The One Inch Barrier: 'Nights of Cabiria' and 'The Seventh Seal'

by Nathaniel R

While we're sad about the current state of Oscar we still have 93 other years of Oscar history to obsess over. So I'm happy to share that I was invited back for a final appearance on "The One-Inch Barrier". Juan Carlos Ojano's podcast has looked at every Oscar race for Best International Feature Film while moving backward in time. Well almost every. There's still a few episodes to go. For this episode Juan Carlos and I talked about the nominated films of 1957 including The Gates of Paris (France), the noir The Devil Strikes at Night (Germany), the musical melodrama Mother India (India), the WW II survival drama Nine Lives (Norway), and the winning film Federico Fellini's enchanting Nights of Cabiria (Italy).

Ingmar Bergman's influential early classic The Seventh Seal was also submitted for the Oscars that year but the Academy unwisely passed. I have words about that. Hope you enjoy...

Showbiz History: Ingmar Bergman's Rise and Vera-Ellen's Centennial

6 random things that happed on this day, February 16th, in showbiz history

1938 Screwball classic Bringing Up Baby premieres in San Francisco with a release following two days later. It's one of the best films of 1938 or maybe even the best... but it was not appreciated in its day.

1957 The Seventh Seal premieres in Sweden and becomes the first of four consecutive Swedish Oscar submissions from Ingmar Bergman. Unfortunatly Oscar ignores it...

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Bergman in '57

by Cláudio Alves

Ingmar Bergman is my favorite filmmaker of all-time. That being said, I'm aware of the difficult reputation his cinema has earned over the decades. As Nick Taylor wrote in his fabulous piece about Harriet Andersson, few directors have so masterfully captured the overwhelming pain of unhappiness as Ingmar Bergman did. In his films, God is either dead or a giant stony-faced spider, a monster intent on causing suffering to everyone, making for a cinematic cosmos where agony is the most universal experience of all. It's heavy stuff which justly earns the fame of depressing art, though I'd argue that there's more to Bergman's cinema than constant unbearable ache.

Just look at his 1957 masterpieces, The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries…

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Bergman Centennial: Death and "The Seventh Seal"

by Chris Feil

The Seventh Seal begins with some of the most enigmatic and iconic imagery of Ingmar Bergman’s career. Which is saying something considering the auteur’s filmography is composed almost entirely of meditative frames. Here Max von Sydow's post-Crusades knight Antonious Block is visited by a black cloaked Death and the two take part in a literal and intellectual game of chess. It’s a grave way to start a film, one that still endures for its thematic impact and how it establishes the rest of its stark narrative as spiritually timeless.

Named for the passage in the Book of Revelation marking the final opening of the apocalyptic scrolls and the resulting period of silence in heaven, the film lives in that quiet Godlessness...

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