I remember that my first and until yesterday sole viewing of Bergman's The Seventh Seal took place in August of 1958 at one of those big old downtown Brooklyn movie palaces. I was in the company of Leigh Anderson and Alice Bruno, who might not remember the day -- or remember me, for that matter.
It was a memorable occasion because Bergman mattered, or so it seemed at the time. Like everyone in my age-cohort, I had grown up on westerns and crime and horror and musicals. I knew what to expect in a movie theatre. A beginning, a middle and an end, for one thing. A resolution. But then along came Fellini and Kurosawa and Bergman and the rules changed. It was exciting and puzzling and like other observant college kids, I was trying to figure it all out. Movies had been Saturday entertainment; I did not know that thee could be "intellectual."
The Seventh Seal took me by surprise in all kinds of ways. It was episodic and the episodes didn't tie together into a linear narrative. Its emotional range -- from sexy to sordid to brutal to picturesque to ruminative -- was more than I could fathom or follow. It didn't have a Hollywood plot -- no one ended up with the money or the girl. And then there were these long brooding silent shots in which the point lay in the cinematography (I word I didn't wouldn't learn for twenty years). I had no vocabulary to help me understand what I saw -- I didn't even know the word "allegory", or if I did, I didn't connect it with movies.
Last night, The Seventh Seal came around again, this time not in a palace but right there on the big hdtv. I was hoping it would still be as magical as it was in the 1950s, but alas, not so. It seemed, I'm sorry to say, stagey and contrived and pretentious. The allegory -- the despairing knight's search for meaning in a godless universe -- came across, last night, as shallow. The discovery that there ain't a god out there does not shock this born and raised atheist, although I do feel for Bergman and all those others whom it cost so dearly to surrender the illusion.
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