Religion, Truth and Symbolism from The Seventh Seal to The Silence

Abstract

Religion has been a major preoccupation throughout Bergman’s career, but it became the main focus for the films of the late 1950s and early 1960s, coinciding with the period when Bergman became known outside Sweden. While films of the late 1950s (The Seventh Seal, 1956; The Face, 1958) are critical of orthodox religion and outdated religious ritual, there is nevertheless a quest for a more internally spiritual or ‘truer’ faith. Unique moments of happiness, like the wild strawberry sequence in The Seventh Seal, symbolize the truth in human communion, both in contrast to and as original source of religious rituals of more conventional communion ceremonies. The quest to unveil a raw, original source of truth beneath religious convention recalls the de-masking process in Summer Interlude (1950). The quest for truth begins to crumble in Through a Glass Darkly (1960), marking the advent of the three films later to be termed the trilogy,¹ which focused to a far greater extent on human characters than Bergman’s work of the late 1950s. With The Silence (1962), the last film of the trilogy, also comes a questioning of words and images as signs or symbols of meaning.