About Death's Deal (which is supposed to sound like "The Seventh Seal")

I was looking at a Bergman website in the UK, where they're releasing a new version of The Seventh Seal and found some nice wallpapers. I've now got the famous image of the Dance of Death (which occurs near the end of the film) on my desktop.

The Seventh Seal was the first Bergman film that I watched (and currently the only one that I own). I can't remember what attracted me to it -- it may just have been the cover of the DVD, which has the figure of Death with his cape outspread. I think it's one of Bergman's most accessible films. It's very artfully shot, with a strange inter-play of dark humor and genuine existential questioning. Check out the website for some stunning stills from the film. (You can also enter the contest, win the box set and give it to me ... I've already entered with all the email addresses I own ... of course, for all I know this may be an old website that hasn't been taken down ... )

The Dance of Death (or La Danse Macabre for poseurs like myself ...) is a medieval allegory where Death comes to a range of people, in a range of secular and spiritual stations of life. He speaks to each one in turn (in a more or less descending order of social hierarchy) and warns them (and mocks them) about their impending death. Each one then responds by expressing their unwillingness to die and how they will miss worldly delights. A version that I've read, by John Lydgate, paints a pretty bleak picture. Even the religious figures are more concerned about accumulating worldly riches and prolonging pleasures. No one is prepared for death except for three lowly characters near the end of the poem: the Laborer, the Child and the Hermit. Lydgate's version is a pretty close translation of a famous medieval mural at a Church in Paris (Of The Holy Innocents), which apparently had the Dance of Death strung out and illustrated on the walls surrounding the cemetery.

Bergman's film doesn't really have Death interrogate the various characters in the same way, although the opening scenes has Max Von Sydow as a knight entering a church and looking at a Danse Macabre mural. Death catches up with him and challenges him to a game of chess (another of the stunning visual moments of the film). The knight gets to live as long as he keeps the game of chess alive. Along the way, various individuals join the knight's strange journey home. Having the horrible memory that I have, I don't really recall how it all ends: it might indeed end with the Dance of Death (my copy of the DVD being in the "safe-keeping" of a friend in Singapore...) but it certainly is a profound cinematic experience.

Strangely enough, the text that I'm laboring over today (and am delightfully distracted from as I write this post) is the medieval morality play Everyman, which has eerily similar qualities to the Danse Macabre. I guess the Freudian uncanny is always lurking around, ready to cut into and alienate our experience of consciousness.