Knight's gambit

Det sjunde inseglet (The seventh seal)

(1957)

(OK, I'm going to pretend there are a lot of you . . . ) Does everybody remember how the Friday night deaccession routine works? Specifically, does everyone understand that there's a big difference between (1) screening a DVD I haven't watched for at least 5 years that I suspect (usually with reason) I might as well give away and open up some shelf space and (2) screening a film that has been on my DVR hard drive unwatched for at least 2 years, in order to free up some electronic space?

In case 2, it's not that I expect to react blahly to the film; it's just that (1) if I found it necessary to record it so long ago, then why haven't I gotten around to watching it yet? and (2) if I was able to record it once from TCM or IFC (or, on the rare occasions when I want something they're showing enough to tolerate having to FFwd past commercials, AMC), chances are it'll be there again later--or, for that matter, will be streamable from Netflix.

All of which is a prelude to saying that I knew that I thought this was kickass the first time I saw it, but it was the sort of thing I needed to be in the mood for, and I hadn't been in the almost 3 years since recording it. (Today, of course, I got in a Swedish mood with my postwork movie.)

And kickass it is--both brutally existential and surprisingly sweet and lovely, even sometimes funny. Max von Sydow, in his 20s and unnaturally blond, is heartbreaking as the desperate-to-believe knight Antonius Block, and if there has ever been a better Death in cinema than Bengt Ekerot, I haven't seen him. (I seem to recall noticing this the last time: his look is without any doubt the source for the Emperor in the Star Wars trilogy. Of course, the character is also the source for the final segment of Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, and lots of the medieval stuff here turns up in MP & the Holy Grail.) Positively lush b&w cinematography by Gunnar Fischer, who was apparently a regular on Team Bergman. Oh, and I should mention that no "deaccessioned" label appears below because I decided at the last that it's worth 2 hours of hard-drive space to be able to watch this again whenever I feel like it.

The director, by the way, is name #0000005 on IMDb, and I've always assumed that the really low numbers were the people who first came to mind when the site was in utero. Care to guess the 4 people with even lower numbers? Click the numbers below for the answers. (I would have guessed only #2, but I approve across the board.)

0000004
0000003
0000002
0000001