I had originally watched The Seventh Seal not many years after it first came out. It was still the beginning of my film-watching career. Much earlier, as a kid, I had seen occasional Westerns on Saturdays with my cousin Pat. The first time we saw one, she asked me afterwards while we were waiting for the bus home whether I had liked the movie (I had been reserving comment). My NO! surprised her, and she asked what was I hadn't liked. I had cared, it seemed, a lot more about the fate of the horses that got shot than about the fate of any of the human characters in the movie. I was appalled by the slaughter, and even more appalled that no one in the movie -- never mind anyone in the audience -- had seemed to care much. I was outraged and devastated and near to tears. My slightly older cousin had to explain to me that the horses in the movie were trained to fall down on cue, and definitely to get up again, healthy and well, and not hurt or shot or really dead, and then persuade me she wasn't just saying that to make me feel better. I'm not making this up.
My cousin thought I was pretty hopeless to go to the movies with. But I had learned something, I now see, about my own movie-watching: I'm there for the emotion. Not cheap, manipulated emotion, but real hard-won emotional reaction. All the action and effects in the world leave me unmoved if there's no real emotion, no real connection there.
With not much more than this early experience and its high level of cinema-watching sophistication under my belt, I skip ahead to my early twenties and college, when my soon-to-be first husband and I went to the local art house to watch the Seventh Seal.
Before I watched it this afternoon, I remembered only a few specifics: some isolated images and a few faces and isolated scenes from the film. I had watched it, but didn't remember much of it. That means I hadn't taken much of it in. I was not yet awake to life, still in the adolescent mode of trying to find out where and how I might fit in to all the things that were going on around me. There didn't seem to be any handles to hang on to, signs to tell me what to do, steps to use to climb on.
And also from back then I remember the stark use of black and white. There's black and white, in some films, that looks like the film simply was made before reliable color film was available. And then there's black and white filmmaking that uses the quality of black and white brilliantly -- black-robed Death with his white-painted face, the contrasty oversize black and white chessmen filmed in the bright sun on the beach, the knight with his shock of pale hair sitting opposite; the characters following Death along the top of the ridge, black against the pale sky, in the Actor's vision. Of course I didn't think of it in that way, then. But the black and white contrasty images have proved indelible.
I also remembered an emotional atmosphere, like an impending thunderstorm about to break, an oppressive feeling needing release. And I remembered that it was a film that 'got' to me; I had been moved to laughter, to worry for the fate of the characters I had come to like, to horror and disgust at the flagellants, to the impulses that made them think that their behavior could possibly do them any good, and injustice of the fate of the scapegoat girl who is to be burned at the stake as a witch.
Then I saw the movie again today. Today, with decades of movie-watching and book-reading and people-watching and life experience already behind me, today when I am able to take in great gulps of movies at both the worm's eye level of tiny detail and a satellite context overview all at once, I see it -- and I understand only now so many of my first husband's references -- verbal, facial, gestural -- to the movie. And I see how many of those references I missed. I was not yet awake, back then.
No special effects, no color, no car chases, no shoot-em-ups, seen through subtitles, but one of the richest and deepest emotional ranges I've experienced in film. The very austerity of style helps charge the atmosphere.
I reflected again while watching it how cruel people can be to each other (the movie is filled with ironies of situation. How could it not be? Look at its subject: Death comes for the Knight, who offers to play chess with Death. While the game lasts, Death won't take him. If the Knight wins, Death will allow him to live. The knight and his squire, a formidable man in his own right, are just back from a crusade, a hollow and life-wasting experience. The Black Plague is rampant, and so are many horrors of brutality in a people frenzied to escape a horrible death). I felt the horror and disgust, the injustice, the frustration, the anger, all over again.
And having thought that, I asked myself why I thought things were really any different with people nowadays?
The knight and his squire show kindness and offer what help and protection they can to those them meet. And the Knight finds a way during the chess game to let a young family escape Death's grasp. One finds some good people and some kindnesses along the way, perhaps, and if so, one is lucky. And also sometimes a few unexpected pieces of one's own past.
7:26:22 PM 
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