Art Film Where Death Appears in a Town and Makes Religious People Riot
Starkly existential, boldly poetic, slow and grim, Ingmar Bergman'south great classic The Seventh Seal has haunted film aficionados, baffled and bored college students, inspired innumerable parodists, and challenged both believers and unbelievers for almost half a century. Long considered one of the greatest films of all time, Bergman's medieval drama of the soul can exist difficult to watch but is incommunicable to forget.
Directed by Ingmar Bergman. Max von Sydow, Gunnar Björnstrand, Bengt Ekerot, Nils Poppe, Bibi Andersson. Janus.
Caveat Spectator
Some morbid imagery, including dead bodies and religious self-flagellation; some violence, including a burning at the stake; references to rape, adultery, and promiscuity; an offscreen adulterous affair; much religious questioning. In Swedish with subtitles or dubbed.
The picture show opens and closes with the passage from Revelation from which information technology takes its title: "When he broke open the 7th seal, there was silence in sky for about half an hour" (Rev 8:i). "Silence in heaven" — or rather the silence of heaven, the silence of God in the world — is Bergman's ambitious theme, along with mortality and death, existential dread, and apocalyptic fears.
The Seventh Seal is the kickoff film of Bergman's "heart menstruation" as a filmmaker, a period characterized by reflection upon religion, doubt, and unbelief. In these films, the director tin exist seen working through the tension betwixt the childhood organized religion of his strict Lutheran upbringing and his adult skepticism. During this period, having lost his faith in God, Bergman remained haunted past the horror of beingness without God and faith, of life in the shadow of a death that is simply annihilation.
In The Seventh Seal more than any other film, Bergman confronts these issues with the directness of a medieval allegory. In fact, it is a medieval allegory, ready in fourteenth-century Sweden, with ane character embodying tortured doubt, some other simple organized religion, still another defiant unbelief. Withal information technology is a medieval apologue for modern sensibilities and anxieties, later on the loss of medieval religion.
Key dramatic images are drawn from medieval art and drama — a knight literally playing chess with Death; Death coming for the living, leading away men and women in a morbid procession, a danse macabre — simply the religious structure around those images has eroded. In a fourteenth-century danse macabre, Death might appear as an emissary from God beckoning men to judgment and the afterlife. In Bergman'southward film, Death (Bengt Ekerot) appears equally an enigmatic emissary of the unknown, bringing united states unknowing into the unknowable.
The Seventh Seal tells the story of a knight named Antonius Block (Max von Sydow) and his squire Jöns (Gunnar Bjönstrand), who take just returned from ten fruitless years in the Crusades to a Sweden in the throes of the black plague. At that place the knight is confronted by the specter of Decease; and, in an paradigm parodied from Woody Allen's Beloved and Decease to Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey to the lame Schwarzenegger action-comedy The Last Action Hero, the knight challenges Decease to a game of chess.
We also run across a simple player named Jof (Nils Poppe), his married woman Mia (Bibi Andersson), and their infant son Mikael. The names of the couple, diminutive forms of the names Joseph and Mary, immediately remind united states of the Holy Family unit (in the Criterion DVD, the dubbed English soundtrack uses "Joseph" and "Mary," but the subtitles retain "Jof" and "Mia"). Yet it's soon clear that, despite the intentional resemblance, Jof and Mia don't represent the Holy Family in an emblematic sense; in fact, Jof, who is given to visions of saints and angels, sees the Virgin Mary herself walking in a field.
The knight Block and the player Jof both see supernatural figures; simply Jof, a uncomplicated human being of unproblematic faith, sees a glorious homo beingness who bespeaks a human afterlife of sky and hell, while Cake, who desperately longs to know if God and sky are real, sees only a numinous entity whose existence offers him no assurances about what may be across the grave. In 1 central scene, nosotros discover that Jof besides can encounter Death playing chess with Block; simply Block never gets to encounter the Virgin Mary. Cake fifty-fifty wishes at one betoken that he might meet the devil, reasoning that if anyone would know nigh God, he would. But no, to him the spiritual world remains inaccessible.
Torn between his inability to believe and his dissatisfaction with unbelief, Block rails against God's frustrating elusiveness on the one paw and the God-shaped pigsty in his own heart on the other. "Why must he always hibernate behind unseen miracles and vague promises and hints nigh eternity?" Cake complains. Yet he also asks, "Why can't I impale God within me? Why does he live on inside me, mocking and tormenting me till I take no residuum, even though I expletive him and try to tear him from my eye? Why, in spite of everything else, does he remain a reality — a maddening reality I cannot get rid of?"
These tortured questions come in a scene at a chapel confessional, where Cake speaks to a robed figure who, unbeknownst to him, is not a monk but Death himself. "I cry out to [God] in the nighttime," Cake confides to the robed figure, "simply sometimes it seems as if there is no ane there."
"Information technology could exist no i is there," comes the reply.
"If that is true, and so all of life is meaningless [or 'a senseless horror']. Nobody can live with death before he dies if he thinks that oblivion lies at the end."
Too struggling with doubts about God'due south existence, Block too resists death in the hope of performing a single meaningful deed before dying. Although the picture show doesn't explicitly draw the connection, the quest for God and the quest for meaning are really two sides of the same coin, for in that location is no true meaning autonomously from God.
Notwithstanding, although the knight does become an opportunity to perform his meaningful act earlier the film ends — even in a fashion adulterous Decease — ultimately this gives him no alleviation or peace. Instead, his only respite from his existential dread occurs, notably, during an encounter with the player couple, Jof and Mia, in which Block briefly shares in their peaceful being, enjoying a simple meal of wild strawberries and milk.
The significance of the scene is underscored by clear eucharistic overtones. Block himself invests symbolic and commemorative significance in the meal in quasi-liturgical language: "I shan't forget this moment. And this shall be to me a sign and a great sufficiency." There'southward an echo of liturgical gesture in the solemn style Block raises the bowl of milk to his lips in the manner of a eucharistic chalice. The meal, too, is an occasion of fellowship and an "hour of peace" for the knight, with Jof's strumming a secular counterpoint to the sacred music of the liturgy.
In contrast to the bread and wine of the Eucharist, however, which the liturgy notes are "work of man hands" besides every bit "gift of the earth," the elements in this meal, milk and wild strawberries, are entirely natural foods with no need of any boosted process at human easily. (The strawberries, in particular, seem to have a special significance in Bergman'due south imagination; Wild Strawberries is the name of his next motion picture.)
In fact, the idyll of wild strawberries seems more a point of contrast to the eucharistic liturgy than a point of comparison; it seems intended to point abroad from the Christian commemoration rather than toward information technology. The natural goodness of the meal and the feel seems meant, not to evoke the greater supernatural goodness of the eucharistic liturgy, merely to suggest that information technology is rather in natural pleasures such as this magic hour of strawberries and milk than in the promises and sacraments of the church that fulfillment is to be found.
In this connectedness, it's very telling that, thought Block spends the whole film longing to hear from God, nosotros never see him really doing much of anything past way of seeking him — certainly not the sorts of things nosotros might wait a medieval knight to exercise. For all his talk nigh "crying out to God in the dark," we never see him praying, fasting, watching in the night. Though he finds solace in a meal with eucharistic overtones, he shows no involvement in ever going to Mass. He makes some endeavor to get to confession, still never accuses himself of whatever sins or expresses whatsoever contrition, instead engaging in mere psychological introspection.
Block talks to an declared witch near the devil, merely never to a priest virtually God (though he makes an effort to do so in the confession scene). He doesn't seek God in beloved of neighbor; on the contrary, equally he himself says, "My indifference to men has shut me out. I live now in a world of ghosts, a prisoner in my dreams."
Thrashing about in a vacuum, Cake inquires after God equally a naked and autonomous intellect, scrutinizing life and death as a philosophy problem rather than living it as a human. In saying this, I'm not so much making a moral judgment most Block, who has been involved enough in his world to get married and fight in the Crusades, equally a disquisitional observation most the picture, which has no involvement in exploring how beloved or war might be occasions of seeking God, let alone finding him.
Significantly, the only displays of organized organized religion in the film are the flagellants' procession and the burning of the witch. Bergman stacks the deck: He depicts skepticism and existential angst with gimmicky immediacy, merely allows religious devotion to appear only in primitive and repugnant forms. ("Do they actually wait modernistic people to fall for that?" Jöns scoffs at the flagellants' procession.)
Of class there'south still Jof, with his visions and his simple faith. Yet while the motion-picture show depicts his visions as straightforwardly as Cake'due south encounters with Expiry, this neither affirms God's existence nor endorses Jof'south faith. Bergman wants to evoke the feel of elementary faith in a sympathetic and cornball fashion, simply he allows Jof's world and Block's globe to exist side by side without establishing either one over the other as factual — though clearly his sympathies are with Block rather than Jof.
At the same fourth dimension, both the moving picture's ending and the nature of Block's "pregnant human action" advise a curious solicitude on Bergman's part toward his little holy family unit. Some wags take suggested that the filmmaker favored these characters because they were actors; but Bergman explicitly establishes, in one of the picture show's flashes of mordant humor, that being an actor carries no special privileges.
Similar Block, Bergman is unable to enter into Jof and Mia's manner of life, however still somehow seems to draw condolement from it. Past the film's end it'southward clear that although the director has no wish to be like Jof and Mia, he yet values their way of life and doesn't wish to see them deprived of it.
Though the movie'due south theme, the silence of God and the horror of death if there is no afterlife, is an essentially religious 1, The Seventh Seal doesn't really bargain with organized religion or God as such, but with the place of God and religion in the human heart and man order. The 1995 Vatican pic listing rightly ranked the film for its significant contribution in the area of "Values" rather than "Religion."
Incidentally, Bergman's inner conflict and his sense of horror at the prospect of the empty heavens and the eternal grave didn't stay with him forever. Years after making The Seventh Seal, the director gave the following respond in response to a question about death:
I was afraid of this enormous emptiness, only my personal view is that when we die, nosotros die, and nosotros get from a land of something to a state of absolute pettiness; and I don't believe for a second that in that location'due south anything higher up or across or annihilation like that; and this makes me enormously secure.
This is not an respond, needless to say, that Antonius Block would have found remotely satisfying ("If that is true, then all of life is a senseless horror"). Block has his limitations as a character, notwithstanding compared to the after Bergman, he has a far more authentically human view of life and decease.
Source: http://decentfilms.com/reviews/seventhseal
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