THE SEVENTH SEAL
d. Ingmar Bergman, 1957

5 April 2007

Chronological context provokes the question, where did THE SEVENTH SEAL come from? The previous Bergman films we've seen, from CRISIS to SMILES OF A SUMMER'S NIGHT, have all been about sexual and romantic relationships. THE SEVENTH SEAL is a nearly complete break from this. Human relationships are portrayed in the film - a happily married couple with child; a whoring actor and cuckolding blacksmith's wife - but in service of a larger thematic matrix.

Before THE SEVENTH SEAL, Bergman's films almost entirely ignore religion. The most explicit statement on religious matters in any of the previous films - Marie's atheistic outburst in SUMMER INTERLUDE - is the sole memorable mention of the topic. (There's also a priest in SUMMER INTERLUDE, but he's not much use to anyone.) THE SEVENTH SEAL revisits Marie's sentiment from a more mature but no more pious vantage.

Certainly the claim can be made that THE SEVENTH SEAL is about the relationship between Man and God. God, however, is nowhere to be found in the film. It may be more apt to say that THE SEVENTH SEAL is about Humanity's relationship with the idea of God, or Humanity's relationship with Humanity's own desire for God.

While God is not a character in THE SEVENTH SEAL, Death, most famously, is. The image of Death from THE SEVENTH SEAL is one of two which have come to mean "European Art Film" in the public consciousness over the years. The other is the image of Anita Ekberg in the fountain in LA DOLCE VITA. How many college film courses have had their catalog entry illustrated with one or the other of these images?

Max Von Sydow's Knight wants to believe, but also wants to be convinced. He's frustrated that God seems stay out of reach, yet never seems to entertain the obvious possibility that He simply does not exist. Succinct, matter-of-fact Atheism is left to the worldly, realistic Squire.

I'll go out on a limb here and say that I can't take The Knight seriously. His spiritual suffering, however private, seems too theatrical and self-conscious. He's stuck in the same sort of self-pitying narcissism as the whiney, self-absorbed violinist in TO JOY - his suffering is loftier but no less selfish. His spirituality ultimately reduces to the position that God must exist because he wants Him to exist, a "there must be SOMETHING" theology which I think is very poorly thought out. Shut up, you big baby!

Having said that, I'll now contradict myself by saying that The Knight is as noble and poignant a character as it is possible to find in cinema. It is impossible to doubt his sincerity or his humanity while watching him with the poor girl who is about to be burned alive as a witch.

In this sequence, the camera explicitly connects The Knight to Christ by Max Von Sydow's resemblance to the figure on the crucifix. It is left ambiguous whether The Knight is "a Christ figure," or simply a believer recognizing the gulf between himself and Christ. I would like to think that The Knight represents Christ himself, in the process of realizing that he is, in fact, not the son of God, but just a human among other humans.

In contrast to the silently suffering Knight, is the position held by Joseph, an actor in a tiny travelling troupe. Joseph's delight in existence leads him to see God everywhere. He is innocent, unquestioning, very likely illiterate. He has to have seen nearly as much suffering and horror as anyone else in the film, and yet seems to float above it all. Both V.G. and I thought there was a striking resemblance between Joseph and The Fool in Fellini's LA STRADA, right down to the look of playful idiocy on their faces. Of course, The Fool meets a very different end.

The Squire holds the third point of view, that of stark, practical atheism. The Knight's longings are meaningless to him, though he is still bound to The Knight through their friendship.

(Of the three, I'd be prone to self-flattery by imagining myself The Fool, but in reality my position is probably that of The Squire.)