Film: The Seventh Seal
Director: Ingmar Bergman
Country: Sweden
Released: February 1957
Runtime: 96 minutes
Genre: Fantasy
Studio: AB Svensk
Influenced: Andrzej Wajda, Woody Allen, Margarethe von Trotta, Pete Hewitt, Noah Baumbach
1957 was the year that Ingmar Bergman truly announced himself to the world, with two masterpieces – first The Seventh Seal and later Wild Strawberries. The influence of Kurosawa's Ikiru and Dreyer's Ordet on The Seventh Seal is plain to see, but Bergman took those existential themes of death and finding meaning to a higher metaphysical plane in this film. Bergman has admitted to his obsessive fear of death while making The Seventh Seal, to the extent that the process was almost a form of therapy for him. The spare opening credits and the lean typeface hint at the sober, stark nature of the movie, and the theme of God's silence is there straightaway in the apocalyptic opening quote from the Book of Revelations.
Set in the Middle Ages, the knight and his squire have returned from the Crusades but seem exhausted and scarred by the experience. Bergman derived much of the film’s imagery from the medieval frescoes in Swedish churches he encountered in his youth, including the iconic scene of Death playing chess. Plague came to Sweden in 1349 and about a third of the country died from it. In the fresco scene with the painter, we see the squire coming to terms with the plague’s horrific symptoms. Many of the film's most iconic scenes involve the knight and Death, who at one point masquerades as a priest at the confession box. The knight is full of angry, rhetorical questions about the existence (or absence) of God. Death outflanks the knight by tricking him into confessing how he plans to win the game of chess, giving away his secret.
Strawberries are a potent symbol of summer and pleasure in Sweden, and the mention of wild strawberries in the scene where Jof, the knight, the squire & the women all sit and eat them with milk provides a cheerful interlude. The squire’s interactions with the fresco painter and Plog the smith are some of my favourite scenes in the movie, featuring witty and incisive dialogue. The film presents us with two different ways to approach the world, the squire’s hedonism and the knight’s idealism.
Coming from a background as a theatre director, Bergman always maintained close relationships with his actors and used the same nucleus again and again in his films. The Seventh Seal launched the careers of Max von Sydow (as the knight Antonius Block) and Bibi Andersson, who both went on to star in many other Bergman films. In the character of Mia, Andersson helps to portray a scene of pastoral contentedness as one of the wandering players, a mood at odds with the film’s opening scenes featuring the knight playing chess with Death. Like Shakespeare, Bergman’s theatrical background meant he was adept at using farce and comedy as light relief from the film's darker or more gloomy moments. Bergman intended the film as a gallery of archetypal characters asking the same question, "what is the meaning of life?" This gallery of characters each represent a different facet of humanity and each meet Death in their own way.
Technical flourishes such as Bergman's lovely cross-dissolves and his innovative use of sound effects, like the sudden cut in the sound of the waves when Death appears, are notable features of the stunning black and white cinematography. There's also an incredible sequence showing the marching flagellants interrupting the play, swinging incense and carrying a twisted effigy of Christ on the cross. Constant talk of death will have chimed with audiences at the time who were concerned about the Cold War, but its theme is universal (and was especially relevant again during Covid). Raval’s painful death from the plague is almost Bergman taking revenge on all the domineering and petty Church officials who marred his life as a young man in Stockholm.
By the end of the film, the knight no longer cares if he loses at chess to death, as he’s now done that one last "meaningful act", as he called it back in the confession box, in this case saving the lives of Jof, his wife and the baby. He understands that faith can only work through action, not thought. "It is finished" are not only the words of the (until now) mute girl, but also those of Jesus Christ on the cross.
Comments