Review: The Seventh Seal (1957)

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The Seventh Seal

Rating

Director

Ingmar Bergman

Screenplay

Ingmar Bergman (Play: Ingmar Bergman)

Length

1h 36m

Starring

Gunnar Bjornstrand, Bengt Ekerot, Nils Poppe, Max von Sydow, Bibi Andersson, Inga Gill, Maud Hansson, Inga Landgré Gunnel Lindblom, Bertil Anderberg, Anders Ek, Åke Fridell, Gunnar Olsson, Erik Strandmark

MPAA Rating

Not Rated

Basic Plot

A man plays a game of chess with death, hoping to prolong his own life.

Review

One director has emerged from Sweden to become one of the most recognized and highly praised filmmakers in cinematic history. Ingmar Bergman, director of such films as “Fanny & Alexander” and “Autumn Sonata” was making films long before those legends.

He wrote his first film, “Frenzy,” at age 26. Then two years later, he director for the first time in “Crisis.” One of his biggest successes came in 1957 with the first in a trilogy. It was called “The Seventh Seal.”

“The Seventh Seal” was a very insightful film. It stars a young Max Von Sydow as Antonius Block, a knight who has returned home from the crusades in the middle of the Black Death (the great plague featured prominently in Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death”). He is accompanied by his squire, Jons (Gunnar Bjornstrand), who tries to lighten every day situations with song, yet always seems to get disapproving glances from Antonius.

As the film opens, Antonius is washing his face in the ocean. It is on the beach that he meets a tall, robed and hooded figure. The figure’s face is stark white and he is dressed all in black. It is Death (Bengt Ekerot). He has come to take Antonius to his grave. Antonius has come back and longs to see his wife and refuses.

Death isn’t one for deal making, but Antonius suggests they play a game of chess. If he wins, Death with let him live, if he loses, Death can take him right then and there. So begins the game.

“The Seventh Seal” is a film about death. It is an essay on the human desire to live and how there is no escaping death and it’s only a matter of time before Death wins that eternal game.

When looking at a film as expressionistic as “Seal,” you lose sight of the fact that it’s, in essence, a morality play. One you might find in any classical opera. Perhaps this is because Bergman has been heavily influenced by opera and has devoted his post-filmmaking life to it.

What, perhaps, is most interesting about “Seal” is its stand on religion. In many of its religious-oriented scenes, “Seal” casts a harsh light on the inverted morality that seems to be at work.

One scene features Antonius confessing his sins to a minister, alike in every detail, except when the priest reveals himself, it is Death who has heard all he has to say. Death is a priest, a man who seeks out the sins of mankind, only to vilify and attempt to destroy them.

In another scene, we view a religious procession where various people, who have been infected with the plague are led through the town. They beat themselves and degrade each other as a ways of repenting. The priest leading the procession uses them as an example of what can happen if wickedness is allowed to run its own path.

As with the Crusades, religion merely fights a war to protect what it holds as ideals, yet breaks each and every ideal they seem to reject.

In the end, Death cannot be staved and near the end of the film, we see a group of people preparing a fire so they can burn one of the blighted. They believe that if they burn this wicked child they can be spared from the plague.

They firmly believe what they are doing is right, but as is the moral of “The Masque of the Red Death,” it is the morally superior and haughty who, in the end, become the victims of villainy and destruction. It is their vanity and their self-righteousness that blinds them to the truth. Death will take them all eventually. You cannot hide from it, nor can you keep it out.

“The Seventh Seal” is a wonderfully complex film that will undoubtedly evoke different emotions from different people and each will find a different moral imperative in the film. It is undoubtedly up for individual interpretation.

“Seal” is not only a film that makes you ponder its own meaning, it also helps you to look inside yourself to find your own truth, to come to your own self-understanding and perhaps to better relate to those around you. It makes you realize that you are merely one drop of water in a sea of human experience that while each have unique aspects, there is essentially only one beginning and one end to them all.