BERGMAN - The Seventh Seal

Much has been said about The Seventh Seal, and I'm not likely in this brief essay to say anything new. That's pretty much true of everything I'm going to be writing about for this project, but nothing can surpass The Seventh Seal in terms of sheer aptitude for undergraduate term paper dissection. The movie is a festival of symbols and metaphors and allegorical constructs, and it almost seems so stuffed with them that it could be reviewed with an Excel chart.

So instead of analyzing the symbolism of the movie, I'd like instead to investigate a question: two days after the death of Ingmar Bergman, what does his most well-known movie have to tell us about his thoughts on life and its extinguishment?

To begin with, the character of Death is not, as could easily have been the case, a sombre spectral nightmare. True, whenever Death appears on the scene, all ambient noise disappears, and is replaced by a sometimes deafening stillness. Wearing a black robe, and made up to be as pale as possible, Death is initially fearsome. And uttering lines like, "I am unknowing," the character can be very serious.

But there is an almost lighthearted quality to the banter he exchanges with the Knight, Antonius Block, over the chessboard. He clearly enjoys the duel, and comes to respect and indulge Block, at one point even expressing his happiness that Block was able to accomplish something in the extra time he was afforded as a result of the chess match.

Death is therefore humanized. He pops out of shadows, or stalks characters as they pass into the frame, and never exhibits any supernatural trickery whatsoever. He is simply an inevitability, a guy in a robe with a job to do.

The real villain is not Death. At one point, in an amazing scene in a church, Block confesses to Death, mistaking him for a monk. "We must make an idol out of our fear, and call it God," laments the knight.

And indeed, God is never present in the film, except as a name given to horror. Such as a fascinating and ghoulish procession of monks and the penitent, all of them stumbling under their heavy burdens and whipping each other and themselves, a procession so holy that all entertainment stops when they approach, and all present drop to one knee and pray as they pass (except the world-weary-and-wise knight and his squire).

Throughout the film, God is remarkable by His absence, as death brutally seizes whole populations and the priests can do nothing but profit. As people die and others grow more afraid, the church gets richer and more powerful. Death, hope, God can all be exploited to inspire fear, the true root of suffering.

And in the end, finally, Death comes for everyone. He enters a room filled with all the main characters, and they stand to greet him. None are afraid, because Death is not something to fear; there is no point. Fear is fearsome, death is simply what happens at the end of a life.