Breaking Down Bergman on The Seventh Seal

Have you seen The Virgin Spring? Summer with Monica is also flawed but interesting. Our Decade in Review episodes (accessible on the main page) wrap up our favourites of both the 40s and 50s, though the 60s episode has yet to be posted.

- David

Breaking Down Bergman
http://www.youtube.com/breakingdownfilms

Amadeus,

Certainly the three you have seen so far are in nearly every Bergman fan's top ten, and in most fans' top five. Ftr I have not seen Virgin Spring or Summer with Monica, but have seen pretty much all of his other major films. The ones called the trilogy are all excellent, particularly The Silence, as well are the later sixties films Shame and Hour of the Wolf. Certainly Scenes from a Marriage and Cries and Whispers should also be recommended to you.

But the film of his I thought was spectacular that I don't always see on other Bergman fans' favorites lists is The Passion. I don't know why not everyone else sees the same virtue in it as I do. It has some oddities, such as including brief interviews with the four main leads about their characters. Some even object to the use of animals during the course of the film. I think some even do not like that it is in color. The name of the film in its English release is problematic as well, since the film is not one based mostly around Liv's character Anna, and so I refer to it merely as The Passion. In fairness I think it requires repeat viewing, since on first viewing it seems to leave some plot questions unanswered, but my own view is that on further viewing you get an understanding of why it does so.

Perhaps it is too unsettling for some. Bergman again uses an island setting, a practice he used in Persona, and then continued in Shame and Hour of the Wolf. In that sense The Passion is tied to the three films that precede it. But here the island setting, despite several outdoor scenes, and several other comfortable bourgeois interior scenes, there is a claustrophobic sense that creeps in. Bergman fans who learn about his own history eventually find out about his great love of Faro Island, but in The Passion there is a sense that even there, or "here" if one is talking about The Passion, one has not escaped the ways in which as Sartre said other people can be hell. And this is not just in the interplay of the main characters, but also coming from what society there is on the island.

But it has a great cast, with Liv Ullmann, Max von Sydow, Bibi Andersson and Erland Josephson, as well as Erik Hell playing an acquaintance of Max's character. And I would argue it is nearly the equal of Persona in the way it employs a focus on the interiority of the characters to reach existential truths.

Please see it, and more than once.