The Virgin Spring and The Seventh Seal: A Girardian Reading

Born: July 14, 1918, Uppsala, Uppsala lan, Sweden Died: July 30, 2007, Faro, Gotlands lan, Sweden Ingmar Bergman was not only Sweden's but also one of the world's most important filmmakers of the twentieth century. He was an artist with extraordinary breadth, also an author, dramaturge, and director of theatre and opera. Music was the foremost inspiration throughout his life. In Sweden, Bergman's position, not least as a filmmaker, was undeniably paradoxical. On the one hand, he was hailed and canonized, whilst on the other, constantly questioned and regarded as being too complex, too private, and too theatrical. Following his death, his notability is fully recognized. From an international perspective, the picture of Bergman is uniform, synonymous with Swedish film. What made Bergman unique was, not least, the long span of his working career, which was framed by two periods of writing: the first as a screenwriter in the 1940s and then, toward the end of his career, writing deeply personal works which, having left filmmaking behind him, allowed others to direct. But perhaps the most striking fact is that his films, however headstrong, integrate fully with film history, from the silent era when Victor Sjostrom's films were an enormous influence, and through the following decades. Bergman was one of those directors who, with an insatiable voracity, fed off film, eagerly watching films over and over again, and allowing himself to be inspired by what he had seen to make his own. For Bergman, the 1940s was the most important decade for experimentation, when he learned his craft through testing, discarding, and trying anew. It could well be that none of the earlier films from Crisis to Prison or Thirst, are particularly distinguished in themselves, but in them he experiments with style, for example, flashbacks or themes and central narratives that deal with alienation, all of which recur in his later films. In reality the films of the 1940s present the key to Bergman's breakthrough. It takes years of apprenticeship to achieve mastery, a luxury very few filmmakers are granted in such a costly enterprise. International recognition came in the 1950s after some considerable difficulties, amongst which Bergman left Svensk Filmindustri for Sandrews in order to make Sawdust and Tinsel with its stark portrayal of the artist's suffering which lay close to his own heart. But after films such as The Seventh Seal, Smiles of a Summer Night, or Wild Strawberries, which reaffirmed Swedish film internationally, restraint was at last cast aside. Most strikingly, perhaps, is that Smiles of a Summer Night, a comedy, won the director's prize at Cannes. The difficult and introspective brooding had evidently added strings to his bow, as the classic lift scene in Waiting Women had shown three years earlier. The contrast between the light colors and the commanding lightness of tone with darker passages often dominated interpretations of the director's work which became evident in the 1950s. Another turning point came in 1960 when Bergman discovered Faro, the significance of which can only be measured in retrospect. It is as if the barren island landscape, which became the setting for a long series of films beginning with Through a Glass Darkly, revealed an expression that had lain dormant in scenes set by the sea in earlier films, such as Sawdust and Tinsel and The Seventh Seal, and had at last found a home. Bergman's narratives were finally anchored in their appropriate element. It was during this decade that it became clear that Bergman's films had started to challenge filmic conventions. In a period which produced a new international generation of filmmakers for whom documentary simplicity was the order of the day, Bergman continued to make such deeply personal films as Winter Light, The Silence, Persona, Hour of the Wolf, and The Shame as if the rest of the world ceased to exist. In certain respects these were extremely unfashionable films, and it was no coincidence that during these years Bergman's premieres gave rise to fierce media debates. …

A Ballad and a Movie: Scandinavian TSB B21 and Ingmar Bergman's <i>The Virgin Spring</i>

This article offers alternate readings of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) and Winter Light (1963) to those proposed in a preceding article by Esma Kartal. It argues against the contention that the two films express optimism about one’s ability to resolve spiritual-existential angst and the possibility of ultimately reaffirming one’s faith. Through close analysis of pivotal scenes, including that of Death in the Castle in The Seventh Seal and the Frostnäs church service in Winter Light, the article exposes the unremitting pessimism that pervades the films’ atmospheres. In essence, the article asserts that the two films, Winter Light in particular, are among the most pessimistic in Bergman’s cinema.

The development of themes, motifs, and techniques in Bergman's films, from the first intimations in the early work to the consummate resolutions in the final movies.Known for their repeating motifs and signature tropes, the films of Ingmar Bergman also contain extensive variation and development. In these reflections on Bergman's artistry and thought, Irving Singer discerns distinctive themes in Bergman's filmmaking, from first intimations in the early work to consummate resolutions in the later movies. Singer demonstrates that while Bergman's output is not philosophy on celluloid, it attains an expressive and purely aesthetic truthfulness that can be considered philosophical in a broader sense. Through analysis of both narrative and filmic effects, Singer probes Bergman's mythmaking and his reliance upon the magic inherent in his cinematic techniques. Singer traces throughout the evolution of Bergman's ideas about life and death, and about the possibility of happiness and interpersonal love. In the overtly self-referential films that he wrote or directed (The Best Intentions, Fanny and Alexander, Sunday's Children) as well as the less obviously autobiographical ones (including Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, and the triad that begins with Through a Glass Darkly) Bergman investigates problems in his existence and frequently reverts to childhood memories. In such movies as Smiles of a Summer Night, Scenes from a Marriage, and Saraband, Bergman draws upon his mature experience and depicts the troubled relationships between men who are often weak and women who are made to suffer by the damaged men with whom they live. In Persona, Cries and Whispers, and other works, his experiments with the camera are uniquely masterful. Inspecting the panorama of Bergman's art, Singer shows how the endless search for human contact motivates the content of his films and reflects Bergman's profound perspective on the world.

Religion has been a major preoccupation throughout Bergman's career, but it became the main focus for the films of the late 1950s and early 1960s, coinciding with the period when Bergman became known outside Sweden. While films of the late 1950s (The Seventh Seal, 1956; The Face, 1958) are critical of orthodox religion and outdated religious ritual, there is nevertheless a quest for a more internally spiritual or 'truer' faith. Unique moments of happiness, like the wild strawberry sequence in The Seventh Seal, symbolize the truth in human communion, both in contrast to and as original source of religious rituals of more conventional communion ceremonies. The quest to unveil a raw, original source of truth beneath religious convention recalls the de-masking process in Summer Interlude (1950). The quest for truth begins to crumble in Through a Glass Darkly (1960), marking the advent of the three films later to be termed the trilogy,1 which focused to a far greater extent on human characters than Bergman's work of the late 1950s. With The Silence (1962), the last film of the trilogy, also comes a questioning of words and images as signs or symbols of meaning.

Many types of non-professional, non-credentialed relationships are seen by laypersons as analogous to those occuring in psychotherapy. This paper takes a leap backwards several centuries and describes two examples of one such type of interaction as portrayed in artistic masterpieces. In Miguel de Cervantes' novel, "Don Quixote," an elderly, depressed man pursues a restitutive and grandiose delusion of being a heroic knight errant. In Ingmar Bergman's film, "The Seventh Seal," a disillusioned knight returns from the Crusades to face the lethal bubonic plague, and he uses obsessional means in an attempt to outwit death. Both men are accompanied by squires who try, with varying degrees of success, to help their masters relinquish their infantile needs for omniscience and omnipotence, accept their human limitations, and deal more appropriately with their surrounding realities. The powerful and inspiring insights of both works have much to teach contemporary therapists whose patients wear more metaphorical suits of armor.

This volume provides a concise overview of the career of one of the modern masters of world cinema. Jesse Kalin defines Bergman's conception of the human condition as a struggle to find meaning in life as it is played out. For Bergman, meaning is achieved independently of any moral absolute and is the result of a process of self-examination. Six existential themes are explored repeatedly in Bergman's films: judgment, abandonment, suffering, shame, a visionary picture, and above all, turning toward or away from others. Kalin examines how Bergman examines these themes cinematically, through close analysis of eight films: well known favorites such as Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, Smiles of a Summer Night, and Fanny and Alexander; and important but lesser known works, such as Naked Night, Shame, Cries and Whispers, and Scenes from a Marriage.

Bergman’s Magic Flute (1975) is one of the highlights of opera-film. It represents a splendid example of Bergman’s mastery of image and film technique, and a memorable interpretation of Mozart’s late opera. Except for chapters by Jeongwon Joe (1998) and Jeremy Tambling (1987), it has been underrepresented in research on opera-film. There is much more to be said, especially with respect to sound. Not only are Flute’s sound practices critical to the film, but its emphasis on vococentrism is unusual for an opera-film and also connects Flute to Bergman’s cinema as a whole. Many elements in the soundscape contribute to Bergman’s highly personal interpretation. One is the dry environment in the passages of spoken dialogue, recorded live and its contrast with the warmer environment in the musical numbers, which were prerecorded. The spoken sections impart a sense of intimacy and interiority, qualities found in other Bergman films, such as Persona, The Seventh Seal, and The Hour of the Wolf. Ambient noise occurs in some places, its use linked to certain moods and situations. Variations in the resonance of the vocal music add another element to the mix. This chapter focuses on three places in Flute. The second tableau, numbers 1-5, uses sound to delineate the juxtaposition of theater and cinema and establish a link between dry speech and interioirity. In the scene of Tamino’s crisis at “O ew’ge Nacht,” an expanded array of effects, including the acousmêtre and reverberation in addition to dryness, limn Tamino’s psyche and underscore a key moment of the opera. And at Pamina’s parental crisis in the first half of Act II, silence as well as sound plays an integral role. The striking sound design of Bergman and his team is crucial to the film’s aesthetic style, in which “less is more,” and its reputation as a landmark of opera-film.

The films of Ingmar Bergman have oftentimes been considered depressing and pessimistic. Nevertheless, there is enough material to claim that this is not the case. Two of his early pieces, Det sjunde inseglet/The Seventh Seal (1957) and Nattvardsgästerna/Winter Light (1963) are two of these examples. Both films include similar protagonists who are troubled by their lack or questioning of faith, who in the end find a way out of their angst with the help of secondary characters in the films.

Upon encountering a work— any work, be it in film, theatre, transcribed screenplays, dramatic texts, and memoirs—by Ingmar Bergman, there is scant little that any critic can add as testimonial to the inarguable artistic genius—and there is no other word for it—associated with the name of that distinguished Swede. His legendary output in films from the 1950s on until the early 80s is munificence enough to nourish a sensate soul’s appetite for human discernment and spiritual longings. To even suggest that works such as Persona, Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, and Through a Glass Darkly are masterpieces is to state the obvious. Through piercing psychological insights into all-too-human foibles, an eye for the telling detail that lies deep and unknowable in the vast recesses of our complex psyches, and an unerring ability to mine the richly evocative personae of his actors—each of them (and I expect the reader to know who they are) a signal and equal collaborator in degree and kind to the director’s vision—Bergman’s searing depictions of relationships between people as they struggle to make sense out of their existence is unparalleled in the history of film, if not in the art of recent decades.

Known for their repeating motifs and signature tropes, the films of Ingmar Bergman also contain extensive variation and development. In these reflections on Bergman's artistry and thought, Irving Singer discerns distinctive themes in Bergman's filmmaking, from first intimations in the early work to consummate resolutions in the later movies. Singer demonstrates that while Bergman's output is not philosophy on celluloid, it attains an expressive and purely aesthetic truthfulness that can be considered philosophical in a broader sense. Through analysis of both narrative and filmic effects, Singer probes Bergman's mythmaking and his reliance upon the magic inherent in his cinematic techniques. Singer traces throughout the evolution of Bergman's ideas about life and death, and about the possibility of happiness and interpersonal love. In the overtly self-referential films that he wrote or directed (The Best Intentions, Fanny and Alexander, Sunday's Children) as well as the less obviously autobiographical ones (including Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, and the triad that begins with Through a Glass Darkly) Bergman investigates problems in his existence and frequently reverts to childhood memories. In such movies as Smiles of a Summer Night, Scenes from a Marriage, and Saraband, Bergman draws upon his mature experience and depicts the troubled relationships between men who are often weak and women who are made to suffer by the damaged men with whom they live. In Persona, Cries and Whispers, and other works, his experiments with the camera are uniquely masterful. Inspecting the panorama of Bergman's art, Singer shows how the endless search for human contact motivates the content of his films and reflects Bergman's profound perspective on the world. Irving Singer is Professor of Philosophy at MIT. He is the author of Reality Transformed: Film as Meaning and Technique, Three Philosophical Filmmakers: Hitchcock, Welles, Renoir (both published by The MIT Press), and many other books.

Nicholas Haydock, Movie Medievalism: Imaginary Middle Ages. Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland & Company, 2008, p/bk 234 pp. ISBN 0786434435. Costas Constandinides, From Film Adaptation to Post-Celluloid Adaptation: Rethinking Transition of Popular Narratives and Characters Across Old and New Media. London and New York: Continuum, 2010, h/bk 166 pp. ISBN 1441103802. Jefferson Hunter, English Filming, English Writing. Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana UP, 2010, p/bk 280 pp. ISBN 0253221773. Paul Newland (ed.), Don't Look Now: British Cinema in 1970s. Bristol, UK, and Chicago: Intellect Ltd., 2010, p/bk 280 pp. ISBN 1841503202. Although differing in terms of theoretical focus and subject, these four volumes are unified in their intention to follow precepts of historian E. H. Carr by showing how filmmaker-historians on both sides of Atlantic have reworked European history, ancient and modern, to communicate different stories to their viewers, and how viewers have responded to such material. Nicholas Haydock's Movie Medievalism takes as its subject enduring fascination - in Hollywood and elsewhere - with Middle Ages. Inspired by Jacques Lacan's notion of imaginary, Haydock argues that cinemedievalism (his term) has not been preoccupied with anachronism but with cultural fantasy wherein reel/real divide is reinterpreted as Imaginary/Real (36). Films such as Jean-Jacques Annnaud's Name of Rose (1986) recreate an imaginary past as a way of commenting on real present: The formation of a persecuting society, said to have begun in late Middle Ages, can [...] be seen behind rise of capitalism but it is responsible for failure of socialism (32). Haydock proposes that this past/present relationship can be approached in Deleuzian terms as double arc, a present that passes and a past that is preserved [....] Put more simply, past that present is always becoming and present nature of recollections mirror one (39). This phenomenon underlies plot of lngmar Bergman's Seventh Seal (1957), where Antonius Block's situation (as played by Max von Sydow) marks a kind of midpoint in his transition between a genocidal holocaust (the Crusades), and threat of an apocalypse (the Black Death), analogous perhaps to Bergman's own situation in 1957 between World War Il and prospect of all-out nuclear war (41). bulk of Movie Medievalism consists of a series of case-studies of recent films, looking at ways in which their respective directors have explored past/present relationship. First Knight (1999) and A Knight's Tale (2001) constitute good examples of Hollywood's transformation of European medievalism into the practice and study of pastiche, or rather of generations of pastiche stretching back not to an original but to earlier acts of composite forgery (110). medieval period did not acknowledge modern concepts of 'authenticity,' or 'realism'; they were more interested in portraiture and apocryphal continuation (106). Haydock's observation explains why medievalism proves so attractive to postmodern directors in new millennium; they do not retell past, either in script or in visual terms, but construct their own apocryphal versions of it. This strategy contrasts with that employed by big-budget filmmakers such as Luc Besson in Messenger: Story of Joan of Arc (1999), or Ridley Scott in Gladiator (2000) or Kingdom of Heaven (2004), who use past to construct symbolic and unified national identities in face of daunting imperialism (111). Haydock examines Kingdom of Heaven in detail to show how Scott uses past to comment on contemporary western - specifically American - intervention in Middle East (134). In another chapter Haydock proposes that Antoine Fuqua's King Arthur (2004) is dominated by notions of convergence, not only between past and present but between film and newer media - for example, CGI technology. …

Scandinavian Drama: Medieval and Modern Introduction This issue of Comparative Drama has been organized around Scandinavian drama in the Middle Ages and the relation between the medieval and modern in theater and film. The theme is defined by the five contributors who revisit specific domains of the medieval world. The object and nature of their search for the Middle Ages set the boundaries for a collective attempt to represent Scandinavian drama in a medieval context. Below the clouded and tangled patterns of facts and events the scholars represented here attempt to reconstruct history from their diverse vantage points. They all share a historical approach in their remembrance and reflection on things past. From this perspective the articles allow themselves naturally to be presented in chronological order. Terry Gunnell's article, '"The Rights of the Player': Evidence of Mimi and Histriones in Early Medieval Scandinavia," examines evidence for mimes and actors from the beginning of the tenth century to around 1350. Gunnell refers initially to an often repeated assertion that apart from the liturgical ceremonies of the Catholic Church, "medieval Scandinavia was, to all intents and purposes, void of any other dramatic activity." In his careful philological reconstruction of the evidence pertaining to the early implications of the word leikari (literally "player"), primarily in Old Norse literature, he traces the itinerant entertainers recorded at the courts and castles of medieval Scandinavia. It was after all the aristocracy's demand for story-telling, poetry, singing, and mime as entertainment—an aristocracy with sufficient economic resources— that made these incipient theatrical activities possible. The earliest appearance of these players in Scandinavia seems to have been at the court of King Haraldr hárfagri (c.855-932). The evidence from Gunnell's research supports the notion of the courtly milieu of the nobility as the provider of literary culture in the vernacular languages in Scandinavia, with Norway and Denmark being slightly earlier than Sweden. In other words, only a small and select group from the ruling class could attend these performances, but thereupon these activities were disseminated to the educated burghers and other residents of towns in the Middle Ages. The entertainers' popularity among aristocracy and common people alike can be seen from the restrictive laws which applied to the rights pertaining to the players in m ivComparative Drama provincial Sweden from the thirteenth century onwards. The players in Gunnell's documentation represent a histrionic tradition of music, dance, mime, farce, and burlesque comedy skits memorized to be "improvised" from shared performance structures and techniques . In this way they represent a continuous histrionic tradition of creation and re-creation in many ways analogous to the oral ballad tradition . The players represent a body of knowledge with antecedents in the European community of mimi and histriones. It was a performance tradition that existed without written documentation apart from the scant and scattered comments of observers. Albertus Pictor's painting of a player (Sw.: lekare), dressed in colored hood and tights and playing his fiddle in a suggestive position, in the famous wall paintings at the Härkeberga church in Uppland from the 1480's is a revealing document. Another portrayal of lekaren in the same sequence by Albertus Pictor depicts a player who, entering the stage cautiously and peeking forward with shield and stick, is dressed in a green fool's garment with hood, pointed ears, black stockings, and leather bauble. In Ingmar Bergman's depiction of medieval life in The Seventh Seal, a troupe of itinerant lekare are shown in their profession, improvising a bawdy farce about a cuckolded husband as part of their stock repertoire. There may be here a direct inspiration from the visual imagination of Albertus Pictor since the latter also appears in the film as a spokesman on life and art. Bergman also presents him as the painter of a wall painting of the Dance of Death, underscoring the director's central visual metaphor for the existential human dilemma of suffering in the face of death. While there is such a painting at N0rre Alslev church in Denmark, none has been identified in medieval Sweden, though Albertus Pictor did depict a related motif, the Wheel of Life, in the H...

The Duality of Seeing “Darkly”:Analyzing Bergman’s Karin in Through a Glass Darkly Christina Boyles (bio) While many scholars praise Ingmar Bergman’s film trilogy—Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence—they tend to disregard the contradictory views on gender within these films. However, each of these films explores how men and women interact with one another. Though women play a prominent role in each part of the trilogy, Through a Glass Darkly is especially significant because its plot revolves around Karin, a woman who is treated as both powerless and powerful. In fact, the duality of Karin’s existence is the very essence of the film: in the eyes of the men in her family, she is an object used to satisfy male desire; but, in the narrative of the film, she is the autonomous catalyst of male redemption. In Through a Glass Darkly, Bergman intentionally highlights the duality of woman as both object and autonomous being, an idea which is outlined by Slavoj Zizek in his article “Woman as a Symptom of Man”; by emphasizing Karin’s duality, Bergman reveals how Karin’s ontology is both disregarded by the men in her family and embraced by the narrative of the film. While many scholars have written on Karin, their analyses have been oversimplified and reductive. Analyzing Karin’s duality, however, more clearly captures Bergman’s intent: to highlight the ways in which women function as both subject and object in patriarchal world of his films. For Bergman, the God’s Silence trilogy presents a male-dominated world in which women are silent, or forced into submission, who find their voices by subverting social norms. In Through a Glass Darkly, Karin’s subversive visions of God provide her with an escape from misuse at the hands of the men. Similarly, in Winter Light, Marta, who is symbolic of Martha, suffers and subverts Thomas’ world by still loving him when he pushes her away. In the Bible, Martha is the sister of Mary and Lazarus, and is the first to meet Jesus when he comes to raise Lazarus from the dead. In all later depictions of Martha, her servitude is emphasized. For example, in John 12:2 and Luke 10:40, Martha serves meals to her community. The most significant passage on Martha, however, is John 11:20–27 which states: [End Page 17] Then Martha, as soon as she heard that Jesus was coming, went and met him: but Mary sat still in the house. Then said Martha unto Jesus, Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died. But I know, that even now, whatsoever thou wilt ask of God, God will give it thee. Jesus saith unto her, Thy brother shall rise again. Martha saith unto him, I know that he shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day. Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this? She saith unto him, Yea, Lord: I believe that thou art the Christ, the Son of God, which should come into the world.1 Here, Martha’s devotion to God is underscored. Her role as the faithful servant is reflected in Winter Light’s Marta, who attempts to imbue her love interest Thomas, symbolic of doubting Thomas, with the faith he needs to grow in his relationship with God. At the end of the film, Thomas is about to preach a sermon to his congregation, but no one shows up to listen except Marta. Her presence, however, subverts of Thomas’ expectations and, as such, distinguishes her voice from those around her. As such, Marta becomes the center of the film and the character around whom hope flourishes. While there is also a subversive female character, Anna, in The Silence, she is not symbolic of hope, but rather of pain. Noticeably, Anna, her sister Ester, and her son Johan, are traveling home when they decide to stop in the fictional town of Timoka. While here, Ester isolates herself in her hotel room while Anna...

Reconstructing the Middle Ages: The Monk's Sermon in <i>The Seventh Seal</i>