Word: seales
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...Colbert Report has an occasional segment called "Cheating Death," which is introduced by the image of Stephen facing the hooded figure of Death over a chessboard. That's a reference to the 1957 film The Seventh Seal, a medieval morality play written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. Colbert, who switches chess pieces while Death is distracted, parodies the role of a knight (Max von Sydow) who puts his soul on the line to save a few lives during a season of plague...
...Janus Films, with U.S. rights to most of his pictures, ran Ingmar Bergman festivals in theaters around the country. Full-length studies of his work appeared in English, French, Swedish. In 1960 Simon & Schuster published a book of four of his screenplays (Smiles of a Summer Night, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Magician). For a generation of budding cinephiles, that settled it. Film was literature. Movies were art. And Bergman was the Shakespeare of the cinema...
...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...