"Bibi's right. I've done enough comedies. It's time for something else. I mustn't let myself get scared off any more. It's better to do this than a bad comedy. I don't give a damn about the money."

The typical view of Ingmar Bergman is of a brooding intellectual agonising with his inner demons. With hindsight, therefore, it might seem hard for many people to believe that he enjoyed his first major triumphs as a director of comedies. When he wrote the words above in his workbook (the Bibi he names is his partner at the time, the actress Bibi Andersson) he has just had his first international success: his comedy Smiles of a Summer Night had won the jury's special award at the Cannes Film Festival for its "poetic humour". Before that, the film had been totally panned by Dagens Nyheter's influential arts editor Olof Lagercrantz, who declared himself ashamed of having seen it. Whether it was this negative reception on the home front or the international success that led Bergman in a new direction is hard to say, but it is clear that The Seventh Seal marks a turning point in Bergman's career, both in artistic and commercial terms. Paradoxically enough, his "difficult" existential dramas of the latter half of the 1950s became far more successful with international audiences than the more accessible comedies he had served up previously.

 

Bergman had already passed on his screenplay to his production company Svensk Filmindustri, but it had been refused. Bolstered by his recent success, he made a new attempt: "Then I flew down to see the head of Svensk Filmindustri, Carl Anders Dymling. I found him sitting in a hotel room in Cannes, overexcited and out of control, selling Smiles of a Summer Night dirt cheap to any horse trader who happened to show up. [---] I place the refused screenplay for The Seventh Seal in his lap and said, "Now or never, Carl Anders!" He said, "Sure, sure, but I have to read it first." "You must have already read it since you turned it down." "That's true, but maybe I didn?t read it carefully enough.?" Dymling eventually gave his consent to the project, yet only granted Bergman a minimal budget and a particularly limited shooting time: thirty six days.

Dymling's own recollections differ somewhat: "As a producer I was quite aware of the financial risk in a motion picture with so serious a theme. But it promised to be an unusual, an outstanding picture. It had to be done. We discussed the script for several days and nights during the Cannes festival in May 1956. We agreed on some changes, on the cast and on the budget. We felt it as if we were launching a big ship and we were very happy."

 

Photo: Andreas Roth
© Stiftelsen Ingmar Bergman

The work started out as a one-act play that Bergman wrote 1953-1954 as an exercise for the actors at the Malmö Municipal Theatre. He had asked his students to suggest roles they would like to perform, quickly writing a few pages of monologues based on their choices. After the exercise he re-wrote the material as a complete play, Wood Painting, which has many similarities with The Seventh Seal. The main part, however, falls to the squire Jöns, and the knight has smaller role. In this prototype, Death - perhaps Bergman's best-known role ever and played subsequently in The Seventh Seal by Bengt Ekerot - does not feature at all. Wood Painting was first performed for an audience as a radio play 21 September 1954, directed by Bergman himself. Gunnar Björnstrand played his later film role as the squire, while Bengt Ekerot played the knight. In September 1955, Ekerot directed the play at the Royal Dramatic Theatre, following its première six months earlier on the stage of the Malmö Municipal Theatre, directed by the author (a production in which Björnstrand also played the part of Jöns).

 

Photo: Andreas Roth
© Stiftelsen Ingmar Bergman

A point worthy of note - and which perhaps confirms that it was with this film that Bergman followed Bibi Andersson's advice to move away from comedy - is that the finished screenplay bears a dedication to her.