"Tis the season to be jorry..."

It's Christmastime, dear readers:

Don't take up a triple-dog dare

Be sure your star points straight, and always buy your fuses by the gross

Revel in the triumph of your Major Award

Don't be scared of Santa or his jolly elves

Strive for your dreams

Do something different for Christmas, like going out to eat

Don't say the F- - - word and end up with a soap-poisoning disability

Don't break your glasses

Don't EVER let your friends see you like this

Don't shoot your eye out

And be sure to drink your Ovaltine

Happy Holidays.

We got the television, too. Rerun movies.

The following is an embellished version of an article which originally ran in the 2012 edition of the New Orleans Worst Film Festival program book.  Like many B-movies, it’s been re-edited slightly and retitled.

When television was making its first major impact upon American culture, the big movie studios feared that it would kill the film business altogether.  Why go to the theater for a picture show when people could watch movies on television at home? the thinking went not only in major studio offices but in the many little offices of theaters across the country.  And over the years, theater business was affected to increasing degrees by the rapid spread of television sets into nearly every home.  Attendance did drop off and in many places so dramatically that moviehouses and drive-in theaters by the thousandfold closed their doors or gates forever.  The whole moviegoing experience that had existed in America for nearly thirty years was changed beyond recognition as television took over more and more of the functions of the picture house —providing news and filling airtime with cartoons and short-subject films that it was no longer necessary to go to town to see them.  The newsreel vanished from the scene in the middle of the 1960s, theatrical cartoon shorts by the middle of the next decade.  Where movies had been the main if not the sole source for information and entertainment, and whole families went out for three or four hours on nights and weekends to catch the ‘flicks, now they were staying indoors, in the perfect and increasingly air-conditioned comfort of the home, with snacks, beer, Cokes and TV dinners handy.  The movie culture was never the same afterward.  But rather than being supplanted by the new medium, television and movies came together into an intimate relationship which grew from the necessity of filling airtime with programming of any and all kinds.  Far from eliminating movies altogether, they became a necessary staple for television stations from coast to coast, and the old and new mediums reached an accommodation when it was seen that the demand for new big-screen movies was still going strong even with a television-watching public.

Movies of all kinds appeared on the small screen: old classics like Casablanca and Gone With The Wind, a plethora of Westerns to the extent that it became a cliche on a variety of television shows that whenever characters on those shows were watching TV, the channel was most often tuned to a Western.  Every week, stations had at least three movie programs during the daytime or even primetime slots, the major networks had a major movie program one day a week, and weekends were a combination of sports, old reruns, and movie shows.  And there were also late-night movie shows, often airing as the last program of the day before signoff at two in the morning.  It was a time when television, restricted to only three major channels, a UHF independent channel or two, and a PBS channel, and a broadcast day that only lasted twenty hours at the longest, really was a cool, hip, cutting-edge, pleasant seat-of-the-pants, going-for-broke proposition which, for all its technological and scheduling limitations, presented an incredible smorgasbord of programing each and every week, with a greater variety and entertainment value than we get today with twenty-four hours programming and five hundred channels which have helped to turn television into nearly unwatchable shit.  But I digress for the moment.

In this bygone era when television stations were actually locally owned, struggling for survival and throwing everything and anything on their airwaves, movies of all kinds aired, from the finest Hollywood gems to, at the opposite end of the scale, the silliest, cheesiest and even most rancid B-grade and Z-grade films ever made.  Really cheap films that were, in many cases, rushed through production as quickly as possible to make a quick buck for whatever Poverty Row studio made them, and which were snapped up by television stations all over because they cost next to nothing to lease out and thus constituted a cheap and ready-made source of programing fodder.  The sort of hokum which no self-respecting program director would ever dream of airing in prime-time but was just perfect to fill that late-night timeslot.  Many of these were the science fiction and horror movies which were ultimately parodied in films like Kentucky Fried Movie, Amazon Women On The Moon, Matinee, and of course ended up being mercilessly skewered on Mystery Science Theater 3000: a show which itself was a parody of one of the staples of local television.  In every major market, at least one area station had a dedicated science fiction/horror movie show which took on one of two distinct forms: the hosted program featuring a mad scientist or ghoul in his dungeon laboratory appearing in wraparound segments, or the more prosaic yet dedicated sci-fi/horror show most often airing late at night, or on weekend mornings or Saturday afternoons.  Often, local stations had two such programs in their weekly lineups, especially the UHF stations, to fill up that precious airtime.

In my own hometown, New Orleans, we had Morgus the Magnificent, the Crescent City’s resident television mad scientist, who had his experiments first on WWL television from 1959 to around 1964, then after returning home from a stint in the Detroit market, found a home on WDSU for a couple of years.  Morgus would end up returning yet a third time in the late 1980s when his regenerated movie experiments aired on WGNO TV-26, the main area UHF independent station which, in the days when it was still WWOM (Wonderful World Of Movies), had the horror show with host Guru S. Malady.  Another station, WNOL TV-38, aired the nationally syndicated Elvira show for a couple of years as well.  We also had, for many years, the program which many of my old cronies from New Orleans remember fondly as The Sunday Morning Movie which aired on WVUE.

The Sunday Morning Movie was mother’s milk for local sci-fi/horror fans, nurturing a love of the genre during our youth.  You switched over just after the book closed on the sleeping faery on WDSU’s Let’s Tell A Story to Channel 12 (Channel 8 after 1971) and, before having to go to the noon mass on Sundays you could sit down and watch, for the tenth, twentieth, or hundredth time, some monster trash Japan or evil aliens with intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic but with the acting skills of gerbils coveting our world, or the standard group of nuclear war survivors —among whom were always at least two nubile 20-plus year old breedable females— being menaced by the rubber-suited mutant horror that had once been Tony.  These were real turkeys to be sure.  Yet, every few weeks, you would be lucky to tune in and find yourself being treated to a really good movie like the 1953 George Pal classic War Of The Worlds or The Last Man On Earth, with Vincent Price as the sole remaining human survivor of a global plague that killed off most of the Earth’s population and turned the survivors into corpselike mutants.  Every once in a while, you would get a real classic like 1951’s The Day The Earth Stood Still.  It was a very different television culture then, when you suffered only eight minutes of commercials in a program hour and you could watch a movie or a rerun largely uncut —although of course movies which were shot in the widescreen formats which became increasingly popular in the 1950s would be subjected to pan-and-scan re-edits to try to fit the action into the dimensions of the small screen, so young movie fans growing up would end up waiting decades before letterboxing of movies to restore the original proportions became common practice on cable television to finally see these movies in all their artistic glory.  That is another issue for another blog entry, of course.  In the era when TV was largely the only prospect for seeing many of these movies at all, you took what you got.

On the flipside, when it came to the prime movie show slots on local stations and the far richer networks, it was a bonanza of classic and modern A-grade cinema.  For many of the readers of this and other movie blogs, the first experience of Citizen Kane, The Longest Day, The Defiant Ones, Lawrence Of Arabia, Jaws, The Bridge At Remagen, Dr. Zhivago, The Blue Max, and dozens and dozens of other titles I could reel off came from the small screen.  Certain movies aired in their distinct seasons for them: Christmas always meant at least two showings of Frank Capra’s sentimental classic  It’s A Wonderful Life.  Easter brought The Wizard Of Oz and The Greatest Story Ever Told and, of course, Cecil B. DeMille’s larger-than-life biblical epic, The Ten Commandments.  My whole early experience with the world of James Bond was brought to me courtesy of the ABC Sunday Night Movie, which ran at least three Bond pictures a year —edited for television for technical as well as broadcast decency reasons, of course.  Arguments can and are made of how viewers mostly never saw the “true” movies until the advent of cable stations like HBO, Cinemax, and Turner Classic Movies, but for anyone growing up through the sixties, seventies, and the early eighties, television was as much about movies as it was about sitcoms, cop shows and adventure/drama shows, and it afforded a rich exposure to the cinematic arts throughout the year.

Much of that rich television culture is gone now.  Swept away in the era of increasing ownership conglomeration and media-merger, of power-advertising and loosened broadcast standards and non-enforcement of regulations which now allow the networks to make you suffer fifteen minutes of the same banal commercials airing three times in each ad spot, and to squeeze the credits of your favorite shows and movies into tiny boxes on screen so you can be bombarded by truly obnoxious network promos as you wait for the next round of commercials interrupted by a few minutes of actual program.  And in an era of continuous programming which has resulted in the same shows being aired in all-day marathons each and every week, which has really cut down on the variety that once existed in the medium.  Movies are suffering in this new 24/7, five-hundred channel wasteland as much as the whole of television itself.  Yes, there is Turner Classic Movies and Sundance and IFC, and HBO and Cinemax as well.  But Bravo used to be one of the finest movie and cultural arts channels on the package and which now airs almost nothing but reality shows.  Same with A&E.  American Movie Channel not only no longer airs uncut classic movies but original drama programing that has very little to do with movies.  And the few cable networks that still air uncut movies, most of them are airing the same three or five features multiple times during the same week and in some cases the same day.  The result has been that much of that rich movie/television culture has been all but strangled to death as more and more cable/satellite channels are steadily becoming the same channel just with different identifying icons and all with the same programing practices which are making TV —which Newton Minnow condemned as a vast wasteland in the 1950s— into an infinite and ever-expanding, hellish realm of banality.  A cursed Darkling Plain from which everything that once made TV so much a part of the cool American culture of a bygone era has all but vanished.

Channel-wise, in the era I and many of this blog’s readers grew up in, there may theoretically have been a lot less actual choice with only a thirteen-channel dial but, paradoxically, a far greater variety of available choices for viewers to select from, and much of them being movies.  Lots and lots of movies of all kinds.  In the time when TV was still watchable.

Your hell, Prospero. And the moment of your death.

  
It is altogether appropriate for the Witching Season that we turn some attention upon what perhaps was one of the finest horror/thriller pictures ever made: Roger Corman’s The Masque Of The Red Death (1964).

Roger Corman has long been infamous as the great schlockmeister of Hollywood; a reputation earned from having cranked out numerous cheap B-grade films through the 1950s and later the 1970s to make a fast buck – which he most assuredly did succeed at doing.  Not a single picture Corman ever made failed to show a profit, no matter how thin it might have turned out to be in the final accounting.  After having compiled a canon of some of the hokiest B sci-fi/monster thrillers and hamfisted social “message” movies ever made, it was around 1960 that Corman suddenly launched off on making a string of remarkably well-crafted horror films based on the works of Edgar Allen Poe, scripted by talented genre writers such as Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont.  As with every Corman picture, these also were low-budget productions.  Corman always knew how to squeeze a nickel, and  he became quite adept at circumventing the limitations of budget by borrowing sets and costumes left over from other productions and squirreling away monies saved on each of his assigned production budgets by finishing each project ahead of time and then ploughing the leftover cash into the next film.  He also got great performances out of his casts, headlined by the great Vincent Price, whose very presence and mellifluous elocution lent dignity to any film he appeared in.  The first of these productions, House Of Usher (1960), set the pattern for the series: Price leading a cast of mostly rookies and unknowns, always few in number, and turning upon costuming, acting, and a tight psychological story to create the horror absent of monsters or elaborate visual effects (though most of the films in the series would feature at least one “hallucinatory” scene rather effectively and cheaply done with some basic photographic artistry, scored with appropriately eerie music, of course), turning upon the evils human beings inflict upon one another rather than the terror of the supernatural.  It proved a very effective formula.  For 1963, Corman finally got around to making The Masque Of The Red Death, which he had put off because he had felt that elements of it would have been too similar to Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) and he wanted a few years to pass before attempting his project.  The timing turned out to be just right, for the British government had recently enacted a policy of granting tax advantages and subsidies to movie producers who worked in England, using mostly English actors and production crews.  There would also be castle sets that could be borrowed from English studios to give a far more lavish look to the finished film  With a much reworked script from Charles Beaumont and R. Wright Campbell in hand, Price and lovely scream queen Hazel Court in tow, Corman readily accepted American International Pictures studio boss Samuel Z Arkoff's suggestion that they go to London to make the movie.  The result was a picture which would end up becoming a classic of the genre beyond anyone’s expectations.

Of Roger Corman’s many movies, The Masque Of The Red Death is unique for its depth.  Having to craft an entire ninety minute photoplay around two Poe short stories, “The Masque Of The Red Death” and “Hop-Frog”, the resulting work spins out a story of human depravity and hope. On the night Prince Prospero (Price), a medieval Italian duke, stages his annual banquet for the nobles of the countryside and also, as per personal custom, invites the landed serfs of the nearby village of Catania to the banquet as well — ostensibly out of generosity but in all likelihood as entertainment for his wealthier guests — the villagers, far from expressing their usual servility or any hint of gratitude for their overlord’s apparent generosity, are rebellious thanks to a prophecy from a mysterious holy man (in actuality, Death, played by John Westbrook) on the hill that the people of Catania would soon be delivered from Prospero’s tyranny.  When the old woman who brought the message of the prophecy screams out in agony, she is found to be a victim of the Red Death, a virulent plague which has periodically ravaged the countryside.  Prospero orders his guards to take captive a local village girl, Francesca (Jane Asher), her father and fiancée (the latter two for his own amusement) and then to burn the village to the ground, regardless of the oncoming winter.  Shutting himself and his guests within the walls of his castle in seeming safety from the plague without, and having become fascinated by Francesca, Prospero proceeds upon a project to seduce and corrupt the innocent girl into the worship of Satan.  Subjecting her to continual displays of cruelty from his noble guests while alternatively assuming a protective, even paternal attitude toward the girl, Francesca is gradually stripped of her hope and dignity until she is brought very near the point of succumbing to Prospero when Death appears upon the night of the masque, and at the stroke of midnight brings down upon Prospero and his guests their grisly and well-deserved fate.

What makes The Masque Of The Red Death unique in the horror genre is the degree to which the movie examines the nature of man.  Prospero and his wife Juliana (Court) are Satanists, having adopted the worship of the Fallen Angel in hopes of achieving immortality through the Devil's favor.  While outwardly confident and contemptuous, Prospero is a mortally frightened man who cannot accept the prospect of his own demise.  He is willing to sacrifice everyone in his orbit, including his wife, to Satan in order to escape death.  Juliana has deceived herself into believing that she can wed Satan and thus ascend higher in his favor than Prospero, but still seeks her husband's continuing grace by finally agreeing to undergo ceremonies she has held herself back from now that Francesca has entered into the scene.  “How truly realistic women are,” sneers Prospero.  “Finally you are ready to undergo the most terrible rites and incantations in order to secure your position here”.  Juliana, despite her own veneer of outward superiority, fears being cast out of Prospero's home, as he is well aware of, and in the sort of world that was early 14th century Italy that meant impoverishment at best and death at worst.  As for all of Prospero's friends, they constantly seek to curry his favor because he is the wealthiest and most powerful of their circle.  To fall outside of Prospero's grace is to risk ruin and, in the case of Count Scarlatti (Paul Whitsun-Jones) who arrived late to the castle, death from the plague when Prospero refuses him admittance.  Scarlatti finds himself unable to buy his way in even by the offer of his own wife to Prospero for his sexual amusement, and the Prince “spares” his friend by killing him with a crossbow bolt in the heart before tossing a dagger to Scarlatti's widow so that she can spare herself the Red Death as well.  The other noble guests within are more than willing to degrade themselves  as Prospero sees fit to stay under his protection and gain ever more wealth.  On the night of the masque, Prospero showers them with gold and precious stones from the balcony over the main hall.  “Look at them.  Look at them!  Like starving men scrambling for a few crusts of bread.  All rich beyond imagining and all greedy for more,” he says to Francesca with undisguised contempt.  Then, there is Alfredo (Patrick Magee), presumably Prospero's closest friend, who enjoys cruelty and corruption for their own sakes and is an outright bully.  He imagines himself Prospero's superior but is a bigger fool than he is capable of apprehending, and is quite heedless of the revenge being laid out for him by the dwarf dancer Hoptoad (Skip Martin), in payback for his assault of Esmeralda (Verina Greenlaw), Hoptoad's wife, earlier in the evening.  He has no clue of how he is being led to his own death by the cunning dwarf, who successfully plays on Alfredo's overweening vanity as part of a plan to engineer escape for himself and Esmeralda from the castle.  Alfredo's ultimate fate is indeed a very gruesome one.

Against all this, Francesca and her fiancee Gino (David Weston) have only love.  But that is what undergirds their own religious faith and gives them strength.  It is Francesca's faith that most intrigues Prospero and even, despite himself, attracts him on a deeper level than he is willing to admit.  At one point, Prospero wonders if Francesca is willing to risk everything for the sake of love, and later when she offers herself to Prospero's mercy in order to spare Gino from being cast out of the castle, he confesses that she almost makes him doubt his own convictions.  Likewise, with the strength of love within him, Gino is able to find new courage – with only a little prompting from Death – to try to turn the surviving villagers away from degrading themselves before Prospero to buy their own survival and then to go back to the castle to try to rescue Francesca.  Even when she is beginning to crack under the relentless psychological pressure put upon her, Francesca still manages to avoid completely tumbling into Prospero's grasp by the time Death makes his appearance at the masque because love has not been extinguished in her even if she has lost hope.  There is indeed one brief moment when she gives the mad prince a tender kiss when she is sent off to the battlements of the castle, knowing also that she will not see him again.

Prospero combines the qualities of psychologist, torturer, and father-confessor, and wields all of them as both weapons and surgical instruments to “instruct” people.  His grandfather was an inquisitor for the church who tortured over three hundred people to “save their souls”, which he relates to Francesca.  He casually speaks to her of how he locked a friend of his in a yellow room in the castle for three years, after which the man could never again look upon the sun or a flower, as a demonstration of how easily a man's mind can be twisted.  Later, he tells her of how a falcon is trained as a hunting bird by temporarily sewing the eyes shut and forcing it to endure the whims of the trainer “until her will is submerged and she learns to serve”.  Prospero was also adept at twisting virtues to justify his cruelties and to outwit Francesca, who had no learning and could not rebut his logic.  He uses this to justify putting Gino and Ludovico (Nigel Green) to a death challenge as punishment for their sin of killing three of his guards, and later in a warped argument that by slaughtering the last survivors of Catania he was actually showing them mercy by sparing them the agonies of the Red Death.

In any viewing of the movie, it is evident that Prospero is subjecting the girl to a classic brainwashing procedure.  Cut off from her family and home, thrust into unfamiliar surroundings, Francesca is bombarded both by the wanton displays of debaunchery from the people in the castle and by Prospero's dogma, both of which steadily break down her sense of reality.  Acting as protector and instructor, he simultaneously presents himself to Francesca as her only source of safety and knowledge, and she has little means to resist the continuing instruction in his worldview:

“Somewhere in the human mind, my dear Francesca, lies the key to our existence.  My ancestors tried to find it, and to open the door that separates us from our Creator.”

“But you need no doors to find God!  If you believe—”

“Believe?  If you believe, you are gullible.  Can you look about this world and believe in the goodness of a god who rules it?  Famine, Pestilence, War, Disease and Death!  They rule this world.”

“There is also life and love and hope!”

“Very little hope, I assure you.  No.  If a god of love ever did exist, he is long since dead.  Someone, some... thing, rules in his place.”

She is stripped of all the outward symbols of her former life, such as her crucifix and her own clothing, and is forced by circumstance to depend upon Prospero.  The shocks to her sensibilities delivered by everything she witnesses in the castle, the murder of her own father before her eyes, the casting-out of her lover into the plague-ravaged wasteland beyond the castle walls, and the death of Juliana who attempted to help her and her men escape the castle (to further secure her own place rather than any genuine concern for their safety, of course), completes her isolation from the reality she had known before her captivity, while each hope is crushed one by one.  By the time Alfredo is burned to death wearing an ape costume at the masque, after being rendered helpless by Hoptoad, she is desolate within and losing the last of her ability to resist Prospero.  “My life is done.  What's left I give to you tonight,” she says dully.  Were it not for Death's timely intervention, she certainly would have been lost forever into Prospero's madness.

As with the entity played by Bengt Ekrot in The Seventh Seal, Death here is similarly a sympathetic and to a limited extent even a helpful being who is merely performing a necessary task in the world.  He takes only those whose time is up, but points Gino in the right way; hearing his confession of his own fears and inadequacies and helping the young man to again find his courage at the very moment he needs it to rescue his beloved.  He prevents Gino from simply charging down from the battlements where he would have been cut down by the guards.  He sends Francesca to safety before bringing down upon Prospero his own demise.  After the end, Death is seen happily playing a Tarocci game with a child who was one of only six in the village to survive both the plague and Prospero's depredations.



Death is also a judge, pronouncing sentence upon Prospero while forcing him to at last confront his own folly though it is far too late for him to profit from the lesson.  At first taking him to be an emissary from Satan, Prospero gleefully recounts how he alone had the right faith when others doubted, building a temple to the Devil, corrupting all his friends into his cult, promising them safety from the plague and setting them up to fall victim to it – which has just occurred when Death infects the assembled throng and sets them into a danse macabre.  “You presumed too much,” Death remarks, to which a still unknowing Prospero concedes while adding that “It is a fine jest, one that would amuse Satan.”  “Would it?” replies Death rhetorically. It is after Prospero makes his “generous” request to spare Francesca and her subsequent departure from the masque when Death brings reality crashing down down upon the prince:

“Thank you, Excellency.  For the girl.”

“Why do you call me Excellency?  I have no title.”

“Well, I thought as the emissary of Satan—”

“He is not my master.  Death has no master.”

“But Satan rules the universe.  I made a pact with him.”

“He does not rule alone, and your pact with him will not save you.”

“There is no other god!  Satan killed him!”

“Each man creates his own god for himself.  His own heaven, his own hell.”

And when Prospero demands to see the face of the figure he's talking to and pulls off the mask to see his own blood-coated face staring back at him:

“Your hell, Prospero.  And the moment of your death.”

Only at that moment does Prospero at last confront reality and he still attempts to flee from it, as he has been doing his entire life.  Desperately clawing his way through the throng of infected revelers all falling upon him, Prospero reaches the Black Chapel as his last sanctuary, only to find Death already waiting for him there.  Unable to unlock the door, the prince cowers from the oncoming spectre.

“Why should you be afraid to die?” Death says to Prospero,  “Your soul has been dead for a long time.”

Though both The Seventh Seal and The Masque Of The Red Death shared certain thematic similarities, they differed in one critical aspect: where the existential terror confronting Antonius Block was his uncertainty that God and an afterlife actually existed, Prospero's was the certain dread of his own oblivion spurring his effort to run away from it.  Block wanted answers, Prospero sought escape.  In the course of this flight, Prospero destroyed his own soul in the service of a folly and sacrificed hundreds of lives to it.  His was an empty existence spent in the pursuit of power, wealth, and immortality.  He corrupted others and destroyed himself long before his own final demise, and his end was one of stark terror.  Prospero truly did create his own hell.

In many ways, The Masque Of The Red Death is far more a philosophical rather than a horror movie.  Its themes touch upon some of the deepest questions confronting and confounding human understanding.  Greed, cruelty, depravity, the amoral decadence of the ruling class, and self-deception are laid bare for examination, as are love, mercy, generosity.  The true source of horror lies in human evil rather than from any supernatural agency, and the one supernatural element of the movie, the figure of Death himself, takes on an allegorical aspect not unlike his depiction in Catholic morality-plays of the medieval era.  The psychology of power is exposed for what it is: the ultimately doomed attempt to control everything like a team of trained horses.  While the opposite lesson is that the only true source of human strength is love.  A most unexpected message from a horror film, to be certain.

You and your visions and dreams.

For the latest entry in this journal, the spotlight falls upon Ingmar Bergman's 1957 expressionist masterpiece, The Seventh Seal.  Until recently, it has not been a movie I have had as many opportunities to view, enjoy, and dissect, as has been the case with other favored classics such as Citizen Kane, Kagemusha: The Shadow Warrior, Diabolique and numerous titles from my library I could list here.  But having found the film available online, I've been able to do a bit of catching up in that regard.  Eventually, I will get around to adding my own examinations of the philosophical aspects of this singular celluoid allegory.  But for the moment, I intend to focus on the imagery of The Seventh Seal as composed by Bergman and cinematographer Gunnar Fischer which made it such a rich feast for the mind.  And if this post rambles a bit, then it is a result of the difficulty I have had in coalescing my own thoughts regarding all I have experienced from this ninety-six minute work of moving art.  So do bear with me.

Bergman stated in several interviews that one of the main sources of inspiration for Der Sjunde Inseglet was church frescoes rendered by Albertus Pictor (who appears in the movie as a character in a dialogue scene with the squire Jons) circa 1480: most notably the depiction of a chess match between a knight and Death on the walls of Täby kyrka in the Diocese of Stockholm.  Church frescoes and murals served much the same function as motion pictures in our present day, telling moral stories through vivid imagery (necessary in order to communicate with a largely illiterate population in that era).

Let's start with the first images confronting the viewer:

"Antonius Block and his squire, after long years as crusaders in the holy land, have at last returned to their native Sweden.  A land ravaged by the Black Plague."  And then fades in a vision of the doom-laden cloudscape of the Apocalypse to open the movie.

Next, a transition to the seabird hovering motionless against the heavy sky, suggests an unsettling, almost vulture-like connotation of the Holy Ghost watching over the knight and his squire on the bleak rocky beach, presaging the appearance of Death in the movie.

In this frame, the long-shot serves to establish Block's isolation from the world.

Block kneels to pray, but cannot bring himself to do so because of his own inner emptiness.  Beyond him, the surf pounds in past the rocks and we see the distant sun; here symbolizing the grace and enlightenment the knight seeks but which eludes him.  Notice the shadow covering half of Block's face, which shows the viewer the two conflicting halves of his nature: the man who wants to believe in God, and the man who cannot do so because of all he has seen and lived through in ten years of war.  The overall effect of the composition renders a wonderful poetic image of Block's turmoil.

And thus, in just two minutes worth of film and without dialogue, Bergman effectively illustrates the knight's troubled soul and lays the groundwork for his particular story.  The sequence unfolds with wonderful economy, wasting not a single frame in establishing the main conflict and foreshadowing the ultimate fates of the knight and squire.

 

Just prior to Death's first appearance, the audience is treated to this panorama of the chess set against the sea, with the large rock situated in the middle distance, just before the first of Fischer's slow dissolves in this movie; with this one rendering the chess set transparent against the relentless fury of the crashing waves.  A dichotomy of order and chaos, for the game of chess represents man's civilization and his efforts to impose structure, which are in continual conflict with the "disordered" state of wild nature.

Death on the beach, confronting Antonius Block for the first time three minutes into the movie.  The sudden drop-out of the background noise of the surf accentuates the visual impression of the scene.  Death is himself a force of nature here, having come to cull Block from the world of the living as his time has arrived and bringing in his wake a silence on earth and in heaven.

The smallness of man in comparison to nature is further emphasized to very great effect by this long angle view of Block and his squire shot through the two cliffs as we see here:

Death's stalking of the characters is illustrated with three images symbolizing his omnipresence: in the one when Jons finds a dead shepherd, skin bleached and eyes plucked out of their sockets.  The next is the death-mask carelessly hung on a tree branch by Skat which foreshadows his fate.  A third is that same mask hanging on the brake lever of the wagon as Jof happily strums out a tune on his lute, quite unaware of the danger hanging over himself, his family and new-found friends.

There are numerous parallel scenes and triplets riven throughout The Seventh Seal which are integral to the advancement of the narrative.  The most effective use of this device in the movie is to be found with the three rounds to the chess match between the knight and Death, mirroring Block's mood in each particular phase of the story.  In the first, Block has marshaled his courage for battle against Death, illustrated effectively by the contrast of the game against the bleak seascape.

 

In the second, Block has gained an advantage and is full of confidence, even amused by the contest; the game is set against a pleasant summer evening.  However, the presence of the family set in the background between Block and Death presages the battle the knight will now have to fight for far higher stakes than his own life.  Indeed, this very scene telegraphs the shift in mood for the final third of the movie.  Block is enjoying a last moment in the sunlight of hope, but the future is unavoidably moving in Death's direction.  Here, the dark tones are all on Death's side of the frame: the Black chess pieces, Death himself, and the foliage behind him.  The imagery for most of the remainder of the film is progressively nighmarish as the entourage travel into the dark forest.  In and of itself, this scene is brilliant for how it sets up the deterioriation of the knight's fortunes leading to his ultimate fate.

In the third, while the entourage is stopped in the dark forest, a now demoralized Block has resigned himself to his fate, though remaining determined to play one last gambit to save Jof, Mia and their child from Death.

In these parallel scenes, Antonius Block appears behind bars: once in the chapel as he talks with Death (believing him to be a priest) through the confessional screen, and later when he asks the accused witch if he can meet the Devil so he can ask about God.  Both serve as visual metaphor for Block's own self-exile from the society of his fellow human beings as well as desperate search for knowledge.  He is forever on the outside looking in.

The impromptu supper in the clearing on a pleasant summer evening, in which Block finds a moment of peace and is very close to touching the perception of God with his senses that he has sought, though he will remain unaware of it, contrasts with the Last Supper in the inner depths of Block's estate, where all those gathered are utterly devoid of hope and in a sense are already in the tomb.

Bergman and Fischer play several games with the audience's perceptions, one of which was the closeup of Block praying on the beach in the opening sequence, which was shot in studio against a film back-projection (the lighting on Max Von Sydow's face is a dead giveaway).  A far more subtle trick was pulled off in this frame here.  According to the Internet Movie Database, the chapel that Block and Jons are approaching is just a model hung in the dead tree in the foreground, placed just so that it appears to be behind the fence and the stone arch.  It seems almost impossible to credit, but the giveaway is the lack of a shadow stretching from the left of the building.  To cover this, a false chapel building for closeups and visible through a tight shot focused on the stone arch was evidently erected.

However, the greatest visual tricks pulled off in this movie were ones that happened by pure accident: the squirrel that climbs onto the stump of Skat's tree after being felled by Death, the impromptu sunshine on Ravel after his death by the plague which was caught when the camera was left to continue rolling just at the moment the sun came out, and the final dance of death scene at the end of the movie: improvised on the spot by Bergman to take advantage of the cloudscape that had suddenly appeared in the sky over Hovs Hallar.  The actors had gone home after the day's shooting so Bergman stuck anybody he could get into costumes, including tourists, and had them do the procession on the hilltop.

One of the most beautifully artistic sequences in the movie is Block's confession in the chapel.  Starting with a long shot looking toward the chancel, the shadows again highlight Block's physical and spiritual isolation.  The knight finds little comfort from institutional religion, as shown when he looks up at the crucifixion statue with its emaciated Christ figure staring down with a terrifying expression on its face.

Block begins his confession to the priest, who is actually Death.  Bergman makes especially effective use of the shadowing within the confessional alcove to express the crusader's torment.  He does not fear his physical death, but oblivion terrifies him and he needs more than a vague faith in an afterlife as promised by the Church.

"Is it so terribly inconceivable to comprehend God with the senses?  Why does He hide in a mist of half-spoken promises and unseen miracles?  How can we believe in the faithful when we lack faith?  What will happen to those who want to believe, but cannot?  What of those who neither want to nor can believe?  Why can't I kill God within me?  Why does He live on in me in this humiliating way despite my wanting to evict Him out of my heart?  Why is He, despite all, a mocking reality that I cannot be rid of?"

During the confession, the camera pans up and to the left and then into a slow closeup as Death listens.  Bengt Ekerot's silent acting as much as the camera work here truly makes this scene; the set of his eyes conveys his sympathy for the knight while he pours out his heart:

The knight will get no answers here, however, and never will.  A central theme of Bergman's regarding the failure of the Church to provide answers or comfort is woven throughout the fabric of the movie and is presented far more brutally in the long-angle shot of the Flagellants making their way across barren ground.

In ninety-six minutes, Ingmar Bergman unfolds a visual tapestry as rich as any medieval illumination or fresco. The imagery of The Seventh Seal has inspired both tributes and parodies through nearly six decades now and the chess match between Death and crusader-knight Antonius Block has become iconic to the point of cliche. It is one of the most beautiful movies ever made by anyone at any period in the history of the form.  Its sheer artistry in and of itself constitutes a whole extant lesson in the craft of movie-making which any film student would do well to study in depth.  Beyond that, the merger of text and imagery into a seamless whole serves to deliver to the audience what the writer, humorist and quantum philosopher Robert Anton Wilson would have classified as an "information-rich" movie.  Each time you view it, you will find aspects to the story that you did not notice before.  Like peeling back the layers of an onion, which is how it has so indelibly stamped itself into cultural memory.