Short notes from the Mumbai festival: Jafar Panahi’s Closed Curtain

“I’m sure it’s the right address,” the woman says, “No other house looks like this one.” She is searching for her sister who, she has been told, hid in this beachside villa two nights ago. But the door has now been opened by a stout, middle-aged man (the director Jafar Panahi, playing Jafar Panahi) who knows nothing about the missing girl.

This is a scene late in Panahi’s new meta-film Closed Curtain, a work that might puzzle anyone who doesn't know the Iranian director’s back-story: the ban on his movie-making, the house arrest, his continuing fugitive attempts to practice his art, and to do so by making films that explicitly comment on his own situation. His last movie – with its poignantly ironical title This is Not a Film – was shot partly on iPhone and featured him talking to the camera about the projects he has in his head, projects he is no longer permitted to bring to cinematic life. Closed Curtain, by contrast, begins by appearing to be a narrative film (about a screenwriter and his impossibly cute dog) – for a few scenes it is as if Panahi has succeeded in realising one of the visions he discussed in This is Not a Film.

But around the halfway point we are reminded again that nothing in this director’s life and work fall within the bounds of “normalcy” any longer. The narrative is interrupted, the fourth wall is, almost literally, torn down: Panahi enters the house that has been the scene of the action so far; he takes down curtains, revealing wall-posters of his own previous films; the effect is a little reminiscent of the ruptures and interruptions in Ingmar Bergman’s The Passion of Anna. The characters we saw in the conventional-narrative section of the film – the screenwriter, his dog, two people seeking shelter from the authorities – stop functioning as elements of a coherent story and begin to move in and out of our line of vision, seeming less like real people and more like phantoms (perhaps ghostly manifestations of half-structured ideas in the mind of a writer-director who lives in chains). Other people come in and interact with Panahi, but again we are unsure whether they are “real” or visitations from another half-imagined story.

These intersecting narratives touch on similar matters: being in hiding with the things that are most important to you, trying to get your work done, or simply living your life, with the constant threat of someone bursting in and taking everything away. The writer in the “regular” narrative must cover all his windows with black curtains, because dogs are considered unclean by the regime he lives under; the writer-director Panahi in the meta-narrative doesn't have the freedom or resources to tell his story properly, or to engage with the world while telling it, which means there are metaphorical black curtains around his mind.

As Panahi and his fictional characters move in orbit around each other, other questions arise too. We often romanticise highbrow art as an essentially closed process – being principally about the relationship between the artist and his creations, like the literary writer who says “I write primarily for myself” – but does art have any value, or purpose, if it cannot (at least to a limited degree) be shared? And then, if it does reach the outside world, can the relationship be strictly one-sided? What happens when the world begins to intrude on it, deconstruct it, or even demand that it conforms to certain standards, values or rules?

All of which means that Closed Curtain is a self-conscious, self-referential film, but given its context it is also a deeply moving self-conscious film, an artist's cry of defiance. In terms of form, it is an abstract and "difficult" work, but it is also a plea for greater openness - for doors to be unbarred, for curtains to be removed. And the woman in that scene mentioned above is dead right on one front: if this secluded villa is a metaphor for Panahi’s current cinema (or for the mind striving to produce that cinema), it is true that no other house looks anything like it.

To Rome with Love and Death: thoughts on aging stars

Two Woody Allen moments, more than 35 years apart. In the newer one, from To Rome With Love, an old man – a shuffling, white-haired version of one of modern cinema’s most recognisable profiles – delivers a quasi-philosophical monologue in a familiar, nervous-tic-ridden style, ending with a little shrug and the remark that, of course, death probably won’t come to him for another 40 or 50 years at least! The line invites laughter, but the chuckles stick in one’s throat.

In the other scene I’m thinking of – from the 1975 film Love and Death – a much younger Allen, playing a character named Boris, speaks directly into the camera. Having just undergone execution by firing squad and now preparing to trail the Grim Reaper into the great unknown, Boris is understandably preoccupied with such subjects as Death, Life, God and insurance salesmen, and he offers us a deadpan meditation on these things (“the key here, I think, is to not think of Death as an end, but to think of it as a very effective way of cutting down on your expenses”). In one of the funniest closing shots of any film - a parody of the final scene of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal - Boris and the Reaper then perform a demented Danse Macabre through the woods together. (See video below, especially the last three minutes.)



One can of course cite countless other similarly toned moments from Allen’s large body of work. (Remember the one set in a biology classroom in Manhattan, where Allen’s Isaac chastises a friend about an extra-marital affair, then points to a particularly ugly skeleton and says, “We’re going to end up just like him – and he was probably one of the beautiful people in his time”?) One could even go back to the 1960s when, as a stand-up comedian, he was trading in self-consciously morose humour on the same set of existential subjects.

And yet, for me, the two scenes mentioned above produce very dissimilar effects. Watching a 76-year-old pontificate about death (as in To Rome with Love) is a markedly different experience from watching the same man doing so in his 30s or 40s. It’s less easy to smile at.

Allen himself would not condone such a treacly attitude – the very idea would probably be distasteful to him – but for a long-time viewer these feelings are inevitable. One can spend half a lifetime admiring certain movie-stars for their (mental or physical) toughness and their lack of sentimentality (“lack of sentimentality” itself being a meaninglessly broad category that can include Woody Allen’s Borises, Alvys and Isaacs as well as Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harrys and Blondies, to name just two venerably aged American actor-directors) – but as time passes they become vulnerable in one’s eyes. They may continue doing the same things onscreen but the way we receive and interpret those things changes. As Pauline Kael wrote in a related context about Katharine Hepburn and Bette Davis in 1968, “The two great heroines of American talkies have both gone soft on us, become everything we admired them for not being. They have become old dears – a little crotchety maybe, but that only makes them more harmlessly lovable.” Implicit here is the idea that the viewer’s perception is as important as what the actor is consciously doing.

When actresses begin to use our knowledge about them and of how young and beautiful they used to be – when they offer themselves up as ruins of their former selves – they may get praise and awards, but it’s not really for their acting, it’s for capitulating and giving the public what it wants: a chance to see how the mighty have fallen.

There have been a few exceptions: film artists whose work grew determinedly less sentimental with age – the most notable perhaps being that wily old surrealist Luis Bunuel, who made some of his sharpest films in his seventies when awareness of coming oblivion seemed almost to have fine-tuned his sense of the absurd. And indeed there are Bunuel-esque touches in To Rome with Love, such as a scene where an apparently shy, star-struck young woman accompanies a famous actor to his hotel room and ends up romping in bed instead with a thief who has broken in. But despite these moments – and despite the overall pleasantness of the film – I found it hard to shake from my mind the images of a frail-looking Allen, the skin on his face sagging, the eyes slightly more unfocused and the speech just a little slower than it used to be.

I felt a similar odd sensation a few weeks ago while watching the US Open men’s final, a five-hour marathon between Andy Murray and Novak Djokovic that must (partly because of the playing styles of the two men) have been nearly as fatiguing for the spectators as it was for the contestants. In the audience was Sean Connery – Sir Sean Connery – lending his support to fellow Scotsman Murray; he looked as spry and bright-eyed as ever, but I may have spent as much time worrying about his health as I did thinking about the match itself. At some point, as the rallies wore on, he transformed in my mind’s eye from being one of the world’s most charismatic movie stars, the original 007 and a continuing object of adulation (the Twitter accounts of Murray and his team would soon be full of photos clicked with him) to being a crabby old man needing to take yet another toilet break and wishing these kids would get on with it. You can be the fittest 82-year-old in the world but you’re still, you know, 82 years old.

As for Amitabh Bachchan turning 70 next month – that’s such an incogitable prospect for my generation of Hindi-movie viewers, I won’t even address it in this space. It may require a book-sized lament.

P.S. To Rome with Love repeatedly contrasts “ordinary” people with people living in the public glare: two of its four plotlines (including the riotous one about a middle-aged undertaker who can sing like a world-class tenor only when he’s in the shower, necessitating bizarre productions of famous operas) deal head-on with the idea that people are alternately drawn to and repulsed by the celebrity life.

In a way this is a poignant reminder of how those who achieve stardom often cling to it at all costs, past their sell-by date. Some do it with a measure of dignity. The other day I was watching the iconic sequence in Limelight with Chaplin and Buster Keaton on screen together for the only time. Both men were around 60 then and had already been performers for five decades, having begun their vaudeville careers as children. You’d think after a lifetime of this sort of thing the old enthusiasm might have begun to wane, but not a bit of it. On the other hand, perhaps it was the only thing they knew how to do.

Two Swedish novellas: Manolis' Mopeds, The Legend of the Plague King

[From my Sunday Guardian books column]

The bilingual literary journal Pratilipi has done some notable work in the field of translation in the past few years. Recent titles by its publishing arm Pratilipi Books include Home from a Distance, which is an anthology of Hindi poets translated into English, and Prabhat Ranjan’s Marquez ki Kahani, a study (in Hindi) of the life and work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Now, as part of a project to introduce voices from around the world to India, they have published English translations of three very interesting contemporary Swedish novels.

Scandinavian crime fiction has been popular here in recent times - with Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy giving Indian readers a pretext to discover earlier classics like the Martin Beck series - but of course the region has a rich body of literature in other genres too. The slim books published by Pratilipi tell offbeat stories that combine melancholia with dry humour, and the settings range from medieval Sweden to the post-war Balkans to a sleepy village facing the advent of modernity.

I particularly enjoyed Jan Henrik Swahn’s Manolis’ Mopeds, which has been translated from Swedish to English by the author himself. The book’s fragmented narrative and whimsical tone take a while to get used to, but it soon resolves itself into a devastating portrait of an old man who has become irrelevant – even to himself. A mason by profession, Manolis lives in a Greek village, growing tomatoes and eggplants, occasionally meeting his estranged wife (she has remarried the TV, we are drolly told) and riding about on his precious moped; it’s the fifth he has owned. At times he imagines that there’s an alternate Manolis living somewhere nearby, one who opted to ride donkeys instead of mopeds. But things are changing in the village anyway: there are no donkeys around now, the quaint old buildings may soon be torn down and replaced by shiny modern ones, and even the tavern that Manolis spends most of his best moments in could be under threat. An old way of life is quietly passing.

Nothing of all he knows about the island and the islanders has he managed to pass down. He will take it all with him to the grave. He'll take the donkeys, the tobacco factory, the old chairs, the smoke house, the coffins, the barrels, the wheelbarrows, the days when the village reeked of retsina, he will take it all with him.

The strength of Swahn’s book lies not so much in the plot as in its detailing of vignettes – the tragedies and small pleasures – from a life; in the way, for instance, that it almost unobtrusively discloses that Manolis’s young son died in a car his father had saved up to buy (“at a bend in the road where no one else during one hundred years of automobile history had ever succeeded in killing himself before”). This is one of the strangest, most moving novellas I’ve read in a while.

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Reading Manolis’ Mopeds is a bit like watching the deadpan films of the Kaurismaki brothers, but Lars Andersson’s The Legend of the Plague King made me think of the indelible images of spiritual despair in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. Andersson’s book is set in the same place and period as Bergman’s film – the mid-14th century, shortly after the Black Death had devastated Sweden – and centres on a meeting between King Magnus Eriksson and a hunter named Tormod Gopa. The encounter doesn’t begin on an agreeable note (the king – already burdened by an insurgency launched against him by his son – is trapped in the hunter’s throwing net and strung up on a tree), but soon the two men recognise their affinities. “It is right that I free you,” Gopa tells the ruler, “for you once freed me.” Magnus’s law outlawing slavery had saved Gopa, then just three years old, from a life of serfdom. Ironically, Magnus was also three when he first became king (effectively losing his own freedom).

This becomes the starting point for a tentative conversation that draws on Nordic and Icelandic myths, touches on the relationship between a ruler and his subjects, and encourages us to wonder what manmade laws and authority might mean in a world that has been ravaged beyond imagining. Gopa’s account of the horrors he witnessed in plague-devastated villages amount to a vision of hell, and reminded me of scenes from The Seventh Seal: a procession of groaning self-flagellators; a young “witch” being burnt at the stake; Death standing on the beach, a scythe over his shoulder. But as in Bergman’s film, there is also a note of grace and affirmation at the end.

(The third book in the series – which I’ve just started – is Agneta Pleijel’s A Winter in Stockholm. Pratilipi is also planning a series of Spanish novels translated into Hindi)

A film and its cover

[The Yahoo column for this week. With images! In full colour! Originally published here]


Two very nice things happened to me last week. First, Manjula Padmanabhan (friend, multi-talented author and illustrator who once put me in a comic strip with the peerless Suki) dropped in with a gift: a couple of posters that she had designed for Govind Nihalani’s Ardh Satya in 1982. Second, I got my hands on a bunch of Criterion Collection DVDs that another friend, Tipu, had picked up for me at a sale in the US. (It was my first brush with legitimately bought Criterions: Tipu had disapproved of my pirated discs from the underground market in Delhi, and decided to help make an honest man out of me.)

Both the posters and the DVD designs were reminders that high-quality promotional artwork can have a life of its own, even while it enhances one’s appreciation of the film. One of Manjula’s posters is a large close-up – a drawing done in black ink – of Om Puri's lined, weary face. You might recall that in Ardh Satya, Puri plays a sub-inspector named Velankar who is facing a crisis of conscience. To my eyes, the poster suggests the inner turmoil more effectively than a still photograph would have done. The thick black lines appear to cast shadows across the actor’s face, and looked at in a certain light, Velankar seems scruffy and unshaven - something you never see in the film, where he is neatly turned out from beginning to end. There’s an artistic rather than literal realism on view here, and it's perfect for the character.

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I’ve been fascinated by poster art – cool and formal, loud and kitschy, and everything in between – for a long time. Many a lunch at The Big Chill café in Khan Market has been spent with my fork and knife suspended in the air, my mouth half open, while I study the wall posters of Attack of the 50-Foot Woman and The Bride of Frankenstein instead of concentrating on my food. When the annual Osian-Cinefan film festival in Delhi started displaying vintage posters, lobby cards and paintings, I routinely spent more time in the foyer than in the auditorium, to the disapproval of friends who believed that watching five movies back to back was the thing to do at such an event.

This interest has led to a few good (and I must admit, cheap) purchases over the years. On a wall in my living room is a 5ft x 3ft poster of Nargis and Raj Kapoor in the famous clinch in Barsaat. It’s a painting, not a photograph, and though the faces are very accurately drawn, the poster (unlike the film) is in bright colour, with a florid red background. On the other hand, my An Evening in Paris poster features a Goldfinger-like image of a naked green woman with prominent nipples, which I’m fairly certain wasn’t in the film. But I love it anyway.

Among the posters I sadly don’t own, some of my favourites are the ones created outside the film’s home country, so that the familiar original title is turned into something exotic (and the film itself appears transformed and foreign as a result). For example, I much prefer the Belgian Psycho poster that spells the title “Psychose” (you’ll find a version of it here) to the relatively staid American and British versions. And who can deny that “Reporter des Satans” is a more evocative title than Ace in the Hole for a film about a rotten journalist exploiting a cave-in victim?

A poster I once saw of Deewaar had the alternate English title “I’ll Die For Mama!” scrawled across Amitabh Bachchan’s face in a dramatic font size. The Danish posters for From Here to Eternity (“Herfra til Evigheden”) and The Bridge on the River Kwai (“Broen Over Floden Kwai”) make these stodgy, Oscar-honoured epics seem more interesting than they are. And speaking of stodgy Oscar-winners, there’s an awesome Polish poster of Attenborough's Gandhi with the central image a fragmented drawing of Gandhi in a sitting position, hands joined in prayer. The great man appears literally to be disintegrating even as his country is being divided. There is more delicate artistry here than in most of the film.

As you can probably tell, I'm not as interested in posters made up of publicity photographs or stills, but even these can be imaginatively designed, or combined with other media – as in the Umrao Jaan poster Manjula showed me, with a photograph of Rekha in the foreground and a Taj Mahal painting (done by Anjolie Ela Menon) in the background.

The artwork on the Criterion DVDs occupies a smaller canvas (the size of a DVD cover or, at most, the size of the Main Menu on your TV screen), but has greater scope for mixing media. For instance, the DVD cover of Onibaba, the Japanese horror classic about a woman who gets hold of a demon mask, features a bright, coloured caricature (again, the film itself is in black and white), while the Main Menu shows a short animation of the “demon” popping up from behind tall grass while two woman flee in terror.

The designers at Criterion frequently use striking, original art – I have too many favourites to mention, but consider the minimalist cover of Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well, with a simple line drawing of a tall building marked with a bright red cross on one of the upper windows (the film’s plot is set in motion by a man leaping to his death). Or the whimsical, New Yorker-like drawing on the cover of Make Way for Tomorrow, with two old people walking away from each other in the middle of a big city.

But at other times, images from the films are used to equally good effect. Nearly all the Criterion covers of Ingmar Bergman's movies feature the faces of his actors, often seem in tight close-up, expressions of contemplation or barely suppressed anguish on their faces – and what could represent Bergman better? In such cases, the very act of selecting a specific frame from a movie (from among the thousands available), then blowing it up or giving it a slight tint, can do wonders for packaging.

Thus the cover of Winter Light, a stark film about a tormented, self-doubting pastor, has a full-length shot of the actor Gunnar Bjornstrand – who plays the lead – lost in thought. The disc menu shows the sallow face of Max von Sydow, who plays a man seeking religious solace; in the background of the image we can see the uncommunicative pastor, his back turned to us. It's a lovely summation. As is the cover of Criterion’s A Woman Under the Influence, which shows the lead character in bed, looking fatigued and hung-over – the choice of visual, but also the fact that the colour has been deliberately toned down, perfectly captures the film's subject matter as well as its mood.

None of this is to say that a movie should be judged by its cover, but there’s no question that a well-executed design can be something worth studying on its own terms. It can deepen our understanding of a film, or it might simply be great fun to look at - or it can do both, as in some of the ones mentioned here.

[Since this is nowhere near enough space to do justice to most of the posters I'd like to talk about, I might consider doing a sequel to this post sometime]

3 Women, Robert Altman's dream film

I’ve only seen six or seven films from Robert Altman’s large body of work, but based on those I associate him with fast-paced, overlapping dialogue (so that sometimes you have to replay a scene to catch everything that was said, and at other times you’re content with a general impression of the background chatter) as well as large casts of characters whose lives cross and collide (notably in Nashville, Short Cuts and Gosford Park). Lots of words, lots of people. There are some very beautiful images in Altman’s movies – McCabe and Mrs Miller comes immediately to mind – but on balance I thought of him as a director who was more interested in cinema as filmed literature than for its visual possibilities. So I was surprised to hear him say, in an audio-commentary track for his 1977 film 3 Women, that his ideal film “would be a painting with music”.

But then, I was unprepared for 3 Women in general. It has a stillness and a thread of menace that makes it different from any other Altman movie I’ve seen. Sure, there are a couple of those familiar, busy group scenes with half-heard dialogues, but more often there is drawn-out conversation between two people punctuated by stretches of silence, or the faraway sound of dripping water, or the distant echoes and dull thuds you might hear if you were submerged in a tank. Generally speaking, water plays a big part in this film, as does the idea of being unnoticed or cocooned. At times you might even be lulled into thinking the whole movie is taking place underwater, or in a place where the usual laws of time and space don’t apply. Even when the plot seems to be moving along “normally”, something feels a bit off.

That sounds suspiciously like a dream-world, I know (it also ties in with some of the recent discussions around Inception, notably in this Jim Emerson post), and indeed Altman claims he made 3 Women after he got the idea in a dream. Not the idea for the whole script, just the title, the desert setting, the basic concept of “personality-theft” (more accurately, the personalities of two women merging with each other) and the lead actresses Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek, both of whom are outstanding.

Spacek plays a wide-eyed young girl named Pinky, who has just got a job at a spa for ailing senior citizens. She seems out of place from the first time we see her (it’s as if Spacek’s Carrie had escaped her tormenters the year before, erased a few memories and zombie-walked her way to a new town), and it isn’t surprising when she starts to idolise and imitate another employee, Millie (Duvall). They end up as room-mates, Millie shows Pinky around the desert town, Pinky behaves like a kid, putting her neck through a noose at a broken-down amusement park, yelling joyously when she sees a “miniature golf” signboard. This set-up leads you to expect a story about a worldly-wise woman becoming role model and guide to a waif. But that doesn’t happen. It soon becomes painfully obvious that Millie – seemingly smart and poised and self-sufficient – is just as much of a lost soul in her own way, and perhaps even more mentally fragile than her new friend. Though the two women rarely even raise their voices at each other, their mind-games escalate.

3 Women has plenty of vivid imagery that you’d associate with a dimly remembered dream: an unexpected zoom-in (probably the only one in the film) to twins gazing blankly at the camera, a childbirth scene filmed continuously in long-shot through the perspective of someone watching from outside the house, a recurring view of spooky murals created for a swimming-pool floor by the film’s “third woman”, an artist named Willie, and several blurred or shadowy shots of faces seen through a glass window. (The first time we see the three women together in the same frame, two of them are looking through a glass window at the third, whose reflection can be seen in the pane.) But at the same time, I thought the one explicit dream sequence – a montage of half-seen images – was the least interesting part of the film. It felt a bit like Robert Altman trying to be David Lynch (who, incidentally, made Eraserhead in the same year **) but without the same conviction or genuine feel for the material.

After watching 3 Women one-and-a-half times (because I wanted to listen to some of Altman’s audio commentary), I brushed off my DVD of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona and saw it all the way through: the relationship between Millie (as a caretaker/nurse) and Pinky (as her ward) had reminded me of Bibi Andersson’s nurse Alma looking after Liv Ullmann’s silent, uncommunicative Elisabeth (and Altman has apparently acknowledged the influence, though I didn't hear it on his commentary). But I had forgotten how quickly the roles start to shift in Bergman’s film, with Alma revealing private memories and doubts – and consequently her own emotional fragility – to her patient within the first 20 minutes of the film. I had also forgotten such specifics as the ambient water sounds in at least two key scenes in Persona.

3 Women might be considered a cinematic sibling to Bergman’s film (and Lynch’s Mulholland Drive might be a close first cousin, with Brian DePalma’s Sisters related to them all by marriage...but then, such associations can go on forever). It’s a film that seems self-consciously slow-moving in parts, but the lead performances keep you interested in the characters, and its quietness makes for a contrast to that very noisy and busy “dream” film that everyone has been talking about in the last month.

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** One of those little connections I had no idea about until I saw the David Lynch Wikipedia entry. Sissy Spacek's husband Jack Fisk played the role of the creepy "Man in the Planet" in Lynch's Eraserhead, and Spacek herself received special thanks in that film's credits. And Fisk also did the production design for Mulholland Drive. Wonder if this makes Spacek and Fisk a "dream-couple".

(An old post about Altman’s M*A*S*H* here)

The Seventh Seal

I’ve often been uncharitable to Ingmar Bergman, holding him up as an example of a director who appeals more to the cerebra than to the emotions, and who therefore gets more critical praise than cinema’s great visual artistes - but each viewing of The Seventh Seal reminds me of what an injustice that is. Watched my DVD of Bergman’s hypnotic 1957 film again last night and was once again sucked into its very particular world. There are other films that reach the same heights as The Seventh Seal but this is a rarity - a one-of-a-kind masterpiece that can’t quite be compared with anything else. (Offhand the only other films I can think of in that vein are Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Tod Browning’s Freaks. Maybe Citizen Kane too, but then that’s a stand-alone in so many other ways.)

How does one begin to speak of the first five minutes of The Seventh Seal? Few images anywhere - film, painting, photographs - convey desolation and spiritual emptiness better than the face of the great Max Von Sydow (playing the knight Antonius Block) in the opening scene. Lying on his back, gazing up at the sky, he sighs to himself, then slowly gets up, washes his face, falls to his knees and prays, the briefest glimmer of hope (faith?) crossing his sallow face. Then he walks back to gather his equipment, waves splashing on the beach in the background, the chess set in the foreground; there’s a brief dissolve, and then the iconic shot of Death standing on the beach, half court jester half Grim Reaper, gazing at Antonius and at us.

In one of the most famous movie scenes ever, Death and the knight begin a game of chess that will span the film’s duration. Of course, other things happen: the knight and his squire (played by the wonderful Gunnar Björnstrand) continue their travels (this is the 13th century and they’re returning from the Crusades); visit a church with depressing murals; meet and pick up people on the way (“my road movie”, Bergman called this film!); witness scenes of flagellation. They see a young “witch” being burnt at the stake - a scene that provides the most searing commentary on the film’s key theme, the impossibility of maintaining faith (and the impossibility of not maintaining faith) in a world where Death is the only certainty (“Look at her eyes!” the squire shouts to his knight, “What does she see? No God or Satan, only emptiness!”)

And placed right in the middle of all this bleakness is one of the most beautiful, simple and graceful scenes I’ve ever watched. During a rare interlude, the knight and his squire sit with Josef and Maria, a young couple who perform in a troupe together, and they all share strawberries and milk. “I will remember this moment of quietude,” says the knight. “The sound of our voices murmuring in the stillness, your faces in the evening light, the gentle sounds of Josef’s lute playing. I will try to remember what we talked about this day.” It’s the strongest defence he has against the horror of approaching emptiness.

One of the reasons for my fascination with The Seventh Seal is that, on paper, this never seemed the sort of film I’d have any sort of fondness for. Too heavy-handed, too self-consciously full of imagery and metaphors. And yet, it doesn’t work that way when you watch it. What you see is a movie that carries such strong conviction that it makes you believe too. And for all the apparent weightiness of its subject matter, it’s so simple and direct in its execution that it takes your breath away.