A Film Canon

This exquisite film translates The Seventh Seal's elevation of imagism over discursion into one of Bergman's warmest registers, elaborating the dreams, visions and memories that present themselves to aging professor Isak Borg (Victor Sjostrom), over the course of a cross-country car trip to collect an honorary degree. Despite their heterogeneity - which could make them feel too self-contained, were the narrative itself not relatively episodic - they all represent some variation on one of Bergman's prototypical depictions of the individual's encounter with mortality: the face caught in the uncanny light of its own reflection, almost blinded by its imminent convergence with the inanimate world. To this end, Bergman suffuses the visionary moments with a bright, unearthly light (most spectacularly by painting an entire set white), populates them with various motifs of duplication and replication (most memorably the twins in the flashback sequence) and, finally, structures them around a series of translucent interfaces (most poetically the distinction between past rooms and present corridors), all of which coalesce into the windscreen separating Borg from the viewer; or, rather the cinematic screen, as if to encourage the viewer to identify more with the actors than the parts they play, or at least with the anguish that this contemplation of their cinematic selves must bring them at the brink of death. Not only does this explain the peculiar appropriateness of Sjostrom's casting, as well as the sense that the actors (many of whom are already regulars for Bergman) are meant to supervene their occasionally trite parts, but it clarifies The Seventh Seal's anti-cinema as the attempt to reclaim the ontological shock of even earlier reproductive technologies, represented now by sepia photography and the light microscope, and offsets the warmth with a residual, glassy coldness, which becomes most palpable at precisely the moment it seems to abate; that is, when it moves from Borg to the atmosphere he breathes, as if his change in sensibility were simply death's harbinger.