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The Seventh Seal (1956)

Director: Ingmar Bergman

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From Time Out London

The late twentieth century’s defining anxiety – nuclear catastrophe –inspired film masterworks in a variety of genres, from noir (‘Kiss Me Deadly’) to essay (‘Hiroshima, Mon Amour’), faux documentary (‘The War Game’) to horror (‘Godzilla’). But it found possibly its greatest cinematic expression in Ingmar Bergman’s doom-laden medieval allegory, a film that re-imagines a previous period of existential angst and primal fear: the plague-ridden thirteenth century. ‘The Seventh Seal’ has the courage to give fear a face. You could say of its most famous image – returned crusader Max von Sydow’s desperate chess game with Death (Bengt Ekerot), shot in superb high-Gothic relief by cinematographer Gunnar Fischer in homage to an image Bergman remembered from a childhood church visit – that it has lost none of its power to impress. But, it seems to me, 50 years of relentless quotation and parody have taken some toll, as they have on the climactic improvised ‘dance of death’.

The film’s other inspirations were the extraordinary, sometimes ecstatic, often profane poems and music of the ‘Carmina Burana’, composed by anonymous wandering scholars scattered by Europe-wide famine, disease and death, which are sung in snatches in the film and echoed in the soundtrack. Bergman’s inclusion of a company of comic travelling players, which may once have seemed like a balancing, populist device, now provides quietly eloquent proof of the great director’s empathy and essential humanism. While ‘The Seventh Seal’ is most often characterised as a beautifully directed, portentous and despairing cry of abandonment to a godless world, it may be the film’s gentler but insistent curiosity about man’s peculiar talent for survival and artistic expressiveness, even under the direst threat, that ensures it remains not only highly impressive but thought-provoking, relevant and intensely moving in our present, nervous, times.

Author: Wally Hammond

Time Out London Issue 1926: July 18-24 2007

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User reviews of this film

elfonzo bonzo said...

Posted on Oct 27 2009 23:48 Who would have thought you could have had so much fun watching a film about the plague-ridden thirteenth century. It's totally brilliant!! Watch this as a double bill with Wild Strawberries, your in for a good night.

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Ece Irem Arslan said...

Posted on Sep 12 2007 09:08 The Seventh Seal is a film which made me question my own faith in God. The film portrays the search for a solid, revealing God in front of a 14th century Swedish background. The black plague, with its companion the black Death, is terrorizing the country. Antonius Block, a man who's been on a crusade with his squire to find God for 10 years, meets the ultimate question of his existence. He meets Death, and persuades him to play chess with him, betting on his own life. The philosophical questions he poses to the so-called witch(who is about to be burnt by the villagers) and Death, are the very questions whose answers we've been looking for for centuries, and maybe afraid to ask.
I watched The Seventh Seal in Odeon Panton St.

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Jose Ramon Lopez Rodriguez said...

Posted on Jul 31 2007 02:51 La Habana, 2007.07.30.L, 10 pm
Sobre El Septimo Sello de Ingmar Bergman
he ido al cine desde los 4 años y tengo 69. He visto no menos de diez mil peliculas. El Septimo Sello de Ingmar Bergman es una de las 10 mejores que he visto.
Junto con El Rostro, La Fuente de la Virgen, Sonrisas de una Noche de Verano y Fresas Silvestres son de las mejores peliculas que he visto en mi vida.
Pienso que debian incluirse como material de estudio den las escuelas secundarias y hasta en las universidades.
Gracias a Bergman y sus magnificos actores y productores por este regalo que han hecho a la humanidad.
Jose ramon Lopez Rodriguez

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