About
The Seventh Seal
Watching The Seventh Seal invokes a cruel image of time: the shadow of man waiting outside the gates of the unexpected, just sitting around until knowledge, an epiphany or death tears away this meaningless shade and replaces it with a purposeful existence. To those who think that death coming out of that threshold is not purpose, should think that it’s the goal we’re all unwillingly reaching for.
Never had an artist raised so intelligently the questions about existence and its final destination since Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot until Ingmar Bergman did it with a premise that sounds as simple and complex as -yet different from- Beckett’s play: a knight coming back from the Crusades plays chess with death in an existential gamble that could mean his salvation and a few more years of life -using the adjective happy would be worthy of a fairy tale. Like the story of Beckett’s two characters who wait for Godot -who could be divinity, death, life, a change, and basically anything unknown-, The Seventh Seal deals with the theme of life as a one way ticket to something we all know is coming but accept it or reject it in many different ways.
In the film, Max von Sydow stars as the reflexive Antonius Block who is accompanied by an often over-the- top cast through a journey to return home like a medieval Odysseus across the villages of Black Death-infested Sweden. From the moment the character is born -his first on-screen appearance, that is-, he is seen around with a chess set, a feature that tells us about the game we play with death since the very moment we’re conceived. Later, as the Grim Reaper appears and tells the knight of his bodily decay leading to one and only fatal path, the wonderful images of a sinister looking coast are left behind and Bergman’s essay on death, God and afterlife is set in motion.
Antonius’ party, made up of his squire, a group of actors, a young mysterious mute woman and a blacksmith and his wife, represents humanity in its many different faces: the heroes whose exhaustion brought by war and killing make them question or mock the Christian faith; the optimistic visionaries who trust God and are able to see visions of His emissaries; the sinners who enjoy the hedonistic aspects of life. Each kind has a philosophy and behavior: the characters who question the existence of God are very critical of the Christian fatalism around them; they reminisce of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Antichrist, specifically in a passage in which the German philosopher criticizes the fear of pain in Hell as a means to attract followers. On the other hand the innocent believers are united as a family and seem to receive continuously the divine grace, which makes them obedient and happy. Finally, the sinners who know their ways don’t think much but fear the end, and this is what links them all, the end of days.
The Judgment Day permeates the atmosphere within the film; wherever they go, the characters find a fatalistic world on the verge of extinction due to the bubonic plague. Every inhabitant of these cursed lands seems to be chained to their fatal hour, and so are their thoughts, which escape their mouths in mockery when one of the actors is humiliated, revealing the cause of the fear of these people: they know they are sinners, they know their time will come the worst way possible. In this stark world, the simple diversions are ruined by the visions of illness and decay and by the sounds of rotten choirs and knife-like ocean waves. Existence is heavy, it is a burden, yet the fear of the unknown makes the inhabitants of this scenario fearful of what might come after the heart stops.
The flow of the film is fantastic, and although it seems rather theatrical due to the dialogue and the performances, it never ends up seeming silly, but rather introspective, profound and sinister, and so is every scene, in which a situation tends to fire away the discussions and reactions towards the central themes like the one in which the party meets a witch about to be burned and Antonius asks her to let him meet the Devil in order to ask him about God.
More a compendium of scenes that incite thoughtful reflection than a straightforward narrative -even though it is one-, The Seventh Seal is a film that invites -and requires- viewers to participate through meditation along with its characters; it extends itself way beyond the movie theater or the screen, and dives into the mind, bringing an existential crisis that Woody Allen seems to have understood well for his character in his wonderful family tragicomedy, Hannah and Her Sisters.
