The Seventh Seal

I have had a hard time picking a tenth film in our “Editor’s Choice” series (which may not have been that big of a deal, since I don’t remember when we decided to put a limit at 10 or if we’re still doing that). I was debating putting the Quay Brothers’ Institute Benjamenta here, which is a beautiful film but I wouldn’t know what to say about it, and anyways I think Ingmar Bergman should be recognized here. I almost wanted to list his later film Winter Light simply because of the devastating brilliance of the last line spoken in the film, which is so astonishingly anticlimactic it stays with you for a long time. I could even go with his more lighthearted Smiles of a Summer Night, which has a poetic rhythm mirroring the comedies of Shakespeare, or Trollflöjten which is a flawlessly cheeky-yet-faithful adaption of a Mozart’s Magic Flute Opera (though I decided to rule that out because it was made for Swedesh Television). The Seventh Seal is a great place to start with Bergman, an abstract, timeless classic that depicts a medieval knight’s battle with Death in the shape of an absurd game of chess. The absurdity of it is in the fact that everyone’s life is a game played with death that we will all eventually “lose,” it’s only a matter of when; we are all being strung along in an inescapable dance of death. Bergman is known for making depressing films — he has even admitted he can’t watch his own movies because they bring him down — but films that deal with hopelessness or existential despair can often reveal a sense of inner strength that is lacking in films with the so-called “Hollywood ending.” Bergman’s films deal with the anxieties and doubts that we all have, and he has the courage to say that there aren’t necessarily any easy answers, or angels to save us, but we are all in this same wayward ship, and sometimes telling this truth can be uplifting in it’s own way.