A Swedish Knight Passes, but his power lives on

From the beginning of Max von Sydow’s legendary game of chess with Death and his own passing a few weeks ago, remains a legacy that few actors past or present can compare with. In his later years he became a regular for cameo roles in productions like Star Wars and Game of Thrones. He worked with some of the biggest figures in American cinema like Steven Speilberg, Martin Scorsese, and Woody Allen. He starred in two of the most classic films of all time, The Exorcist and The Seventh Seal. And, most importantly, he was one of the many muses of the great Ingmar Bergman.

Of all the actors to work regularly with the great European directors of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, Ana Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo with Godard, Alain Delon with Melville, Marcello Mastroianni and Guilietta Masina with Fellini, Jean Pierre Léaud with Truffaut, Claudia Cardinale and Catherine Deneuve moving from one auteur to the next, or even fellow Bergmanian actress Liv Ullman, von Sydow is one who made the most successful transition to Hollywood, being just as appreciated in America as in his native Sweden.

Von Sydow’s tall, long, and lean body, combined with a face that looks hard and weathered beyond its years, made for a powerful physical screen presence that would be incorporated to perfection in both Berman and Hollywood films. While when one thinks of Berman’s actresses like Ullman, Ingrid Thulin, or Bibi Andersson, what first comes to mind are the mystifying closeups of their faces. Small facial movements, and moving emotive eyes being the key to their mesmerizing performances. In contrast, von Sydow was most effectively used in long shots, his imposing, expressive body and long limbs expressing fury, anguish, hate, and, sometimes, violence.

He will be best remembered for his stern, masculine, quick tempered characters with booming voices in Bergman’s films like The Seventh Seal, The Virgin Spring, and Hour of the Wolf, but he had an amazing range, effortlessly playing ordinary, soft, even pathetic men in roles in Winter Light and Shame.

At the center of The Seventh Seal, Berman’s most famous and influential film, a must see classic that is constantly referenced, lauded, and reimagined, is von Sydow’s essential, powerful lead performance. The image of the knight playing chess with Death on the beach is now a part of our collective pop culture consciousness. Even people who have never heard of the film, the actor, or the director, know the scene. This is thanks to a mixture of Berman’s masterful direction, Sven Nykist’s visionary cinematography, Bengt Ekerot’s perfect personification of Death, and, of course, von Sydow’s dashing blond knight, standing in for all of us, playing an unwinnable game against his own determined fate and hoping against hope.

Von Sydow’s stoic and proud yet doomed knight is contrasted with other Bergman regular Gunnar Bjornstrand’s cynical squire. Bjornstrand makes snide comments and half jokes throughout. He is a good man, but he seems dead inside. The Crusades sucked whatever hope he had from him. He seems to accept his fate of death with a calm sense of finality, perhaps even welcomes it. Von Sydow, on the other hand, is much more seriousand much more troubled by the prospect of death. He calls out to God, but gets no answer, and the sense of the unknown burns inside of him as Death gets closer to defeating him.

The silence of God is a theme that runs throughout Berman’s films, and von Sydow must again confront it in The Virgin Spring. Again taking place in the middle ages, this time von Sydow interprets the role of a lord in the countryside whose daughter is brutally raped and murdered. A devout Christian, unable to bear the news, he demands an answer from God. What right did he have to let this happen? In what way does this violent act make sense? He storms off to a single tree on a hillside, and viciously attacks it with all his strength, thrashing it from one side to another until he rips it from its roots. It is an extremely intense moment where the audience senses his feeling of desperation flowing through his entire body. His taking out his anger on such an innocent, natural image seems to be his way of attacking God. In the next scene we see von Sydow bathing before he goes to kill his daughter's murderers. He is naked from from the waist up and forcefully whipping himself with a branch from the tree. His servant observes him with terror as she brings him water. We too, feel his rage and anger as he seemingly takes it out on himself. He forcefully strikes his body, yet is so vengeful that he cannot feel physical pain.

In The Hour of the Wolf, von Sydow would play another man full of rage. Yet this time, his character is much less sympathetic. He is a successful painter who constantly finds himself incapable of being around other humans. He treats his wife, played by Liv Ullman, who only ever seeks to please him, as an ungrateful creature, sometimes unable to even look at her. In another scene, a fan sees him painting on the coast and pursues him as he walks away, gibbering away quick compliments about his desire to meet him. He may not know the man he is trying to engage with, but we do, and the audience sits back uncomfortably as we know the volcano is about to explode. Of course it does, and von Sydow slaps the man to the ground and commands him to shut up. Again, von Sydow’s performance comes all from his physicality. His quick, long, forceful steps, his violent swinging slap, and his deep authoritative voice. In the most shocking scene in the film, a scene shot with no sound except the musical soundtrack, a young boy in nothing but a bathing suit moves around and observes how von Sydow paints. Von Sydow, also shirtless, peers at the boy angrily over his work. Finally, the boy adopts a quite sexual pose, laying on a rock with his hands behind his head. Von Sydow cannot take it anymore. He is overcome with hate and attacks the boy, crashing him against the stones until he kills him, then throwing his lifeless body into the water. We are never really told what is the reason behind the character’s wrathful behavior, but von Sydow’s body language seems to communicate a sense of bent up sexual angst that is finally turned to violence as he sees the boy sprawled out in the sun.

Von Sydow’s ability to move his body in abrupt, quick, and dangerous movements make these characters feel so larger than life and even scary. However, as best shown in Shame, a film about a couple trying to survive during a Civil War, his body, relaxed, slumped, and slow could perfectly communicate the opposite. The roles from Hour of the Wolf are somewhat exchanged in Shame, and this time it is Ullman who is the headstrong, firm, decided person in the marriage, and von Sydow the passive one. She is the first to wake up, quickly moving through the house and washing, as von Sydow slowly slouches upright as he talks about a dream. Throughout the film he is always the second to react, never knowing what to do. His face, normally stern, is almost hound-like and sleepy. As he cries on the stairs he is almost pathetic, and far from his commanding manly men in the other films. When he finally starts using his survival skills, acting without thinking, he is even less honorable than before. We see through Ullman’s eyes as she despairs in the coward of a man she married. A good man no doubt, in times of peace, but a scared insect in times of war, a man much less sure and steady from the knight we saw taking Death head on.

Von Sydow’s best work was done with Bergman, but thanks to the magnificent roles he was able to bring to life in 11 of his films, Hollywood beckoned him from his native Sweden to take on roles that required an imposing presence, or a sense of inexplicable foreignness. His most well known role is of course as Father Merrin in William Friedkin’s horror classic The Exorcist. Though his screen time may be minimal, his character, with the exception of the demonized teenage Regan, makes the greatest impression on the audience. He is mysterious, and his foreign face, dracula-like stature, and aura of sadness and a lifetime of experience make him a tragic and mysterious figure. Von Sydow wore a lot of makeup in the film, sometimes even more than Linda Blair’s Regan, to make him at 44 appear to be a man in his 70s, some 30 years older. While the makeup surely does its job, again, it is von Sydow’s physicality that best sells his age. He walks slow, breathes deeply, and has a gaunt, sometimes arched back. It’s as if a 70 year old von Sydow traveled to the past in a time machine to make the film.

Another wonderful performance from Sydow’s American work is in Woody Allen’s masterpiece Hannah and Her Sisters. Allen, one of Bergman’s biggest fan boys, doing his own versions of Smiles of a Summer Night and Wild Strawberries, and taking his own stab at Bermanian themes and style in September, Interiors, and Another Woman, cast his idol’s muse as a bitter, depressive European intellectual. Von Sydow uses his abrupt movements and commanding voice to play a stereotype of his own work with Bergman straightly to great comedic effect.

Von Sydow was not afraid to take on B projects either, also taking roles in Flash Gordon and Conan the Barbarian. Not many actors have had a career that goes from the ridiculous corniness of Flash Gordon to the high brow intellectualism of Bergman. In his later years, as one of the European noblemen of Hollywood, his familiar face would be cast in big productions, his presence giving a sort of elegance to big science fiction and blockbuster productions

While this work may have been less interesting, he also had small rewarding parts in Steven Landry's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Spielberg’s Minority Report, and Scorsese’s Shutter Island. It was a magnificent, unique career, and while Death may have finally taken the man, his image will live on forever, most prominently in his Bergman performances, as he wrestles with the existential, unsolvable questions of existence, exemplified by an immortal game of chess.