Movie: I met Death today. We are playing chess.

A couple weeks ago I came home from school completely exhausted; having just ran 10k I was about as sore as I could possibly be in good health. In order to rest my legs I decided to have a bath for the first time in years. Unsure of what to do while I sat in the bathtub, I decided I would bring in my laptop and watch something, Margot Tenenbaum Style. Unlike her I didn't have crappy rabbit ears TV, so I chose to watch Manhattan, the 70s Woody Allen movie about a group of friends living in the New York borough of the same name. I liked the movie a lot, and I recommend everyone watch it, especially if you've seen Annie Hall and enjoyed it . . . but that isn't why I brought it up.

I've seen a few of his movies in the last year and so far I've loved them all. I really get a kick out of all the references to pop-culture he throws into them, although I'd be lying if I said I understood them all. In Manhattan there was one reference that really caught my ear. In the scene where Isaac (Woody Allen) and Mary (Diane Keaton) meet for the first time, Isaac becomes enraged by Mary's pretentious personality as she trashes a bunch of different artists for being "over rated". The entire time Isaac is in shock and mumbling in disbelief. What caught my ear was when he spoke up to defend an artist by the name of Ingmar Bergman. He says "Bergman? Bergman is the only genius in cinema today". Seeing as how my goal is to watch as many classic movies as I can, I went in search of one of his movies, eventually deciding upon one called The Seventh Seal.

It's been a couple of weeks, but I finally got around to watching the 1957 Swedish drama. The story follows Antonius Block, a medieval knight as he travels the plague-ridden countryside in search of God and as he challenges Death to a game of chess in order to save save his life. It IS a pretty dark movie, but my description makes it sound a lot more morbid than it really is. I actually found it quite entertaining, even laughing at a few scenes, even amidst witches being burned and people dying of the plague. While it wasn't my favourite movie, I did enjoy it quite a bit. I especially liked how he faded between scenes. Instead of the standard fade to black he chose to fade from image to image, sometimes fading one characters face to another. He even chose to fade to white at one point, conveniently after the protagonist was introduced, ~omg~.

While I was watching the movie, I couldn't help but think of the Bergman reference from Manhattan and the idea of referencing in pop-culture in general. That lead me to remember two movies with Seventh Seal like scenes:

The first movie being Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey; this one was painfully obvious. Death looks very similar to Bergman's Death, and the plot revolves around Bill and Ted challenging it to a game of Twister, Clue, and Battleship, hah. Couldn't be anymore straight forward.

The second one was more subtle. About half way through The Seventh Seal one of the more comedic characters narrowly escapes death, and just as the scene is about to end he looks straight at the camera and recites a line directly to the audience; breaking the fourth wall, or whatever they call it in theatre. At first it struck me as odd for such a serious film to do something like that, but then something clicked and I remembered the scene in Annie Hall where Alvy breaks the fourth wall and complains to the audience about the douche-bag in front of him in line. I know the idea of an aside is nothing new, it has probably been done for centuries in theatre, but I like to think that Woody Allen was at least conscious of the fact that Bergman did it before him. Especially considering how much of a fan he was (outside of his character in Manhattan).

I love the idea of artists having influences and influence over others. I was watching a documentary the other day about Stanley Kubrick and they had everyone from Scorsese to Spielberg talking about how much of an influence he's had on their style of film making. And there is no doubt in my mind that there are countless filmmakers out there today that are not only inspired by Kubrick, but also by Scorsese and Spielberg themselves. I think this idea makes for a much more interesting kind of movie, music, or art in general. It is next to impossible to just create a work of art without having first been inspired by somebody else's. I can't speak for everyone, I'm sure there are people out there that have made beautiful paintings without seeing a Rembrant, a Van Gogh, etc, but I know if it weren't for a handful of famous photographers - Yousuf Karsh, Annie Leibovitz, Linda McCartney - my photography wouldn't be where it is today. I like to think that they have each influenced me in some way or another. That isn't to say that I try and rip them off, but I have definitely been inspired by how Karsh captures emotion, or by how Annie Leibovitz puts so much effort into lighting.

I don't know where I am going with this, so I'll just end it there haha.

Cheers,

Pat