on the outskirts of society, sex and love and playfulness combine to create a warm, earthy ideal in which men and women, without the pretense of ritual and convention, simply enjoy one another. I don't think that Bergman is saying high society needs to get off its high horse and play in the dirt; I think that he may be saying that the dirt isn't really all that dirty and should be raised up too.

With Smiles of a Summer Night, Bergman created a sly, slightly subversive look at polite society. It is a parable of love that just barely refrains from being didactic. The film actually resembles several of Shakespeare's own comedies: a certain carnivalesque atmosphere presides over the entire film, conventions are upset, jealousies are aroused, duels ensue and, in the end, everyone ends paired together as they should be. Even this early in his career, Bergman shows real artistry and he finds a why to make what is essentially a very "talky" movie seem dramatic, compelling and quite exquisite. Since this is the first Bergman film I have seen, I do not yet have a body of work against which to compare this film. Perhaps I have misread several of Bergman's concerns; if I have, that's all part of the fun of discovering new landscapes. However, this much I can say: based on viewing this film, I am very much looking forward to exploring more of his work. The human heart is a fascinating thing, and getting to know an artist's understanding of it, regardless of whether or not you agree with him, is always an intriguing and compelling project. One could do a lot worse than spend some time with Ingmar Bergman.

experto crede: a strong recommendation, especially for those looking for comedy or romance with a slightly philosophical bent