I AM DEATH

Antonius Block: Who are you?

Death: I’m Death.

Antonius Block: You have come for me?

Death: I’ve been by your side for a long time.

Stan Marsh’s grandfather wants to die. He attempts to take his own life several times but fails, so he talks Stan Marsh into killing him instead. But before this actually happens, Death himself appears, scolding the grandfather. It is not acceptable to coerce one’s grandchild — or anyone at all — into killing you. For various reasons, it all ends with Death taking Stan’s friend Kenny. Well, for anyone outside the American television series South Park’s satirical universe, all this is of course incomprehensible. But that’s beside the point. The thing is that when Death appears, he looks like he stepped out of Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal: the black hood, the black cape, the lot.

Ingmar Bergman supposedly had a strong anxiety about death, which he supposedly cured by returning to the subject again and again, using it in his work. In the 1957 film The Seventh Seal, Bergman and the film photographer Gunnar Fischer created something that left its mark on the entire world of popular culture and its way of dealing with death.

Ingmar Bergman often used biblical references and most of his films deal with the meaning and meaninglessness of life as well as with God. The Protestant legacy cannot be ignored. Just as the film makers Robert Bresson, Andrej Tarkovsky, and Lars von Trier were greatly inspired by the Danish film director Carl Theodor Dreyer, so too was Ingmar Bergman. The two also shared the fate of growing up with a father who was a deeply devoted Christian.

Dreyer’s scaled-down imagery tends to show just a whitewashed church where candles flicker, making worried shadows on the wall, where the black-clad priest is an authority and nothing else matters except that relating to God. The same bare walls and ascetic figures appear in several of Bergman’s films. Also, Dreyer’s way of using actor Maria Renée Falconetti’s face in the silent movie classic La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc is constantly repeated by Ingmar Bergman, placing the camera in a way that the actor’s face is in focus instead of the room or context, and so it is through the shifting expressions of the face the psychological drama unfolds.

In The Seventh Seal, Ingmar Bergman refines the themes of faith, doubt, and anxiety about death. A knight, Antonius Block, is on his way home from the crusades. He is tired of life and travels through a landscape devastated by the plague. There he meets Death, literally. Death wants to take him immediately, but agrees to play a game of chess first. The knight longs to do one good deed before his life is over and when his skill as a chess player gives him a certain deferral from death, he uses it to save a young family from the plague.

The title of the film is from the Book of Revelation and refers to a biblical text about God’s silence — where is God in times when the human being is vulnerable, in times of anxiety and doom? How does someone, who longs for God, bear a higher power that only communicates through silence? The theme recurs in several films. In Cries and Whispers, the priest says:

If you’d happen to meet God over there, in the other country. If it would happen that he turns his face towards you. If you then would happen to speak a language that this God understands. If you’d be able to talk to this God — if so, please pray for us.

But the image of Death in a black cape and hood?

Bergman himself said that he was primarily inspired by the painter Albrecht Dürer’s image of Death and a knight riding together in a forest, as well as by the medieval church painter Albertus Pictor. In Täby church, close to Stockholm, there is a monumental picture of Death playing chess. But none of these figures are dressed in black or expose bone-white faces.

The Bergman expert Maaret Koskinen has found the presence of the black-dressed figure in an early stage in Bergman’s imagery. In his twenties, Bergman wrote an Edgar Allan Poe-inspired short story about a woman who was murdered. There her neighbour describes the murderer: ‘And his looks made me cold and scared. He was quite white in sight, and it looked as if there were no eyes there and he had a big slouch hat and a long black coat.’

Ingmar Bergman is said to personalise Swedish dysphoria and depression. From his collection of demons and anxiety, great art was created — but also something more. He turned death into an icon, a Protestant man in a black-and-white movie, a twin brother of the Norwegian Edvard Munch’s figure in the painting The Scream, but calmer, more inexorable and obnoxious. The impression it made in pop culture is beyond all comparison. We drop the name of Death as if it were a celebrity without connection to our daily lives. Death is a meme, a re-occurring joke, a topic for a dinner conversation, a t-shirt motif, and a fridge magnet, and as such nothing much to worry about.