The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Ingmar Bergman · a film · 1957 · in Swedish, as Det sjunde inseglet · from Bergman’s own one-act play Trämålning (Wood Painting)
Mode
Morality play as feature film; allegory, road picture and an argument about God in one journey
Mythos
The game with Death; the half hour of silence after the seventh seal; the holy family spared; the Dance of Death
Phase
One journey from the shore to the knight’s castle, inside the time a single game of chess allows, closed by a dance at dawn
Presentation
Feature film in black and white, Academy ratio, Swedish dialogue; Gunnar Fischer’s photography, Erik Nordgren’s music; two companies on one road
Register
From the smith’s farce and a stage dagger to the reading from Revelation; the flat grey of the shore, the hard shadow of the church
Scale
A knight, a squire, a family of players, a country in plague
Governing Proposition
A knight home from the crusade finds Death waiting for him on the shore and challenges him to a game of chess. The game runs the length of the road home, and in the time it buys he puts his question about God to a confessor, a condemned girl and a family of travelling players; the one answer he finds is an afternoon of wild strawberries and milk, and the family he lets escape. The wager of the film is that a life is the time a game with death allows, that the only free move in it is a deed done for others, and that the farce and the terror of a frightened world are partners in one dance.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film opens on a bird hanging in a grey sky. A chorus sings, and a voice reads the verse from the Revelation of St John that gives the film its title: when the Lamb opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour. Below, on the stones of a shore, a knight and his squire lie asleep, their horses at the water. The knight, Antonius Block, is home from the crusade, and Max von Sydow, twenty-seven, gives him a great stillness and a face of exhaustion. He sets a chessboard on a rock. When he looks up, a figure stands on the shore where a moment before there was no one: a white face in a black cowl. “Vem är du?” “Jag är Döden.”
“Who are you?” “I am Death.”
The knight proposes a game of chess, and Death, a dry and courteous player, sits down to it. Everything that follows happens inside the time the game buys. The board will be seen again on the road, the game will be played once without a board, and it will be closed near the end; the respite is the plot, and the end of the game is the end of the film. The verse read over the opening will be read again at the end. Between the two readings the film is a journey through that half hour of silence: a world waiting for judgement, with nothing said from above.
The road begins with a joke that is not one. Jöns the squire, played by Gunnar Björnstrand, asks the way of a man sitting on a hillside, and the man is a corpse of the plague. Elsewhere, in a wagon of travelling players, Jof wakes and sees the Virgin in the meadow, teaching the child to walk. Mia, his wife, hears of it with fond disbelief, and their small son Mikael is beside them. Jof and Mia are Joseph and Mary by name, a couple guarding a child. Two companies are on the road, the knight’s and the players’, and the film keeps them apart until it brings them together over a bowl of strawberries.
Movement II
In a church the squire finds a painter at work on a wall: a Dance of Death. The painter tells him why he paints it. Frightened people run to the priests, and the priests want pictures that frighten. Bergman, a Lutheran pastor’s son, named as his sources the church paintings he saw as a boy with his father, and the film began as a one-act play, Trämålning, Wood Painting, written for acting students at the Malmö City Theatre: the knight, the squire, the girl and the witch, with Death arriving only at its end. The painter’s wall is the film’s method stated inside the film, and the film will end by becoming that painting.
At the grille of the confessional the knight kneels and talks. He wants knowledge, he says, not faith. He wants to know, and he cannot stop asking. In the same breath he tells the hooded confessor the strategy by which he means to beat Death at the board, and the confessor turns at the grille and shows the white face. The game has been played without a board, and the knight has given it away together with his longing. Then he looks at his own hand, still living. The scene is staged with almost nothing: a grille, a shadow, a cowl that turns.
Outside, a girl sits in the stocks, condemned for lying with the devil. She will be burned. The knight’s question about God is about to become a question put to faces, and hers will be one of them. The church has given the film its three instruments in one sequence: the painting that frightens, the confession that betrays, and the sentence that a frightened people passes on a child.
Movement III
In an empty village Jöns finds Raval, the theologian who talked his master onto the crusade, robbing a corpse and threatening a girl. The girl, who does not speak, comes away with Jöns. He is the film’s modern man on a medieval road: sardonic, brave and decent, with a sceptic’s contempt for the faith that sent them and a sceptic’s vocabulary for the absurd. His contempt is not a shelter either. Raval goes on along the same road, a dark counterpart shadowing the companies to the end.
In the square the players put on their show, and Skat slips away with Lisa, the smith’s wife. Then the show is broken. A procession of flagellants comes into the square under crosses, whipping themselves; the song stops, and a monk preaches the plague to the people who were laughing a moment before. It shows, in one movement of a crowd, what fear does to a society that has a church and no answer: it stops laughing and turns on its own body.
At the inn there is talk of the end of the world. Plog the smith laments his wife. Raval makes Jof dance like a bear on a table for the drinkers, and Jöns cuts Raval’s face with a knife. The farce of the cuckold, the humiliation of the player and the rumour of the Apocalypse share one table, and the film does not separate them. They will be separated only by who is spared.
Movement IV
On a hillside in the afternoon the knight sits with Mia, Jof and the child. There is a bowl of wild strawberries and a bowl of milk. Gunnar Fischer’s light is still, and for once the knight’s face rests. He says he will remember this moment, and carry it with him carefully, as one carries a full bowl. It is the one answer his question will receive: not a revelation, but a meal in company that he can hold in his hands. The knight joins the players’ company, the two parties travel on as one, and Plog and Lisa join them after. At the board the game resumes.
In the forest Lisa returns to Plog, and the comedy plays out its quarrel. Skat stages his own suicide with a stage dagger, a joke, and climbs into a tree to sleep. In the dark Death comes and saws the tree down. The film shows here, at the point where its farce meets its terror, the law that will close it: the joke and the death are partners, and the stage dagger only rehearses what the saw performs.
On the dark road the soldiers bring the girl condemned as a witch to be burned. The knight questions her about the devil, and looks into her eyes for him, and finds only terror: a frightened child, no one behind her. The burning goes ahead. Elsewhere in the dark, Raval, dying of the plague, begs for water. The man who talked the knight onto the crusade dies in the same dark as the girl the church condemned.
Movement V
Jof, who sees what others do not, sees Death at the game and slips away into the dark with Mia and the child, and at the last moves the knight sweeps the pieces from the board to hold Death’s eye while they go. The game ends in mate. Of the principal figures the three of the holy family are spared, and all the rest will be taken. The sparing is the knight’s one act, the only free move in the whole game, and it is done for others.
At the castle Karin, the knight’s wife, has waited out the crusade. The company sits at supper, and she reads from the eighth chapter of Revelation, the chapter the opening verse begins: the seventh seal, the silence in heaven, and the trumpets after it. Death is at the door. The knight prays to a God who must be somewhere. Jöns protests. The girl who has not spoken in the whole film speaks once. The verse that opened the half hour of silence closes it.
At dawn, after the storm, Jof alone sees them on the hill: the dead led away in a dance against a pale sky, hand in hand, the cuckold beside the knight, Death at their head with the scythe. The Dance of Death the painter was making on the church wall is enacted as the last image, and the film becomes the painting it showed being made. The family the knight spared goes on, alive, under that sky.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on the structure and on the speech, since the film argues aloud. The frame cannot give: the game is the plot, and each episode is a stretch of the respite it buys. The confession is required, where the knight says what he wants and gives his game away; so are the strawberries, on which the sparing at the board depends, and the burning, where he looks for the devil and finds a frightened child. What gives is the smith’s comedy, Plog’s lament and Lisa’s return running longer than the counterpoint needs, and the bear dance at the inn, which repeats what Raval has shown. The speech gives too, saying what the images have shown. That padding, in so short a film, holds the axis among the lowest.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The disclosure can be stated. A man who cannot believe and cannot stop asking puts his question to every face, and the only answer he finds is a deed and a remembered moment: the bowl of milk, and the family he lets go. Beside it, the film discloses what fear does to a society that has a church and no answer: the painter paints death because frightened people run to the priests, the flagellants whip themselves through a village that stops laughing, and in the eyes of the girl the soldiers burn the knight finds only terror. That second disclosure is exact, a statement and not a mood, and it holds outside the Middle Ages; Jöns carries a third, the unbeliever’s contempt, which is no shelter either. Held below the top because the first question is posed more fully than it is opened, often in speech, and the answer through Jof’s family is gentle to the point of sentiment.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The elevation is stark, and it rises often for so short a film: Death standing on the shore where a moment before there was no one; the confessor turning at the grille to show the white face; the flagellants breaking the players’ song; the strawberries and the knight’s face at rest; the tree sawn down in the dark, comic until it is not; the girl’s face at the burning; Death at the castle door; the dead led over the hill in silhouette against a pale sky. The rises run from the first frame to the last, and the last image is among the most widely known in cinema, and earns it. Held from the top because the comic stretches are flat by design and the studio forest at night is plainly a set.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The myth is built, not cited, and it is the whole structure. Three patterns bear the load at once. The game with Death is taken from the church wall: the respite is the game, and the game’s end is the end of the film. The Revelation frame makes the story the half hour of silence after the seventh seal, a world waiting for judgement while heaven says nothing. Jof and Mia, Joseph and Mary by name, guard a child, and the knight’s one act is to save them. The Dance of Death painted in the church is enacted as the last image. Take away the names and the structure still stands. Held from the top by the holy family, sweet and thin, and the morality-play types who fill the road.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The inheritance is near and can be named: Sjöström’s Körkarlen (1921), where Death’s driver gathers souls; Dreyer’s Vredens dag (1943), which had already burned a witch in a world of fear and faith; Lang’s Der müde Tod (1921) and Cocteau’s Orphée (1950), which gave Death a face and a voice on screen. Each supplied a piece; none had made the morality play an argued feature. The departure is that transfer: a film that argues the existence of God aloud, a sceptic of the 1950s in a squire’s mouth, broad comedy beside the Apocalypse, Death as a dry, courteous player. Held close to the bar by the stake: Svensk Filmindustri backed a director fresh from a prize at Cannes, and the risk was cushioned.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and the film loses part of what it knows, but not all. What it knows is that a life is the time a game with death allows, and the chess frame gives that knowledge its shape: every episode is a move, and the knight’s last move is the only free one. The pictures carry what the speech cannot. They are composed as church painting, frontal, in strong light against sky or stone, so that the wall painted in the church becomes the closing shot, and the film turns its story into the painting it showed being made. Held below by the stage it began on: the confession, the inn and the castle are scenes of speech a theatre could hold with little loss.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Evidence counts over promise, and there are nearly seventy years of it: the film has been taught, written about and argued over since its release. Its questions stay open. Is the knight’s last prayer the film’s answer, or Jöns’s protest, or neither? Are Jof’s visions grace, folly, or the artist’s sight? Is the knight’s act at the board a victory, or a delay of another kind? What holds the axis lower is that the film states its questions aloud, and once heard they yield less on return than those of a work that withholds. Much of the later attention goes to Death at chess as an emblem, and to parody, which is not credited here.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Published, so force and reach are scored together. The film showed that a feature could put the largest questions directly, in allegory, and hold an international audience; with Wild Strawberries the same year, it made a director’s name a reason to see a film. Force is held below reach, because the reach is largely to the emblem, not the grammar. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the redirection is documented in Woody Allen’s Love and Death (1975), which ends with a dance with Death; in Death brought to supper in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983), played at board games in Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991) and stepping out of a screening of this film in Last Action Hero (1993); and in the film’s place as the type of the art film.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Survival is demonstrated across nearly seventy years of continuous exhibition, teaching and re-release on every format. The form is wholly legible and the presence continuous; nothing that makes the work is lost. The medieval setting shelters it from the dating that fixes most films of 1957 to their year. What makes the work, the game and the dance, has outlived its moment, and Death at chess is known to people who have never seen the film. The surface that is fixed is slight: the earnest manner of the 1950s art film, the existentialist register of Jöns, the high-contrast style and the holy family’s sweetness can read as of their time. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it. With that surface charged, the evidence would carry more; the medium’s span holds it at 8.8.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The making bears weight throughout. Gunnar Fischer photographs the shore in flat grey light, the faces close against the sky, the church in hard shadow and the closing dance in silhouette. The confession is staged with almost nothing, a grille and the turn of a cowl. Max von Sydow’s stillness carries the knight, Gunnar Björnstrand’s Jöns is the finest playing in the film, and Bengt Ekerot’s Death is courteous, weary and exact. Erik Nordgren sets a chorus over the opening and gives the players a plain song. The costs are visible: the forest and the inn are studio sets and look it, the night scenes are lit as stage, Plog and Lisa are played broad, and much of the blocking serves speech rather than the camera.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The two most distant elements are the farce of the smith and his wife and the reading from Revelation at the castle. They obey one law, the law of the Dance of Death: the comic and the terrible are partners because Death takes both, and the dance leads them off the hill hand in hand, the cuckold beside the knight. The law shows where the registers meet: Skat’s stage suicide, a joke, is followed by his real death in the tree. The range runs from bawdy to apocalypse, and the law spans it. The strain is in the speech: the knight and Jöns talk as modern men, in a twentieth-century vocabulary of doubt, inside a world painted as the fourteenth. Much of that anachronism is the film’s own law, the present seen in a medieval mirror, and it is charged only where the speech steps outside the world the images build.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Many orders are held: consciousness, in the knight’s doubt, Jöns’s scorn and Jof’s visions; the sacred, in the church, the flagellants, Revelation and the holy family; death and the natural order, in the plague, the shore and the storm; the family, in Jof and Mia, Plog and Lisa, and Karin, who has waited out the crusade; art, in the players and the painter; power and violence, in the soldiers and the burning; sexuality, in Skat and Lisa. The road and the game carry each order past the knight. What holds the axis among the lowest is the social order: the state and labour appear only as a smith and some soldiers, the crusade is told rather than held, and the breadth is real but sketched.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Archetypal Deep at 9.2, then The Sublime at 9.0, then Pressure on Tradition and The Imperishable at 8.8. A structure in which the game with Death, the half hour of silence and the Dance of Death bear the load together; elevation that returns from the figure on the shore to the dance on the hill; a redirection of the art film whose emblem passed into common knowledge; and nearly seventy years of continuous presence, sheltered from its year by its setting.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable and The Encompassed at 8.2. The smith’s comedy, the second humiliation at the inn and the speeches that say what the images have shown are the parts a short film could lose; the orders are many and sketched, and the state, labour and the crusade itself are told rather than held. Next above them, The Bottomless Well at 8.4: questions stated aloud, which yield less on return than those of a work that withholds.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.5, The Made at 8.7, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Archetypal Deep at 9.2, Pressure on Tradition at 8.8, The Imperishable at 8.8, The Unconcealment at 8.7 and The Swerve at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, the last by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis it covers falls below 8.2, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.2. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Det sjunde inseglet (The Seventh Seal) as released in 1957, from the bird over the shore to the dance on the hill: written and directed by Ingmar Bergman for Svensk Filmindustri, photographed by Gunnar Fischer, with music by Erik Nordgren; black and white, in the Academy ratio. It premiered in Stockholm on 16 February 1957 and was shown in competition at Cannes in May 1957, where it shared the Special Jury Prize with Andrzej Wajda’s Kanał. The film as released is the object, and there is one version. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Every axis is judged on the Swedish film; English renderings are used for sense, are a reader’s aid rather than the object, and nothing here is charged to them. The period colour of the Swedish diction and the weight of its delivery to a Swedish ear are beyond this reading and are neither credited nor charged. Bergman’s play Trämålning is the source, not the work, and is named only as the source. Dialogue is quoted only where its words are certain, Swedish above English; every English gloss is the desk’s own, the verse from Revelation is paraphrased, and no published translation is quoted. The dates were computed by script. Figures that could not be verified, among them the running time, on which sources differ, the dates of the play, the length and cost of the shoot and the credits below the principal ones, are not given.