The Seventh Seal (1957) Directed by Ingmar Bergman
Antonius Block (Max Von Sydow), a Nordic knight who has just returned from the Crusades, finds that while he has escaped his fate up to now, Death awaits him on the shores of his homeland. Cleverly, Antonius challenges Death to a chess match, thus prolonging the inevitable. Antonius and his squire, Jons (Gunnar Bjornstand), continue their travels while the game is going on, and find their country ravaged by the plague, superstition, poverty, and conflict. They meet a young family along the way, a family who could double as Mary, Joseph and the Christ child, and Antonius' match with Death takes on an added meaning.
The Seventh Seal is an existential morality play, and it has always surprised me how many different things it is about. For all of the Christian imagery and references, Bergman present a Medieval society that is essentially godless and abandoned. Bergman presents not just the destitution of many lives but a society that seems brutish to the core. If there were such a thing as a soul, how could it flourish in these circumstances?
Bergman is still in the period where he is more concerned about raising questions than he is about coming to conclusions. It is interesting to watch this movie again, now knowing the nature of the conclusion that he came to: silence (
The Silence, 1963). Either God does not exist or God is dead. Humans are left to cope on their own in a chaotic, often threatening universe. In
The Seventh Seal it is as if Bergman is still shifting through the evidence, and what he observes is violence, inhumanity and dread. There is a sense that if there is any glimmer of hope amid the rubble, it will be extinguished soon enough, and not gently.
This sounds heavy as hell, but it is fascinating in the viewing. Partly this fascination is the result of the brilliant cinematography of one of Bergman's decades' long collaborators, Sven Nykvist, a superb artist in his own right. Shot in black and white, the movie is a pleasure to look at. But Bergman also keeps the story moving. Actually there isn't much of a story, more like a series of tableau that reveal something about the depths of the soul in Medieval Sweden. In effect, the audience is on a pilgrimage, a guided tour through hell on earth with a few lyrical interludes thrown in, thanks to the young family the Knight meets along the way. Bergman/Nykvist finds some stunning images for his audience to focus on, such as the long slow parade of death of doomed souls as they travel up a mountain, never to return.
Bergman seems to have used film as a very personal means of exploring his universe and his thoughts about it. I don't know how sympathetic is was toward the human condition, but he certainly seems to want to understand it. Except for Dreyer, his Danish colleague, and Tarkovsky, who was greatly influenced by Bergman, I can't think of another director who has used film so intimately to explore his place in the universe. Bergman's work seem a little out of fashion at the moment, but he remains one of the great intellectual artists ever to make movies.
subtitles