silver nitrate notes

The Seventh Seal and Gunnar Fischer's Cloud

11 mar 2023

Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007) made The Seventh Seal (1957) in thirty-five days on a small budget at Svensk Filmindustri, having been told that he could shoot whatever he wanted as long as he delivered a release print by year end. He was coming off a commercial hit (Smiles of a Summer Night, 1955) and the studio wanted to keep him producing before he wandered off.

What he made is a film about a knight returning from the Crusades in the year of a plague, who plays chess with Death for the right to delay his own mortality. The premise is theological. The execution is visual.

The cinematographer was Gunnar Fischer (1910-2011), a Dane working in Sweden, who had already photographed nine of Bergman's films. Fischer's great contribution to The Seventh Seal is the sky. He photographed the exteriors using panchromatic stock with heavy yellow or orange filters, which deepened the skies to near-black and rendered the clouds as hard white shapes against that black. The effect is almost engraved. The sky becomes a character.

Look at the opening sequence on the beach. The knight (Max von Sydow) wakes from sleep near the surf line. Death (Bengt Ekerot) approaches him across the wet sand. Fischer has filtered the sky so that it is almost the same value as Death's black cloak, and has lit the sand so that the knight, in lighter armour, reads as the brightest thing on screen. The knight is an object of visibility against a sky that does not notice him. Death is an object of near-invisibility whose presence is registered by the cloak moving against the darkened air. The chess game sits on a rock between them. The ocean is a flat grey behind the chess game. This is less than a minute of screen time, and it is a full visual theology.

Fischer would fall out with Bergman within five years over creative differences; Bergman moved to Sven Nykvist for most of the later films. Fischer's era was the first half of Bergman's career. The Seventh Seal is its high point.

The famous dance of death at the end of the film, the silhouettes of the knight's party being led away over the horizon by Death against the stormy sky, was shot in less than fifteen minutes of available light by Fischer and a reduced crew after the main cast had left for the day. What is on screen is stand-ins in costume, a long lens, a filtered sky, and Fischer's decision to keep rolling until the light was gone. Most of the image is black. It is one of the shots Bergman would later say he did not realise was going to be the image the film was remembered for, and which I think we can credit Fischer as well as Bergman with making.

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sources
[1] Bergman, Ingmar. The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography. Viking, 1988.
[2] Bergman, Ingmar. Images: My Life in Film. Arcade, 1990.
[3] Gado, Frank. The Passion of Ingmar Bergman. Duke UP, 1986.
[4] Björkman, Stig, et al. Bergman on Bergman: Interviews. Simon & Schuster, 1973.