A Titan of Cinema, or: The Man Played Chess with Death!!

Hey guys,

The world we live in is suddenly so disrupted, bizarre, and single-mindedly focused on the COVID-19 pandemic that it feels like pretty much everything else could be overlooked.

Knowing that, I insist that we take a few moments to note that the incredible Max von Sydow died last week.

Husband insisted on the title of today's post, because for some time I've apparently been on a 1-3 year cycle of declaring that von Sydow is "A Titan of Cinema", only to back up my declaration with the unassailable proof implicit in, "The Man played chess with Death!!"

For anyone not terribly familiar with von Sydow's work: he was in over 100 films, including many of the seminal movies directed by Ingmar Bergman, in a career that spanned multiple decades.

I am so brokenhearted that he's gone.  Von Sydow was so sneakily ubiquitous through generations of cinema that it felt like he would live forever.  He had a beautiful, gaunt, haunted face--as if carved from stone--that nevertheless comforted and grounded me, because at least for the moments he was onscreen, we were assuredly in good hands.

He was gravitas personified.  He would have to be to take on the hefty roles whose cloaks he so readily threw around his shoulders.

What a time for him to die: when arguably his most iconic role was that of a crusader playing chess with Death during the Plague.

I rewatched "The Seventh Seal" (1957) last week to mourn him, and was unusually comforted by it. When I watched it for the first time when I was in high school, I remember feeling stunned and frightened at the thought of living through the terrifying, bleak, mercilessly deadly era portrayed in the movie.  A part of me simply couldn't fully accept that human beings had lived through a period that dizzyingly lethal.

And yet, they did.  They did their best to endure it, in sometimes monstrous, sometimes frivolous, and sometimes lovely ways.  As embodied by von Sydow's crusader, they sometimes had the courage and desperate stubbornness to face the anguish of mortality and demand answers, even if those answers never came.

No one asks to live through a once-in-a-century contagion.  The fear many of us feel at watching the world come to a screeching halt at the hands of an invisible viral menace is valid, rooted in the reptilian survive-at-all-costs parts of our brains as much as the historical marrow of our bones that can, on some level, remember the plagues of the distant past.

But if there's anything to take home from the last few posts I've written, it's that humanity is ceaseless in its ability to craft beauty out of its own pain, to bring forth light from darkness.  "The Seventh Seal" is hardly in and of itself uplifting, but what is is its preservation, for generations to come, of the cinematic giant at its heart.

Goodbye Max.

{Heart}