On Friday, November 2, TIFF had its first screening of The Seventh Seal in its two-month-long centennial celebration of Ingmar Bergman, which runs from October 24 to December 23. I went into the screening just after reading Liam Lacey’s piece on the TIFF retrospective for Original Cin. To make Bergman “relevant to our own times,” Lacey suggests a reimagining of Bergman as a superhero—a reconceptualization so Bergman might fit in with what David Cronenberg deems to be today’s major cinematic trend: the “Man era of movies” (i.e. Spider-man, Batman, Superman). “Weird, but whatever,” I thought as I walked into the theatre, asking: Why Toronto? Why now? Why Bergman in Toronto today?
Upon re-watching The Seventh Seal, I realized that it is Bergman at his most and least superhero. His most in the way that there is a real supervillain—as horrifying and comedic as they come—in Bengt Ekerot’s personification of Death. As he appeared before Max von Sydow in the canonical opening scene on the beach, I could not help but compare him to Heath Ledger’s Joker, or Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman, or Faith Goldy as herself. Ekerot’s Death embodies that same unsettling mix of camp and genuine terror that today’s greatest supervillains exude. He should be a joke: he is as eyebrow-less as RuPaul and decked out in a floor-length McQueen-esque medieval robe. But like Faith Goldy’s mayoral campaign, despite preposterous appearances, he is no joke, and his followers take him very seriously. If we are imagining The Seventh Seal in the Marvel universe, the supervillain box can be checked off.
But The Seventh Seal is also Bergman at his most pronouncedly unsuperhero. The film’s title comes from the Book of Revelation—particularly the silence in heaven for half an hour following the Lamb’s opening of “the seventh seal.” Bergman places this silence at the moral and epistemological heart of The Seventh Seal—the deafening absence of the Christian God in a time of societal uncertainty. Set amidst the devastating plague of 1347-1351, when extremist Christians were compelled to tour the provinces in bands of flagellants, the film asks: “How do we live in a world without God?” In this question, it posits the antithesis to popular superhero films of today: instead of asking when good will triumph, Bergman asks, “What if there is no good?” Even, “What if there is no good or evil, but only the ‘silence in Heaven for about a half an hour’ in the absence of both?”
In these conflicting senses, I think The Seventh Seal echoes the essential cinematic ethos of today as much as it reflects the real world’s painful absence of superheroes. When only John Tory keeps Faith Goldy out of office, “superhero” status is only superficially achieved. The film is Bergman breaching all realist impulses through the personification of an inevitable human experience, while simultaneously centralizing reality’s lack of superheroes. In a sense, it feels more real than a Toronto where a white nationalist comes third in the mayoral race.
This tension between fantasy and reality climaxes in the film’s final scene, as the father of the young family of actors—who escape the plague only through the Knight’s (von Sydow) momentary distraction of Death—watches the other main characters being led over a mountain, performing the medieval dance of death. He beckons his wife to show what he is seeing, but she sees nothing, and the film ends with her endearingly mocking her husband’s “visions.” For her, nothing is there, not even a solemn dance into a medieval afterlife; all poeticism in death is merely a product of the artist’s imagination. Bergman’s intended viewer is left alone with the devastating plague that sweeps across the western coast of Europe. Today’s audience member is prompted to ask, “What is left when the superhero ethos of today’s cinema is swept away? When we leave the hopeful world of Avengers: Infinity War, and re-enter a Toronto with no Robert Downey Jr., what superhuman power are we left with to stop the super-evil power of Doug Ford?”
I am not suggesting that Toronto is deprived of wonderful politicians, because it is not. Thankfully there are politicians like Saron Gebresellassi and Sarah Climenhaga running for mayor. But more often than not, the “supervillains” seem to have the loudest voices, whether it is Faith Goldy’s alarming success in the mayoral race, Doug Ford’s recent regrettable cover story in Maclean’s, or the popular Munk School Debate with Steve Bannon earlier this month. And it is in this undesirable sense that The Seventh Seal seems to “hold the mirror up to nature,” as another late-medieval Scandinavian might have put it.
The Ingmar Bergman Retrospective is playing at TIFF now until December 23, 2018.
