Tomato Nation » Ingmar Bergman http://tomatonation.com better red than dead Fri, 10 Feb 2012 13:45:23 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v= The Seventh Seal http://tomatonation.com/culture-and-criticism/the-seventh-seal/ http://tomatonation.com/culture-and-criticism/the-seventh-seal/#comments Tue, 08 Dec 2009 16:56:48 +0000 Sarah D. Bunting http://tomatonation.com/?p=4204 seventh_seal_14The Seventh Seal broke ground in its own time, no doubt, but to a present-day viewer it's pretty obvious stuff.Watching it, I kept thinking of Eddie's dismissive line in Diner: "I went to Atlantic City a hundred times, I never saw Death walk on a beach."(I do wonder, now, how he's watching that at the end of 1959.The film came out in 1957 but didn't get over here until late 1960, from what I can tell.Unless this isn't the only Bergman film with Death walking on a beach, which is a distinct possibility.)

It does have the whiff of homework — and I can't be the only person who kept looking at the baby and wondering, between the amount of time he spent sitting on adults' arms and the scenes in which he's sitting bare-ass on the grass and his parents wonder why he's fussing, when someone would add it up and put a diaper on the kid; of all the distractions you'd expect from a Bergman film, a bare-ass toddler isn't on the list, but there you go — and the clown/performer bits drag, in the style of the "comedic" subplots in Hong Kong kung fu.It's worth a look in spite of the staginess, though, for Bengt Ekerot's controlled performance as Death, and for a few beautiful (and duly famous) shots, especially the handheld-y procession shot through the townspeople.

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