Word: seal
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...from their experiences and obsessions. Both worked fast - at least a movie a year for most of their long careers - and relatively cheap. Both forged long relationships with their sponsoring studios. And Bergman was a strong influence on Allen's work: from his New Yorker parody of The Seventh Seal, "Death Knocks" (in which the hero plays not chess with Death but gin rummy) to a cameo by a Grim Reaper in Love and Death and, more deeply, the inspiration for the theme and tone of Interiors and Another Woman...
...fair to say you're first and foremost a Bergman guy, and that you have been for 50 years. There were a lot of young people in the '50s who saw Bergman's films - usually it was The Seventh Seal - and were overwhelmed with an almost religious conversion. And the doctrine of this religion was that film...
...They certainly launched a generation of film critics, this one included. Dozens of us have the same story of teenage revelation: of seeing a Bergman movie, usually The Seventh Seal, and saying, "This is what I want to study, devote my life to." Here, we saw, was no mere director, collaborating on scripts with other writers, but a full-service auteur. Except for The Virgin Spring, written by Ulla Isaksson, and The Magic Flute, a faithful rendition of the Mozart opera, all of Bergman's most famous film stories sprang from his own fertile, febrile brain - from childhood memories...
...body of work that imposing, that serious, was bound to inspire parody - and did, long before Colbert. Allen, for example, had written a burlesque on The Seventh Seal in The New Yorker. Sometimes whole movies were tongue-in-cheek tributes to Bergman: George Coe and Tony Lover's 1968 American short De Duva (where "water" is the subtitle for the mock-Swedish "aitch-two-oh-ska") and the 1975 Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The spin-offs might be serious, they might be farcical, but all paid tribute to Bergman's unignorable influence...
...Daniel (Sunday's Children) and Bille August (The Best Intentions). But the vogue had passed. He'd had a lock on the high end of popular culture, but by the '80s there was no high end; low was now high. A tribute song by Van Halen, The Seventh Seal ("broken now I can't help but feel / someone cracked the seventh seal / nothing sacred, nothing left unturned / when nothing's simple / then nothing's learned / so take me down to the virgin spring / wash away my suffering, oh"), was itself an anachronism...