The triumph of Death: The Seventh Seal on DVD

Clouds clothe the dawn, a terrified chorus trembles unseen, an eagle hangs so black and still as to seem stenciled out of the sky, a disembodied voice reads from the Revelation of John, horses wade ankle-deep in the sea. Death (Bengt Ekerot) appears on these rocky shores before the knight Antonius Block (Max Von Sydow), newly returned from the Crusades to a plague-ravaged Scandinavia. When the reaper raises his cloak he might as well be ripping open a black hole, but the gaunt, blue-eyed, deceptively young Antonius does not succumb so easily. He challenges Death to a round of chess. He’s seen paintings and heard ballads and knows he’s met a willing adversary. He doesn’t expect to win but merely buy time, hoping to use his reprieve to perform one meaningful act. If in the meantime he could also glean some evidence of God’s existence he wouldn’t complain.

Did such a chillingly seductive embodiment of death appear before Ingmar Bergman before he departed from this world on his beloved island of Fårö nearly two years ago at the age of 89? Did he bargain, propose a game to play, or merely smile knowing that he’d staged all this before? It’s worth evoking the establishing moments of Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) as a reminder that there is here a thoughtful, personal, richly detailed and diversely populated movie, and not just still images so oppressively iconic as to discourage actual engagement. Its impact on international film culture was paradigm shifting, but it’s also an entertainment, an apocalyptic road movie as witty, bawdy and playful as it is gloomy. (“A skull is more interesting than a naked woman,” a painter quips. Bergman was shrewd enough that over the course of his career he often gave us both.) It’s a parable of doubt and regeneration, set in a slyly modern Middle Ages; a nimbly acted, gorgeously staged and photographed tale of disillusioned yet resilient figures—the knight and his squire, a company of traveling players, a cuckolded smith and his juicy wife—traversing a world wracked with violence wrought by the twin terrors of metastasizing civilization and religious piety. (Need we say more about its relevance to our world today?)

I first saw The Seventh Seal half a lifetime ago, thanks, however improbably, to the programmers at faith-based Vision TV, who aired it a few times when I was in my teens. I’m pretty sure it changed my life. Truthfully, I’ve never felt compelled to herald it my favourite Bergman—in just a few years the director’s succeeding, more mysterious, erotic, neurotic and naturalistically photographed films would render certain farcical aspects of Seal pretty corny—but those images, moments, atmospheres, and lingering questions remain singular to me. I’ve never doubted the depth of the film’s impression on my psyche. Or its conduciveness to replay. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen it on screens big and small, but it’s every time been an immersive, even haunting pleasure.

Criterion’s new special edition, available both in Standard and Blue-ray, complete with well chosen special features and a new, digitally enhanced transfer so sumptuous that even on my piece-of-shit 30-year-old TV I marvel at the difference, offers another excellent excuse to revisit the film. It ages very well. When I see it now I appreciate different details: the fleeting flirtation between Von Sydow and the arrestingly lovely Bibi Andersson at the start of that scene where Antonius and the squire share fresh strawberries and milk with the players; the series of individual portraits Bergman creates as his characters watch the moaning flagellants parade into a square, preaching fire and brimstone to an already fearful village; or the serenity in the face of Gunnel Lindblom when she finally meets Death after a last breakfast and speaks her one line in the entire film: “It is finished.”

The highlight of Criterion’s new package, also available as a separate disc, is Bergman Island (06), Marie Nyreröd’s documentary portrait of Bergman made just a few years before his death. Shot primarily on Fårö, where, following his wife Ingrid’s death, Bergman had lived alone for years, sometimes speaking to no one for days at a time, Nyrerod’s interviews yield unprecedented candour from the filmmaker on topics such as his predilection for love affairs with actresses and his neglectful fathering. Bergman also speaks eloquently about topics as familiar as his parents, his thanatophobia, and his sense that his best work was done in the theatre. The film overall is very moving, its subject in good spirits. There’s startling 16mm footage from the shoots for Seventh Seal and Persona, and a pretty funny little story about getting invited to a pool party by Barbara Streisand. (He declined, and promptly picked up and moved back home after a brief time in Los Angeles.) But what sticks with me most after seeing it is the image of Bergman’s aged hands, narrow, a little shaky, but still so alive as he speaks, and reconsiders.

Death on the installment plan: Julian Barnes tries to overcome his thanatophobia, fails, writes book instead—and it’s pretty good!

Now the leaves shrivel, brown and fall from the trees to be obliviously trampled into wintry pulp; now the air turns crisp and thin, the days shorten and the nights forbiddingly chill—what better time is there to think about death! I’ve been reading the Nothing to Be Frightened Of (Random House, $32.95), English novelist Julian Barnes’ latest work of non-fiction. I’ve been reading it mostly outdoors, perhaps because my denial of summer’s end is nearly as resilient as our collective denial of that bigger, more ominous End. My reading of this divertingly morbid little volume has passed largely over pints of rich, opaque, iron-fortified beer on a tavern’s dusky patio until my fingers ached, a sensation that starts to blur its origins—is it just the coldness or the weakening effects of time on my digits?—once you reach a certain age, and that age likely depends on whenever it was you experienced le réveil mortel, a handy term dreamed up by Charles du Bos which Barnes suggests is best translated as “the wake-up call to mortality.”

I don’t know if this sounds like somebody’s idea of bragging, but I actually can’t even remember my own réveil. It seems like it was always there, already hatched and doing its work on my well-fed anxieties before I even knew what anxiety was. There are those, I’m told—and not only those who ascribe to religious beliefs—who aren’t plagued by fear of death. For them, Nothing to Be Frightened Of should hold some anthropological curiosity, a primer on what the fuss is all about. For the rest of us, Barnes’ pithy, anecdotal and arguably kind of amiably aimless thanatophobist’s memoir is all too familiar in its chronicles of late night sweats, those special sorts of panic attacks reserved for involuntary nocturnal “pit-gazing.” Barnes, now 62, is a non-believer, so his pit, for the record, is truly fucking fathomless, and the title of his book needs to be read with the emphasis on that first word: it is precisely nothing that’s so frightening.

Barnes goes through any number of age-old forms of philosophically intoned consolation, from the religious to the genetic, and finds more than adequate grounds for dismissing every one as insufficient. But consolation, that is, grown-up consolation as opposed to the rubber nipple type, doesn’t seem to be what this book is all about—unless we consider the value of the simple consolation of recognition, the reminder that we’re all in the same boat… even if it’s eventually going to smash into an iceberg.

“It is when faced with death that we turn most bookish,” observed Jules Renard and quoted by the Francophile Barnes, and for me this rings true. Literature, perhaps above all texts that survive their authors, holds a singular link to mortality, and books, hand-held, intimate by nature, closely invoke our private dialogue with time. Barnes, while claiming that if given a strict number of days left would probably chose the emotional mainline of music over books—also pretty sensible if you ask me—thus makes the refrain of Nothing to Be Frightened Of references to the books and authors he knows best, which seem mostly to be late 19th century and early 20th century Euros, like Flaubert, Zola or Turgenev, who, as cited by Barnes, once claimed that Russians have a unique talent for swatting away thoughts of death, making them disappear into the “Slavic mist.” “Nowadays,” Barnes later points out, “both the gesture and the mist are available pharmaceutically.” I guess this would be an example of another form of consolation here: humour, which is something Barnes appears to be in no danger of losing.

Barnes’ book is hardly all-encompassing, its consideration of “how we die” being largely confined to how middle-class westerners with reasonable access to health care die. No matter how universal a chord he strikes in his candid exploration of his own thanatophobia and that of people he’s been close to, Barnes never even begins to account for the varieties of thanatophobia that distinguish us culturally. But in a sense, the specificity of Barnes’ book, the personal aspect of it, is its real strength. As much as anything else, Nothing to Be Frightened Of is about Barnes coming to terms with death through the prism of his own family, through recalling the deaths of his parents and grandparents—each of whom are fun characters to spend time with and vividly drawn by the author—or consulting his renown philosopher brother; through trying hard to remember things about the past and about people, all the while acknowledging that memory and the imagination are nearly interchangeable. Barnes seems perfectly comfortable with the vagaries of memory, since as a novelist he’s vocationally inclined to believe some deeper truth may be gleaned from the (re)construction, however founded on the unintended fictions of our murky consciousness. And in these truths are perhaps a third and last form of consolation: our number may be up sometime, but before then, at least there might be one more sublime spark of understanding. All for naught perhaps, but a spark all the same.