My Favorite Subject

The guy on the left looks pissed. Maybe it's because a crippled newsie just took his guns away from him.

Pulling your gun on the man wasn't a good idea. Now you'll take your slaps and like them.

Here's some info on one of my favorite films,

The Seventh Seal by Ingmar Bergman.

Bergman begins The Seventh Seal with a shot of a cloudy sky heaven, for his purposes and a voice-over citing a passage from Revelations, the full text of which reads:

And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour. And I saw the seven angels which stood before God; and to them were given seven trumpets. And another angel came and stood at the altar, having a golden censer; and there was given unto him much incense, that he should offer it with the prayers of all saints upon the golden altar which was before the throne. And the smoke of the incense, which came with the prayers of the saints, ascended up before God out of the angel's hand. And the angel took the censer, and filled it with fire of the altar, and cast it into the earth: and there were voices, and thunderings, and lightnings, and an earthquake. And the seven angels which had the seven trumpets prepared themselves to sound. [Revelations 8:1-6]

Bergman has taken a side in the great debate by opening his movie, not with a dire case of existential morning sickness (for which he certainly had the personal experience and intestinal fortitude to draw upon), but with a passage from Revelations in which "there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour." Bergman in one fell swoop not only posits that God is alive and silent, but that we are on the verge of the apocalypse or a nuclear war.