In Our Time - The Seventh Seal

Episode Date: October 19, 2023

In the 1000th edition of In Our Time, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss arguably the most celebrated film of the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007). It begins with an image that, once seen, stays with you for the rest of your life: the figure of Death playing chess with a Crusader on the rocky Swedish shore. The release of this film in 1957 brought Bergman fame around the world. We see Antonius Block, the Crusader, realising he can’t beat Death but wanting to prolong this final game for one last act, without yet knowing what that act might be. As he goes on a journey through a plague ridden world, his meeting with a family of jesters and their baby offers him some kind of epiphany. With Jan Holmberg Director of the Ingmar Bergman Foundation, StockholmClaire Thomson Professor of Cinema History and Director of the School of European Languages, Culture and Society at University College LondonAndLaura Hubner Professor of Film at the University of WinchesterProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list:Alexander Ahndoril (trans. Sarah Death), The Director (Granta, 2008) Ingmar Bergman (trans. Marianne Ruuth), Images: My Life in Film (Faber and Faber, 1995)Ingmar Bergman (trans. Joan Tate), The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography (Viking, 1988)Ingmar Bergman (trans. Joan Tate), The Best Intentions (Vintage, 2018)Ingmar Bergman (trans. Joan Tate), Sunday’s Children (Vintage, 2018)Ingmar Bergman (trans. Joan Tate), Private Confessions (Vintage, 2018)Stig Björkman, Torsten Manns and Jonas Sima (trans. Paul Britten Austin), Bergman on Bergman: Interviews with Ingmar Bergman (Da Capo Press, 1993)Melvyn Bragg, The Seventh Seal: BFI Film Classics (British Film Institute, 1993)Paul Duncan and Bengt Wanselius (eds.), The Ingmar Bergman Archives (Taschen/Max Ström, 2018)Erik Hedling (ed.), Ingmar Bergman: An Enduring Legacy (Lund University Press, 2021)Laura Hubner, The Films of Ingmar Bergman: Illusions of Light and Darkness (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)Daniel Humphrey, Queer Bergman: Sexuality, Gender, and the European Art Cinema (University of Texas Press, 2013) Maaret Koskinen (ed.), Bergman Revisited: Performance, Cinema, and the Arts (Wallflower Press, 2008) Selma Lagerlöf (trans. Peter Graves), The Phantom Carriage (Norvik Press, 2011)Mariah Larsson and Anders Marklund (eds.), Swedish Film: An Introduction and Reader (Nordic Academic Press, 2010)Paisley Livingston, Ingmar Bergman and the Rituals of Art (Cornell University Press, 2019)Birgitta Steene (ed.), Focus on The Seventh Seal (Prentice Hall, 1972)Birgitta Steene, Ingmar Bergman: A Reference Guide (Amsterdam University Press, 2014)

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. This is in our time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of the thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you can find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, it's an image that once you've seen it stays with you for the rest of your life. This is death, playing chess with the Crusader on the rocky Swedish shore,

and it's the opening of Ingmarg Bergman's film the Seventh Seal, which from its release in 1957 brought Bergman fame around the world. The Crusader learns he can't beat death, but hopes to prolong this final game for one last act without yet knowing what that act might be, and we go with him on this journey in a plague-ridden world where you can burn women as witches. Women to discuss the Seventh Seal on our 1,000th edition of been our time, Claire Thompson, Professor of Cinema History and Director of the School of European Languages, Culture and Society at the University of College London,

Laura Hoomner, Professor F. Film at the University of Winchester, and Jan Holmberg, Director of the Ingmar Bergman Foundation in Stockholm. Jan, we come back to this, but can we spend a moment or two on the opening scene, which I've just sketched in? Yes, it's one of those openings, isn't it? The ones that have stayed in the collective cultural memory, whether you know the entire work or not, you do know the opening, much like the opening sentence of Anna Karenina,

or the opening bass of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. And in this case, the film proper after the credits opens in blackness. We hear the D.S. Eray. Then follows the first image of the film, if you like, of clouded sky. Soon after, an eagle appears. And then the music stops and is exchanged for a voiceover as we cut to a shot of this rocky beach and we hear the voiceover quoting from the book of Revelation

and when the lamb broke the seventh seal there was silence in heaven for half an hour and then follows a succession of shots of a night praying or trying to pray, a squire sleeping, their horses in the water and then suddenly a figure dressed in black with a white face appears, and the knight startled, asks,

who are you? And he replies, I am death. And then they go on playing a game of chess. And that's the first great shock in a good sense. You're not shocked or taking back, you're shocked into a deeper interest because death is a human being. Right.

A pancake face like a clown and a black cloak like somebody in a horror film. But as soon as he says, I think it changed the register of the film completely. It is amazing. Why is he called the Seventh Seal? That is from the Book of Revelation, which is quoted there right in the beginning. And the Book of Revelation, of course, is also called the Apocalypse, which is what the film is about since it's set during the plague.

There was a hint already with the eagle, the eagle being the, what you call the attribute of St. John, the alleged writer of the Book of Revelations. And it isn't unusual that Bergman should find inspiration in the Bible. No, not at all. His father was a very strict Lutheran preacher. Claire Thompson, Bergman is a source of much of what we know about him.

He's the source. So we've sort of got to beware a little now and then, don't we? That's right. Can you tell us about his early life? Yes, well, as you just said, we think we know a lot about his early life and his life generally, in part because there are images and memories from his childhood which turn up in a lot of his films, Fanny and Alexander being a good case in point.

But it's also because he was a writer. I'm sure we'll hear more about that from Jan later on. So we have autobiographies, The Magic Lantern, images, My Life in Film. We have fictionalised accounts of his parents, his family life. And then we have accounts of Bergman's life, which other writers have done. There's a novel by Alexander Andorill, which came out in 2008, I think,

and has been translated into English, called The Director, which fictionalises Bergman's experience of making winter light. So we need to think of this as layer upon layer of myths and memories. Let's just pick out one or two things we know about. Let's pick out the magic lantern. He wants a magic lantern for Christmas. He knows about magic lantern, and he desperately wants it. And the parcel arrives, and the power.

Russell supposedly containing the magic land goes to his brother. Yes. He remembers that and that is repeated several times. What did he do then? First he had to bargain with his brother. He had to give his brother 100 tin soldiers in exchange for the lantern. And this is right at the start of the magic lantern, his autobiography. And what sticks with me is that he describes in great detail all of the senses

that have created his memory of this encounter with the lantern. it's about anticipating the lantern using it and then he remembers the smell of kerosene and the texture of the wardrobe, the closet in which he sat to project these images on the wall and he remembers that there is a young girl in some kind of national dress in a meadow and as he starts to run the film strip

through this little projector he sees her standing up beginning to move and there is a single line paragraph at the end of that chapter which says she was moving. That seems to loom if I can use this cliche, that seems to loom large in his mind from

a very early day and he goes off to get something out of making films. Can you tell us about his early experience? He was, by all accounts, a rebellious child. His family wanted him to go to university and study something respectable. He chose

literature and never finished. He went off to do his national service. And then he started working as a playwright and a theatre producer in a kind of youth home and started writing scripts, both for the stage and then later for films. And it was his first few scripts which brought him to the attention of Stina Berman, No Relation, who was the head of the manuscript department at Svensk Film Industry, the big Swedish film company. and she employed him as a kind of script doctor to tidy up other people's scripts but also she encouraged him to develop his own writing. There was an incident with his father which you can't skip, can we?

His father knocked him down. Yes. And Bergman then knocked his father down and left the house. That's quite big, isn't it? It's emblematic of that relationship, isn't it? It's a turning point where he asserts his individuality and embarks on his life journey, I suppose we could say. But again, he stayed just.

that incident, doesn't he like so much else? He has a sense of drama. You don't look very confident about your position in this one. I don't necessarily see the distinction between fiction and truth in anything that he writes about his life.

As he often says, I mean, sometimes the best way to get to the truth is by lying. And that, of course, is a man of fiction, saying that. I mean, he's a director and he's a writer and so I think he's not necessarily interested

in reality, but in truth, in a deeper sense than just what was going on. And one of the things about him all the way, he's always doing an awful lot of things. He does a hell of a lot of radio and radio plays. A hell of a lot of films before he hits

gold dust with the films that other people take are a great of notice of and scripts for other people. And in those years through the through the early 40s, mid-40s, he's moving a lot as well between Gothenburg, Stockholm, Malma, Helsingborg, and there are a few marriages along the way as well in the 40s, several children.

Laura, let's go back to the beginning in a way. For those who haven't seen the film, can you just summarise it? Yes, a medieval knight called Antonius Block and his squire have spent the night on a rocky Scandinavian shore having spent 10 years fighting in the Crusades. We're talking about 14th century here. That's right. It's approximate though, because I think some of the history might not be so accurate.

The figure of death appears to the night and tells him his time is up. About to accept the knight makes a bargain with death. We'll play a game of chess. He says, as long as I can hold out against you, I stay alive. If I win, I'm free to live. Now, the land is ravaged by plague, and as they make the knight and the squire make their way towards the knight's cask, they encounter a rich mix of characters, including artists, flagellants led by a fanatical monk,

a young woman to be burned as a witch, and a priest who has become a thief. Ravel. Ravel is stealing from the plague victims. As well as this, the knight encounters death, who's destined to win by any means. The knight is drawn to a small family of travelling actors called Mia, Yoff and their baby Mikhail. And having spent a magical evening with them eating wild strawberries and fresh milk, the night's quest shifts. It's a crucial moment.

from that of more self-interest towards his realising his one meaningful deed, the act of human kindness, that's to save the family from death's clutches. By the end of the film, everyone apart from the family

are summoned by death. At this point, the knight is still fixed in prayer, seeking proof of God's existence. The squire, on the other hand, a rugged disbeliever, so adamant that there's absolutely nothing there beyond the flesh, just emptiness.

And then outside in the wilderness from the distance, Joff witnesses the vision of death with his size, leading the figures in their final dance, and that's the iconic shot of the dance. Along the hillside, along the hillside silhouetted against the...

They finished shooting. They're in a bus going back to Stockholm, and Bergman saw the light and saw the hill and got everybody out of the bus. and he couldn't be in the film at all, put them in the middle of the hillside with the dance of death. That's right, apparently some with assistants joining in

and a few tourists are sort of dressed up, just one of those magical moments. This business which completely staggered me, he said, I am death. And you believe it. Yes. And you know it's a man with pancake face, clown face, with a big black clove.

But it's a particular sort of conviction in the acting, of course, But also in the way that Bergman centers him, and you know from the beginning, this is the mover of the entire film, in many ways, a very simple film. Yes, it completely works within the fictional world. I mean, there is an irony in the delivery from death in the sense of a slight wink of the eye sometimes occasionally in his delivery. It gets some of the best one-liners through the film. Such as? When he draws the black chess piece, it says how appropriate, don't you think?

Flightly ironic. You got the idea that from the woodcuts that he saw in medieval churches and monasteries. That's right. Death is a person. That is personified. Death is an actor. It's the way he convinces people that baffles me. He said at one stage, you take a chair, an ordinary chair.

That's right. You put it on a stage. You say, this is a throne. Somebody sits in the train, you say, this is a king. Yes. And people believe you. Absolutely. And I think Perkman was as astonished as everyone else.

Thank you very much. Jan, he made this film in 35 days, but he had this idea around for some time. A bit of an irony, he made the film because it's comedies. He won in prizes. And then he won an award, and the Swedish authorities relaxed their stance and said, okay, you can go away and make this film

that you really want to make. It was a very tight shooting schedule. Yeah. But it had to be too, because at this time, Bergman was extremely prolific. It was probably the time in which he worked the most. And not only worked, as Claire was mentioning, he also had four or five children at this time by three women.

But he was the artistic director of Malma City Theatre at the time and had been for a couple of years. And I mentioned this because he not only did the plays that he staged there, they were a crucial part as the inspiration for the Seventh Seal, but also that he was working with the same actors. So Max von Sidov, for instance, playing the Knight in the Seventh Seal,

had played in Cat on a Hot Tintruth in 1956, for instance, in Bergman's production. And Bibi Anderson played in Stringenberg's Eric the 14th. So at this time, Bergman was doing at least two stage productions and one film per year. So in the year of 1957 alone, not only did the Seventh Seal come out, but also Wild Strawberries, another of his greatest films. So the Seventh Seal was just one of many things that he was working on at the time.

But the origin of the film was a one-act play that Bergman had written a couple of years earlier because he was also the patron of the acting school of Malamus City Theatre. He wrote a couple of plays for the... aspiring actors to toy with, really. So this play called Wood Painting, again alluding to what you were saying about the medieval iconography, it was a play with a lot of characters

from medieval iconography, such as a knight, a woman with a child, a squire, a skeleton, and so on, all seeking refuge from the plague. One of the things that's striking about Bergman's work was that they became his cast list, cast list. It was rather like

what was Shakespeare in the early days. The same people turned up again and again in different parts and that was, because they were so good that gave it, I think, a sort of density. You were more inclined to believe them for some reason. Is there anything in that? But some of the names you mentioned, and others. They're in film

after film after film. Absolutely, yes. Gunnar Björn Strand, playing the Squire in this film was in almost all of Bergman films in the 50s and 60s. And yes, he had his reliable troop of actors much as Shakespeare did. And so, I mean, we attribute these films to Ingmar Bergman,

but it's really a collective effort of all these people, and not to mention the cinematographer, in this case Gunnar Fischer, and many others. So he had these troop working together, and not only in films, but also in theatres. And he used to joke that he actually made films just to keep the actors busy and paid during the summer when the things. theatre was closed. Again, in 1957, not only did Max von Sudev appear in both wild strawberries and in the main role in the Seventh Seal, he also performed in the title role of Pergunt,

Ibsen's Pergunt in Malma City Theatre in Bergman's staging, where he was on stage for five consecutive hours. Well, it worked, didn't it? Oh, yes, absolutely, yeah. Claire Thompson, can we talk about one of the main influences on Bergman, the Phantom Cable? The Phantom carriage from 1921. What was it? Why was it such a big influence? It's strange to think that the Phantom Carriage had its premiere when Bergman was only two years old,

just a toddler. It was the blockbuster, I suppose, of its time of New Year. The Antelius Blockbuster. The Antoineous Blockbuster. So it was premiered at New Year 1921, and it was the first film that had been made in

the new film studios at Rosunda. So also a kind of turning point for Swedish filmmaking in that sense. It's a ghost story, it's a melodrama, it's a kind of folk tale, and it was based on a novella of 1912 by Selma Lagerliffe, who had been the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature. So there's a lot of prestige associated with this production. What caught Bergman's attention particularly there?

He idolised the director and also the lead actor, Victor Hustrum, apologies to Jan and to Swedes everywhere for my pronunciation. Hustrum he had encountered when he was making his, when he was directing his first film, and Hustrom had been around, to sort of put a hand round his shoulder and reassure him. But Hustrum also had the reputation as being one of the greatest filmmakers of his time. For one thing, he manages to adapt the extremely complex narrative structure

of the original novella onto the screen, which was pioneering in its day. The film is also pioneering in terms of its some technological achievement. It used double exposure to give a sense of the ghostly carriage. But I think it's probably also the themes in the Phantom Courage, which haunted Bergman. There are lots of red thread running between that film

and the seventh seal, like the sense of a quest to be a better person, to find God. there is an underlying theme which both films share and that is the sense of impending doom. The Seventh seal has the bubonic plague circulating as backdrop. But in the Phantom Carriage it's tuberculosis, which was a huge problem at the time all over the world

and not least in Sweden. It was killing a lot of young people. The novella had actually been commissioned by the national campaign against tuberculosis to be a kind of educational text. It's also a moralising film in a way It's trying to educate people about their social responsibility And he took up on all these points

He's on record There's a video on YouTube somewhere Where he claims to watch this film at least once a year So I think he knew it at a cellular level We sort of skipped something here Quite a lot of Swedish young man And remember an up to the years We were sent to Germany

And Bergman was among them and as far as we can make out, he conceived a strong passion in favour of Hitler. Is that right? And what do you make of it? I know that it was something that he felt so awful about later on once he'd realised. Well, later on is one thing,

but why did he do it in the first place? He went out there, I mean, there's different accounts, I think it sort of said he was 16 in the autobiography, to stay with a German family. And there he kind of witnessed the fervour. and got whipped up within that. But afterwards came back that claim that this is why he wouldn't really want to get involved in politics thereafter, because seeing how a whole society can get swayed by the charisma of a political figure in that way.

I think it's extremely complicated, though, because Bergman states in his autobiography in 1987, so more than 40 years after the fact how he was infatuated by Hitler and so on. But if we go to the contemporary sources during the war, we see another thing. For instance, Bergman was staging Macbeth in 1941 at Helsing-Borre City Theatre, where a staging which Bergman himself claimed

was to be seen as an allegory of the tyranny of Hitler. So it seems that although Bergman does state, in the Magic Lantern that he was rooting for Hitler during the entire war. In fact, he wasn't at the time. So again, like Claire was saying before, Bergman is, well, the question of fiction and of deception and of truth and lies is always there in Bergman. You should never trust him,

is what I'm trying to say here. Can we talk about the connection with you, Laura, between the figure of death and Bergman's view of religion? Yes, I was thinking about the confession scene, and I think that one of those, that's a moment that's really fascinating because there's this critique of organised religion.

But the way that that's filmed is such that we know beforehand that it's death in disguise. You mean the confessor? The confess that's what that's Death and Disguise yeah That's right So he's disguised as the priest

During the confession scene And we have that moment When Antonia's blocked the knight He's leading his heart out And asking what's there If there's any proof in God's existence And then gives away his tactic With the bishop

And the knight And what happens then is We witness death turning So we can see the face And so there's that sort of chilling moment. And then the camera cuts to inside the confessional. So we are there in with death and sort of complicit to some degree in listening to

this confession. Yes. Religion is, of course, it's a huge topic in all of Bergman's work, but it's almost always, as I see it at least, used as a metaphor. I mean, man's relationship to God is rather, I mean, even though in the case of the Seventh Seal, the knight is asking whether there is a God or not. What he is really asking is, is a communication between people.

So it's much more horizontal, if you like, than vertical. Bergman is not only asking that question, whether there is a God or not. I think it's almost irrelevant to him. It's rather whether we get through our fellow human beings or if we can communicate with them rather than with God. And that is hard enough. Berman tells us, and as we all know.

When did you make of that? If I could pick up on something that I read in the preface to one of his unrealised productions where he addresses quite explicitly his own attitude to God, to religion. This was supposed to be a six-part television series on the life of Jesus. And he says in the preface,

I have no faith at all. He was writing in the mid-70s, roughly. I have no faith at all. But I can relate to Jesus. as a man with a life, a very, you know, a human figure with senses. That is how I can relate to divinity. That may not reflect what he was feeling and thinking in the mid-1950s, of course, it's a bit later. But to me, it expresses something about the attachment that we feel in the Sele to the body,

to corporeal life, that we are here to enjoy it and to smell the breeze, and to meet people we love and to eat strawberries and so on and those bigger existential questions might be somehow secondary to that. I don't know. He has an advertisement for religion. Religion gets not out of 20, doesn't it?

I mean, the young woman who's about to be burned to death for we intimate for nothing at all and the night passes her on, he's on his horse, and he leans over and he's picked out something out of his pocket of these one assumes our sort of pills or medicine stuff that take away the pain, she's going to a fire, and the flagellants are there, and the fires are going. Religion doesn't get a good press, is it?

No, it's religion's fault, but it's also culture's fault, of course. Sure. Can we turn to the circus, the little troupe of circus entertainers? Shall we start with you, Laura? There are three of them, father and mother and child. They're integral, they are playful figures, and there is the, just over halfway through the film, there is the wild strawberry sequence.

And it comes just before the witch-burning scene and just after the in-scene, the scene in the inn where Joff has been mercilessly humiliated and got to dance like a bear, et cetera. So this respite from the horror is very much needed. The knight asked Joff to join them through the forest rather than go to Eltonor, where the plague is rife. And then they sit for a moment in the twilight with the family on the grass,

the baby asleep, Yoff playing his lute in a playful, joyous atmosphere. Mia brings wild strawberries from the hillside. They smell them, she teases Yov. Their simple lifestyle is illustrated by the aerial shot of Mia, played by Bibi Anderson wonderfully, lying on the ground. She's just saying one day is like another So we get that sense of that That's a very simple lifestyle

They share their bowl of fresh milk And the knight says that he will remember this hour of peace The strawberries and the milk The lute their words And he'll bear this memory in his hands This will be a sign, one of great content The scene has been interpreted as a communion Between humans

With the humanist sharing of the milk bowl but at its core it's a reminder to make the most of the moment of cherishing the moment. And the death mask hangs on the caravan behind this idyllic family setting and the knight must resume his game of chess. So life and time is short. But in effect, the knight gets these three people off death. However temporarily, yes. Yeah, and what would you say?

I completely agree with you, Laura. that this scene is so crucial in the film. And it's one of those moments that you were referring to, Claire, where the metaphysical turns into a physical, corporeal sense of being in the world, as it were. On the other hand, though, Jophe and Mia is clearly allegories of Joseph and Mary, and their son of the baby Jesus, of course. and the wild strawberries and milk can be seen as an allegory of the Holy Communion. So although this is very physical, very real, very unreligious, if you like,

it is still packed with religious imagery and Christian attributes and so on. Fairly doomed, yeah. Shall we talk briefly about his technique, starting with you, the use of long shots and close-ups? I'll talk to you about lighting, if you don't know. Sure, yeah. Well, Bowman is famous for his use of close-ups. But...

When he said the human face is the most interesting thing, you can possibly film. Exactly, yes. That's the epitome of cinema is the human face. And this was really the time when he started using that or working with close-ups. He does that to a much more... To a much bigger extent in later films,

such as persona or The Passion of Anna in the 1960s, but already in the Seventh Seal and in wild strawberries, you see long close-ups of faces. But they are intermingled with long shots, often in silhouette. For instance, the dance of death scene at the end of the film, but also in the openings, the shots of the shoreline. What do you think he's achieving by that? It's a formal or aesthetic way of telling what he's also.

telling in the script, if you like, I mean, if, as I suggested before, his films are all about understanding, getting close to other people, or trying to, often failing, in his case, the close-up can be seen as a way of abridging

that gap that's always there between people, certainly in Bergman's rather bleak universe, and with an absent god and so on. So the human face can almost be seen as an icon as something that will fill the void, if you like.

Claire, I'll give you an early warning. You might talk about lighting. He took great care with his cameraman, and lighting mattered to him a lot. Can you give us one or two instances in the Seventh Seal where he shows that it mattered a lot? The Seventh Seal seems to take us through two quite different worlds, different dimensions, different spaces.

One of them is the seascape, the landscape, that Jan has just been talking about. And there we see that really intense quality of Nordic light. I think it's interesting to compare and contrast the Seventh Seal and summer with Monica to really different films, of course. But they are both, at least in part, set out on the Swedish coastline. And the film strip seems to be infused with a kind of light

that you wouldn't see anywhere else. And the cinematographer for both those films, of course, was Gunnar Fisher, who could manage this really. well. But then in the seventh sale, we've got these very, very intimate moments, and it is about facial close-ups. But they're also often fascinating because they seem to adopt a kind of very intimate theatrical space where we might have three layers, so we might have the night confessing in the foreground, and then we might have a grill, and then we, of course, we have death in the confession booth behind, coexisting in a space that doesn't seem now.

or geometrical even at all. It gets back, I think, to the idea that you just touched on Jan, which was the medieval art where there is no such thing as perspective as we would recognise it. We're seeing texture,

we're seeing light shades, we are, we're seeing faces but perhaps not human faces as we would recognise them. And then those two spaces come together quite early in the film with that iconic shot that you were talking about earlier where the knights and death are, have started to play chess on the beach. We see the sky, we see the sea, part of the real world. But then in the foreground, they are lit in the most

extraordinary way and they both seem to have heat lighting on their faces, which is impossible. Because then, as Gunnar Fisher himself said, there must be two suns in the sky. But if death there's appearing there in human form, then fine, we can have two sons. Laura, can I come to this comment of his, again, we have to beware his comments, but making this film helped him address his longstanding fear of death. Just having death appear and be there walking and talking and actually characterising this figure was a bold move and actually enabled him to address some of those questions and to relay those doubts. and to put those questions to him.

There's this sense that he's moving from one time of his life into a new way of thinking. And so sort of starting to move towards a greater sense of rationalism, ridding himself of the earlier childhood faith that he calls naive belief in salvation. And you think he did this? I think it did that job temporarily. And I think that from that point on,

he starts to have that slowly move towards that sense. of acceptance and we see in his later films is that sort of paring down in style and he starts to move away from the symbolism and start to just look at human relations between people so it's fewer characters relating to each other but I think it always stays with him and in terms of the biography

I mean later on in life he talked about holding out to see Ingrid his wife again after death and there was a kind of rapportee between him and Max von Sidov and who plays the night in the Searle where later on they're saying that

if one of us goes first I'll come back and give you, I'll show you some signs that there's something beyond and Max von Sidov has sort of said he's showing me some signs that there is something after death but that didn't actually give a way way, divulged what that was between them.

But again, I think there's this sort of trickery there in those dialogues, really. Yeah. Jan, we're getting towards the end of the programme, but one of two things, this is made in 1956. This is just before around about the time, the great development of French cinema, and one could say of European cinema, all the films we saw, well, I did.

I was very lucky to go to a town which had this cinema, which showed nothing but what we called foreign films. in those days. So the great burst forward was that. And he became a sort of hero and chitory figure in that, didn't he? Yes, at least in the beginning of the French New Wave.

Goddard and Truffaut and Chabrole and the others, they were absolutely loving films like some with Monica and Summer Interlude and Bergman's early stuff. At this time though, it's sort

of shifted because it seems that Bergman was a tad too classical for their taste. He was, for instance, what Claire was talking about before, about the cinematography and the lighting and the artificialness of some of Bergman's scenes were not to the taste of the New Wave people. So what was crucial, of course, was that Bergman was one of those filmmakers

that were hailed as auters, as in absolute control of their medium, along with others like Kurosawa and Fellini and others. But Bergman was certainly among the first to be recognised as such, and that was a huge inspiration in its own right, of course. And it actually, and Bergman was not solely responsible, but it was a key figure in cinema being the art form par excellence in the 1960s, 70s. So yes, Bowman was absolutely crucial.

Yes. And imitated by all sorts of people, including Woody Allen. Oh, yeah. No, but everything right except the core idea. Can you, we've begun to mention the reaction of the films at the time, how has his reputation drifted on in the last 50, 60 years? Shall I start with you, Karan? We've talked about how that late 50s period is a turning point, and the

reputation that he gains through the French New Wave is part of that. And then there are those much more serious films in the 60s, the trilogy in the early 60s, persona in 1966, of course. And you start to see him being

talked about in the states all over the world as a very serious existentialist auter. There is a period in the early 1970s, which illustrates though that he didn't continue to get his way and make anything that he wanted to make

where there's a cluster of unfinished, unrealised projects ranging from what seemed to have been, what might have been a pornographic film, The Petrified Prince. There was the ambition to make a musical, The Merry Widow featuring Barbara Streisland, which never got off the ground. And then he's getting older, of course,

and so he starts to, become the grand old man of Swedish cinema being seen to overshadow the younger generation that's coming through. There are other high points in the 70s. There's scenes from a marriage, which was recently remade.

There's Fanny and Alexander and then a very long period through the 80s where he gives up filmmaking, but he starts to write. But by the late film, is it? Oh yes, yes, definitely. So there's no diminution of powers. Absolutely not. No, it's a late film.

But then he seems to want to develop his his writing. Yeah. What would you say about this? I think, well, peaking up on what Claire just said about his focusing on his writing in his later years, I think that Bourbon is still unrecognised as a writer.

And his works in the 1990s where he wrote things like the best intentions, Sunday's children. That was for his son, wasn't it? Yes, and all these were directed by others than himself. than himself. But as books, as readings, they are absolutely brilliant. Regardless of what do you think of the film or the television series that others made,

Bergman was at this point in the 90s showing himself to be an absolutely terrific writer as well. And I think now when quite, I mean, Bergman is, Claire mentioned that Sears for Marriage has recently been remade, but we also see a tendency where Bergman is being staged in theatres all over the world and he is now being performed almost as much as August Rindberg and so it seems that Bergman has been rebranded as it were from film director to playwright and I think that serves him rather well. I think a lot of his films are actually written as if they're plays.

Absolutely, yes, yes. the way of scenes, the way of a few characters, the way of the encounters. But finally to you, what's your assessment of him these days? He's had a phenomenal influence and inspiration on a vast range of filmmakers. So, Lars von Trier, Del Toro, Martin Scorsese. They're all talking about how the films have inspired them. What is the thing that inspires them? What do you get out of actors of the way he directs it,

or the stories. What most aspires them, do you think? It's what he gets out of the actors. And I think it, and that was one of the things that, I think when he hit the US, probably around 1960, with the big fame at that point of time,

with this discussion around the, you know, having the freedom to, to work, cliche and not, but beyond the bounds of Hollywood to work very closely with the actors. And they've forged this very strong, relationship he often worked with the same actors again and again and there's this dynamic

of him being both very controlling and controlled and wanting the ritual so the ritual of the everyday working life but at the same time being very passionate and so that magic that you talked about earlier that's that happening spontaneously is

another aspect and I think you can possibly only get that I mean, you just see images of him being very physical, very tactile, who actually put hands on to the actors positioning them in the way that they needed to perform. But at the same time, the actors always spoken very warmly of Bergman. Yes, it could be quite vile and quite didactic. But at the same time, there was that warmth, the passion. And I think it was always that fear of that running out. you know, wanting each film to be the best and the last,

just putting everything into that, the passion into that filmmaking. Thank you very much to Laura Hoogne, Claire Thompson and Jan Holmberg, and to our studio engineer Emma Haarth. Next week, the economic consequences of the peace. John Maynard Keynes' famous attack on the Versailles Treaty for the ruin it would inevitably be on Germany and on the wider world. Thank you for listening.

And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Okay, let's go. The only question I have to ask all of you is, what did you not say you'd like to have said? Do you want to start? It's not something that's discussed much, but the comedy is a key ingredient. We see that in the pairing of the characters, firstly between the night and death. And there's the pairing of the knight and his square. So the squire offsets the night's intensity.

And it's apparent in the structuring of the scenes as well. So when the knight undergoes a soul-searching confessional, the squire chats to an artist painting a fresco in the church. When the painter shows the squire awful images of abscesses caused by the plague, they end up getting drunk. And the squire sends up philosophy saying, no matter which way you turn you have your rump behind you. And they both keep repeating the word rump, rump behind you,

Yes, I'd like to share something from our archives of the Ingmar-Burban Foundation because it's, Bergman saved almost all of his writings. Not only his writings, by the way, we also have some 10,000 letters to and from Bergman, including your correspondence with him. I wrote some photocopies of it, if you'd like, by the way. But we can follow the creative process from the very first draft of the Seventh Seal to the finished shooting script. And as such, we can see how it's evolving.

And coming back to Bergman's literary qualities, his qualities as a writer, I think, for instance, in this most famous dialogue in the beginning of the film, we can see how Bergman, in it, the death is asking the knight, are you prepared? And in the first draft, Bergman has the knight answering, I'm not prepared. But in the end, and as we hear in the film,

he actually says, my body is afraid, I am not. Which is kind of strange, because the question was, are you prepared? And he answers that my body is afraid. Now, the thing is, in Swedish, the words for afraid and prepared are almost the same. Afraid is red and prepared. is Bered. So Böhm must have noticed this in his writing. It's a sort of a pun going on there. And also, because Böhmann is so acutely aware of the phonetics and the metric of his lines. So, for instance, he's often opting for an iambic rhythm. So, for instance, in Swedish, the death's line is, are you beread? are you prepared? Are you

prepared so? Dadaam, da'am. And the knight answers My crop is red, not I self. Dadam, da'am, da'am, da'am. If he had answered correctly, as it were, my body is prepared or something like that, the rhythm would be off. So it seems

that Burman is sacrificing semantics over phonetics, or at least he is you know, he's toying with the poetic qualities of his language. What did you miss saying? I think I missed a connection between the Phantom Carriage

to go back to that and the mid-50s. And that is the question of why Victor Hustrom, the director that Bergenso admired, why does he turn up in Wild Strawberries, the other film made in 1956 and not the Seventh Seal where he would almost have been more suited in a way? As deaf, yes. Wouldn't that have been fun?

So that's fascinating. be because that kind of connects those two films which as you said Jan, Jan, he's making in 1956 but Hirstrom turns up as the questing older academic and not death. The other

connection to be made is that in the phantom carriage the person who drives the carriage looks very much like death with the hood and the pale face but he's not death, he's just an emissary of death who has to drive the carriage for a year should someone die at midnight on

on New Year's Eve. But iconographically, the likeness is startling. So there's an intertextuality there between this inexplicably moving figure of death in the Seventh Seal and the

carriage driver. When you say it, you've signed it as if you were out to find him rather sympathetic death. In the Seventh Seal? Yeah. I do. You were talking earlier about how it works and it's impossible to explain why it works. For me, I think it's the

humor of that moment that somehow convinces us that this figure is to be taken seriously because he is human. There's also something with his voice, isn't it? I mean, he has a tenor, a high-pitched voice, whereas Max von, the actor playing, Benchek-Eyrot, whereas Max von Scylough has this, you know,

schooled bariton, the death, you would think that death would have a, you know, a bass or something like that, but he's, Actually, I do breath. When he says perhaps there is nothing there, the first time I heard that, I felt that quite bland, but actually there's almost a heartfeltness

in saying that as well. So I think the death character has quite a lot of death. Yeah. Well, we don't agree that death has quite a lot of death. And it's hard to understand. Well, thank you all very much. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Who's in the news for all the wrong reasons?

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