A chess match with death.

• Author: Gehring, Wes D.
• Position: Reel World - Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal - Column

IN OUR LAST INSTALLMENT, I shared a tongue-in-cheek look at some American film classics. Today, I would like to focus on celebrated foreign filmmaker Ingmar Bergman and his signature "The Seventh Seal" (1957). The Swedish director is synonymous with art house movies, unless you do not enunciate properly and then people think you said "Ingrid Bergman" and expect a detailed examination of "Casablanca" (1942).

Bergman's "Seventh Seal" (or, if you have your Swedish dictionary handy--"Det sjunde inseglet") put the art house movie on the map, or at least in that rundown theater over by the local college. The film is about a medieval knight (played by Max von Sydow, years before Woody Allen had the money to hire him) returning from the Crusades after 10 years. He runs into Death only six blocks from his castle. Talk about a lousy homecoming.

This meeting over a chessboard is one of cinema's most famous examples of the bittersweet allegory, meaning we all eventually play chess with Death. Well, maybe not always. Some people prefer pinochle or Parcheesi. However, these matches just do not look cerebral enough for the art house film.

This Old World look at Death (a la a chess match) is patterned upon actual paintings from the Middle Ages, which, in turn, were based upon very early Kodak instamatic pictures taken of Death at his vacation home on the Black Sea. In contrast, some Americans are more apt to relate to the sexy Death (young Jessica Lange) of Bob Fosse's "All That Jazz" (1979), garbed in slinky, yet deadly, white. The problem in "The Seventh Seal," though, is that it is hard to get metaphysical when you are "hot," especially in Sweden. (The Kinsey Report blames this on warm-water currents and Anita Ekberg.)

A great number of mainstream films address what are called lived problems: How many eyes can The Three Stooges poke out? How long will Janet Leigh's shower scene in "Psycho" continue to encourage the taking of baths? How many people will King Kong tap dance on and isn't it lucky he wasn't into break dancing? In contrast, art house films like "The Seventh Seal" key on raised problems, migraine stuff not always easy to visualize. For instance: Is there a God and why doesn't He or She ever write, or even fax? Does life have a purpose or are we just some sort of cosmic boo-boo? When people die, do their spirits go to a garage in Kalamazoo or do they just hang out like in all those "Topper" movies?

The list goes on and on, but the question...