65 years of The Seventh Seal
On February 16, 1957, the premiere of Ingmar Bergman's film-parable "Det sjunde inseglet (The Seventh Seal)" took place at the Stockholm cinema Röda Kvarn. Film connoisseurs and fans of the work of the great Swedish director know that the film "The Seventh Seal" was born from an educational radio performance that Ingmar Bergman staged with students of his course at the theater studio of the municipal theater of the city of Malmö. The play, which was called "Trämålning (Wood Painting)" and which served as the basis of this performance, Ingmar Bergman also actually wrote together with his students.
The impetus for the creation of the play "Wood Painting" was the fresco "Döden spelar schack (Death playing chess)", painted by Albertus Pictor (real name - Immenhausen) in 1480. Bergman had seen this fresco since childhood on the ceiling in one of the medieval Christian churches of the Stockholm diocese. Ingmar Bergman's father was a priest and preached in this church. Young Ingmar often attended these sermons.
Bergman gave his students the task of composing monologues based on the associations that this mural evokes in them. From these monologues, Bergman, while being treated at the Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm for a stomach ulcer, composed dialogues that became the basis of the play.
The radio play mentioned above went on the air on September 21, 1954. Six months later, the play was shown at the Malmö City Theater, and six months later - on the stage of the Stockholm Theater. The success of the performances based on the play "Wood Painting" led Bergman to the idea of staging a film, in connection with which he reworked the play into a script. However, he had to rewrite the script five times before he started arranging for the producers of Svensk Filmindustri. Although, probably, it was not even the fifth version of the script of the future film itself that convinced Karl Anders Dumling, the head of Svensk Filmindustri, of its prospects, but the success enjoyed by Bergman's film "Sommarnattens leende (Smiles of a Summer Night)" at the Cannes International Film Festival in 1956. Bergman was allocated a budget for the creation of the film in the amount of 150 thousand dollars (about one and a half million dollars today) and set a fairly tight deadline of 35 days. Bergman met the budget, but the shooting of the film lasted a little longer than planned - from July 2 to August 24, 1956.
I can't say how much the final version of the script, and with it the film as a whole, differs from the original play. But the religious orientation of the film is quite obvious. Why, by the way, did the Vatican include this philosophical film score among the 45 "greatest films". This religiosity is clearly evidenced by the title of the film. As you know, the "seventh seal" is a concept from the Book of Revelation or the Apocalypse of John the Apostle. The removal of the seventh seal, according to the Apocalypse, entails the most terrible disasters in the history of mankind: "... And hail and fire followed, mingled with blood, and they were thrown to the earth. And a third of the trees were burned up, and all green grass was burned up.... a great mountain burning with fire was thrown into the sea, and a third of the sea became blood. And a third of the living creatures in the sea died, and a third of the ships were destroyed..... a great star fell from heaven, burning like a torch, and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water. The name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters became wormwood, and many men died from the water, because it was made bitter." Well, and so on.
Three months after the premiere, Ingmar Bergman's film "The Seventh Seal" was presented to the guests and participants of the Cannes International Film Festival, at which it was nominated for the Palme d'Or. The jury of the film festival, chaired by the famous French writer Andre Maurois, gave preference to the American film by William Wyler "Friendly Persuasion". However, in the company of losers, along with Bergman's film, were Federico Fellini's "Le notti di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria)", Robert Bresson's "Un condamné à mort s'est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut (A Man Escaped)", Andrzej Wajda's "Kanal", Grigory Chukhrai's "Сорок первый (The Forty-first)". Not a bad company! But Bergman's picture, along with Wajda's film, received a Special jury prize at this festival.
The vast majority of professional film critics have devoted laudatory reviews to Ingmar Bergman's film "The Seventh Seal". Even such a grouch as Bosley Crowther, who usually finds flaws in non-American films, even apart from him no one sees these flaws, reacted very favorably to Ingmar Bergman's picture. In his review of 1958, he noted: "This initially mystifying drama, known in Swedish as "Det Sjunde Inseglet," opened yesterday at the Paris, and slowly turns out to be a piercing and powerful contemplation of the passage of man upon this earth. Essentially intellectual, yet emotionally stimulating, too, it is as tough—and rewarding—a screen challenge as the moviegoer has had to face this year."
The success of the film at the Cannes Film Festival and the benevolent attitude of the majority of the most authoritative film critics, and mainly foreign ones, made Ingmar Bergman, for whom this film became the 17th full-length feature film in his filmography, a real internationally recognized director. One more piquant feature of this film can be noted: during the filming, Ingmar Bergman's romance with Bibi Andersson began, who replaced her namesake Harriet as the "lady of the heart".
The guru of American film criticism dedicated his review to the film "The Seventh Seal" only 43 years after the film was released. But the fact that Ebert rated the film with maximum 4 stars in 2000 and included it in his list of "Great Movies" characterizes Bergman's film masterpiece as a "film for the ages" that does not lose its relevance even decades later. In his review, Ebert described "The Seventh Seal" as "an uncompromising film, regarding good and evil with the same simplicity and faith as its hero."
However, it was not only Roger Ebert who highly appreciated Bergman's film several decades after its release. Modern moviegoers gave the film an equally high rating. 71% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users gave the film "The Seventh Seal" scores from 8 to 10. And 24% users rated the film with a maximum of 10 points. With that said, the rating of Ingmar Bergman's film "The Seventh Seal" according to FilmGourmand version was 8,770, which allowed it to take the 225th Rank in the Golden Thousand.
