Bergman’s ‘Seal’ Stares Hard at Death, Faith

Ingmar Bergman was so revered in Sweden, especially around the time “The Seventh Seal” was released in 1956, that one of the country’s most influential film magazines finally became fed up. The editors at Chaplin decided only negative criticism would be printed about the famous director and his movies.

Bergman, not a Swede known for a bubbly sense of humor, thought that was very funny. Taking on a pseudonym, he even penned an attack on himself. Bergman later confessed to the prank but never quite disputed the article’s mocking jabs at his career.

He didn’t have to. Bergman could always count on more reasonable critics to defend him. As with many of his pictures, “The Seventh Seal” was declared a masterpiece done by an artist who may have been more than a bit of a brooder but who never failed to interpret the big concerns facing man.

The film, which ends UC Irvine’s “Cinema Potpourri” series Friday night, goes the whole nine yards when it comes to existential dread, staring fitfully at mortality, faith and God.

Bergman, who’s been parodied often--most notably by one of his top admirers, Woody Allen, in comedies like “Love and Death”--is a worried, anxious and ingenious filmmaker throughout “The Seventh Seal.”

The movie begins with one of the most famous scenes of art-house cinema. Max von Sydow, playing a knight disillusioned after 10 years fighting in the Crusades, sits abjectly on a rocky shore. Hard-eyed Death (Bengt Ekerot) shows up, ready to whisk him away.

But Death, apparently a sporting type, agrees to a game of chess with the knight’s life at stake.

Von Sydow, looking like a tormented saint from the mind of a Renaissance painter, takes the opportunity to ask about the hereafter.

His questions, inspired as much by fear as by a hope that his life hasn’t been meaningless, are ignored by Death, who insists that he doesn’t know anything. The game and the knight’s prodding, which becomes more desperate, are the film’s continuing threads.

The landscape Bergman leads us through is both gloomy and striking. Death, as one might expect, enjoys killing even more than board games, and he’s in the middle of a campaign to turn the countryside into a vast burial ground. The plague is everywhere, and Bergman takes an almost perverse glee in showing how it has destroyed people, their lives and morals.

A monk (Bertil Anderberg) now steals from the dead and, when introduced, is about to rape and kill a young woman.

Hordes of diseased peasants lurch down the streets like walking corpses from “Night of the Living Dead,” beating themselves with whips and branches as they go. A girl (Maud Hansson) is burned at the stake for having sex with the devil. This isn’t the pretty, fiord-rich Sweden of travel brochures.

Bergman does take a somewhat more secular, and refreshingly comic, turn with a small band of traveling actors led by Jof (Nils Poppe) and his wife, Mia (Bibi Andersson).

Jof’s antics and Mia’s optimism--which has nothing to do with religion or faith--contrast with the movie’s basic foreboding.

Bergman offers them as man’s hope; it seems fitting that Jof and Mia are the only ones saved when everyone else is forced by Death to dance with him into oblivion.

* What: Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal.”

* When: Friday, Dec. 2, at 7 and 9 p.m.

* Where: UC Irvine Student Center Crystal Cove Auditorium.

* Whereabouts: Take the San Diego (405) Freeway to Jamboree Road and head south to Campus Drive and take a left. Turn right on Bridge Road and take it into the campus.

* Wherewithal: $2 to $4.

* Where to call: (714) 824-5588.

MORE SPECIAL SCREENINGS

Vertical Reality

(NR) Warren Miller’s 45th adventure ski film highlights ski runs in British Columbia, Colorado, Japan, New Zealand, Russia and the Himalayas. It screens Saturday, Dec. 3, at 6 and 9 p.m., and Sunday, Dec. 4, at 2, 5 and 8 p.m. at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. Everyone who attends receives a free lift ticket to Snow Summit. $10 and $12. (714) 854-4646.