the seventh seal (1957)
Through the light of a newly risen sun, as Bergman’s film begins, each human being who awakes to this world reflects a new dimension of its possible interpretations. Bergman is all of these characters in one; our author the nihilist, the idealist, the valiant knight, the cowering jester, the pious priest, all the way to the grim reaper of death himself, but which of these archetypes hold the key to the great mystery that our central Antonius Block is questing after? The world of mortal man, here in this plane of existence, can be beautiful and bleak, but in all ways it remains a mystery. So goes our tale of a knight, drawn away from his life by a religious crusade, returning to his homeland in the midst of apocalyptic circumstances, as four suns hang in the sky and brother devours brother and the graves open up to expel the dead, unable to rest. The sun also rises with death to greet him, but death, like his passengers, is a slave to his appetites and has a taste for sport. Death agrees to match wits with the knight in chess to buy this mortal man some time. The journey plays to the best of theatricality as archetypes both grand and pitiful dance across the silver screen. The world is ending, and how do we choose to deal with it? Many choose to torture themselves in hopes of avoiding the tortures of the damned, self-flagellation in a desperate effort to prove repentance, shouting to all who see them to join the parade or perish in the flames. Others take refuge in a canteen of wine, or in their craft, performing juggling acts or painting pronounced depictions of the horror they see around them. What Bergman paints with The Seventh Seal is the vivid dance between life and death, (in this case, death leads, the living follow) and the ultimate futility as we stand together, on the other side of an abyss, hoping to understand it.
The void, as Block puts it early on in the film, is a mirror. That abyss reflects back to us what we are and those ill at ease with what they see will forever search to rationalize, to discover, to achieve their way out of what they see, outrun it or transcend it by any means they can. For the ones who see peace, and the heavens above, the angels and the trumpets, the lambs, theirs is to awake to a different world and find the virgin walking with the child, kind smiles and warm greetings. For our central character there is only the identity crisis of the crusader, leaving home drunk with ideology, only to return war-torn and defeated to a world in ruin, clinging to the notion that something, somewhere, can make sense of it all so it wouldn’t be in vain. The crusading society, bringing its sacred truths beyond its borders by the sword (or other persuasions) will forever produce this conflict and crisis in the minds of its faithful for the very reason Block posits during the confessional scene with Death. Their actions undertaken to spread their liturgy come to haunt them when the void’s mirror is turned back on them, coming to question everything. Which beliefs were truly their own? Which were adopted in order to uphold the group’s sense of identity?