At the
end of The Seventh Seal,
a film
written and directed by Ingmar Bergman and rel-
eased
in nineteen fifty-seven, Jof, the cheery
idiot
actor cursed with second sight, wakes bleary
on a
bright morning under a sky
so
recently washed clean of the Black Death it’s not yet dry
and as
he potters round his little caravan
preparing
breakfast for his little family, the little man
sees -
and calls Mia, his idiot wife blessed with bland
good
sense, to see - Block the knight and Jöns the squire
and
all their friends silhouetted against the fier-
y sky,
holding hands and dancing up a distant hill-
side
to the music of the piper (who was still,
as ever, bringing
up the rear), drawn from the front
by a
figure in a dark cloak, and tells her with a grunt,
“Their
strict Lord Death bids them dance,”
to
which she throws him a sideways glance
and replies
with good-natured derision,
“Oh
spare me, not another fucking vision!”
It’s a
little-known fact that Max Von Sydow
and
all the other actors on the show
had
left for the day when cinematographer Gun-
nar
Fischer caught sudden sight of the sun
as it
fell behind the hill and its red glow started to suffuse
the
sky and cried, “Ingmar! A light too good to lose!
Quick,
get the actors!”, and when there was none
to be
found, a man and wife out cycling with their son,
two
lovers and three farmer’s-boys were bundled
quickly
into costume and trundled
up the
hill before the sun could go in
to
create the most terrifying tableau in
all of
cinematic history -
Sweden,
land of opportunity!
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