SCREENING: THE SEVENTH SEAL AND DISCUSSION

 SCREENING: THE SEVENTH SEAL AND DISCUSSION

Pre-viewing notes: 

The Seventh Seal (1957)
1)Bergman's first international hit
2)Followed by Wild Strawberries in the same year. 

Criterion Collection description:

Returning exhausted from the Crusades to find medieval Sweden gripped by the Plague, a knight (Max von Sydow) suddenly comes face-to-face with the hooded figure of Death, and challenges him to a game of chess. As the fateful game progresses, and the knight and his squire encounter a gallery of outcasts from a society in despair, Bergman mounts a profound inquiry into the nature of faith and the torment of mortality. One of the most influential films of its time, The Seventh Seal is a stunning allegory of man’s search for meaning and a work of stark visual poetry.

Saw the Film The Seventh Seal

CLASS DISCUSSION:

My Essay Oct. 7, 2020

Bergman jumps right into intense themes of death and God with the first scene showing death manifested as a person and character in the film. It is a theme of Bergman to use these themes in his films. Mast & Kawin say that his films review “an argument about the nature of life” and with a “silent or perhaps absent God.”

The film is death wrapped around death. The plague is killing people and those that aren’t being killed by the Plague are being killed by the crusade.

Antonius Block is a knight who has fought in the crusades for ten years in the name of God. He is coming back home wondering if God exists and what the meaning of life is. As I think a lot of people would have after seeing death and cruelty for ten years.

He finds out from deaths own words that his time is up and asks him to give him a little time if he can beat him at chess, he buys a little time to keep looking for the “value of living” per Mast and Kawin.  

He looks for the meaning of life not with flashbacks on his life or talk about the past as is done in other Bergman films like Wild Strawberries. He seems to be looking for it in his encounters with other people. All he can see are bad people. He asks a woman, who the church believes has fornicated with the devil, if she has seen the devil. He has questions he hopes she can answer. He sees her twice and ask can't get an answer.

In this scene is the knight says, “I shall remember this hour of peace”. It is a change in him having peace and also meeting people who are happy and honest with an innocent baby.  They are poor and offer him the little food that they have, ironically wild strawberries, and Mary listens earnestly to him. The couple are Mary and Joseph. I don’t know how that reference fits in, are Mary and Joseph the mother and father to the savior also his savior?

The mise-en-scene is lit in very bright light reflecting the brightness and purity coming from these good people. 

The meeting with the couple has made him happy and he thanks Mary for this moment. He later is smiling when death meets him where he hadn’t before. He distracts death who has already alluded to knowing that he will meet up with this couple earlier and they are able to escape to life away from death. This gives him satisfaction that there is good in the world and he is helping it allude death and darkness.

In the end of the film the mise-en-scene is also filmed in very bright light. The couple has made it through the rain and darkness that the husband has said is "the angel of doom is rushing past." They make it past the darkness of the forest  to the light of the beach. The bright light and salvation.  

This visual use of the dark forests and bright light in nature follows in the steps of previous Swedish filmmakers Stiller and Sjostrom as said in Mast and Kawin who have “combined the visual and poetic power of the norther landscapes with stories of realistic passions and mystical influences.” 

Another trait of the Swedish predecessors that Bergman adopts is being critical of “hypocrisies and injustices.” One of the monks who sent the squire away to the crusades comes into a house to steal jewelry and rape a woman. The whole crusade is insane and unjust.

I thought of Fellini’s La Strada in that Fellini loved using road side circus performers and outcasts. In La Strada there is the same type of travelling caravan of performers going town to town as in the Seventh Seal.

Also, in 8 ½ where the film ends in a carnival circus type atmosphere but also the is on a quest for meaning. He has writers block and needs to find a way on a journey through different odd characters in his life to find substance that he can direct.

There are still a lot of unanswered open-ended questions that the knight asks which remind me of the Antonioni films. We don’t get a solid answer about the meaning of life or death, we need to figure that out.

Edited by Ida Daroza on Oct 9 at 10:14pm

GRADE 3/3

Great connections to Fellini's La Strada and 8 1/2.

Denah Johnston , Dec 17 at 6:20pm

Student response to my post:

Don Gonzalez:
I agree with you Ida on your observation of the scene showing the the couple with their baby after they "made it through the rain and darkness" that the husband refers to as "the angel of doom rushing past." Jof is a poet and  given his penchant to see visions, it is a perfect line of dialogue in this very dramatic, and should I say, climactic sequence. Your comparing their escape from death is vivid and it really reflects the scene. Indeed, they have seen the bright light and salvation.  Nice analysis.  

Don Gonzalez's essay and my response. 

Oct 8, 2020Oct 8 at 2:30pm

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Having grown up in a home with an active rector for a father, Ingmar Bergman had been exposed to the intricacies and traditions of organized religion. Watching  The Seventh Seal (1957) is like getting inside a Catholic church during Holy Week, from Palm Sunday up to Resurrection Sunday. The part where most of the film is held happens on a Black Saturday, where the protagonist, a medieval knight named Antonius Block (Max Von Syndow in a role that catapulted him to worldwide acclaim), meets Death and challenges him to a game of chess. Themes of spirituality, the pain and sacrifices people have to go through to find and make sense of the meaning of life is further compounded by man’s futile search for the absent God – who, it appears to be, is deaf and mute and cannot be found. In Revelation 8:1-6, where the movie lifted up its title, it says, “And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour,” implying that no matter how hard one prays or beseeches the heavens, there will be no answer. Plagued by the Black Death prevalent at one point in the Middle Ages after the Crusades, Block negotiates with death to buy time, trying to make one more noble deed so he could make sense of his life and purpose, if there is one left at all.

In many scenes, Biblical references are alluded to different characters and in this scene which I chose, the actors Jof and his wife Mia and their son Mikael is referenced to as the first holy family who have survived the violent storm unscathed. Jof, who has a peculiar gift of seeing visions, sees from afar seven figures who are dancing the Dance of the Devil, being led by Death itself. In this scene, the seven figures’ silhouettes line the hills in extreme long shot, the clouds covering the sun and raising the idea that they are going to the afterlife. “It is finished,” the mute girl finally spoke in the scene before, once again referencing the parallels of her suffering to that of Christ’s when He died on the cross. The family is seen leaving the place, washed in bright sunlight, with Jof saying that the waters from the rain will wash away the bitterness of salt in their tears.

The film starts and ends with amazing landscapes – the opening highlighting the violent waves of the shore, foreshadowing upheavals and discontent, while the ending presents still, calm waters as the family walks away from the frame, a cleansing moment, a catharsis. 

Like I’ve mentioned above, Bergman’s films often evokes religious themes, and his characters are clearly referenced as Biblical characters. If the family of caravan actors in The Seventh Seal symbolize the holy family, in Federico Fellini’s L' Amore (1948), for instance, Nanni (Anna Magnani), an overly religious woman who tends sheep and who is desperate to reconcile with her husband, takes a wandering man (Federico Fellini) at the cliff of a hill to be Saint Joseph and takes a drink of wine with him. Months later, she gave birth and she considers it a miracle from the heavens.

Bergman also uses a play of light and shadows to reveal secrets, visions, dreams, suffering and death and places his actors in extreme long shots against a backdrop that enhances the mood of loneliness and isolation, like in the above scene in The Seventh Seal wherein Raval, stricken by the plague and begging for water, dies alone before a haunting burst of light encapsulates his body.

In a similar framing, Isak (Victor Sjöström) in Wild Strawberries (1957) revisits a hidden, familiar space wherein he was again shown with his very eyes the betrayal that happened to him when he discovered his childhood sweetheart and his brother doing the act when he was younger. Again, the play of light and shadows here – and the trees as witnesses as well, evokes poignancy and reflection. Given his successful career and achievements for his life’s works (after all, he will be given an honorary degree from his home town alma mater of fifty years ago), Dr. Isak has a lot of regrets, and reflecting on these memories make him ponder at the vanity, and futility of it all. “Gone, all are gone… and the punishment for all these… is loneliness.”  

Edited by Don Gonzalez on Oct 9 at 9:25pm

My response:

Hello Dan,

I learned a lot from your post. My weakness in this class is the camera work and angles. You gave me insight to a lot of scenes I had not noticed.

The extreme long shot of “the seven figures’ silhouettes line in the hills” now I see it obviously but hadn’t really thought about it before. Also enjoyed your reference to the nature in the shot of the “clouds covering the sun and raising the idea that they are going to the afterlife” which always in mythology is a dark place.

Loved your insight about the violent waves of the shore compared to the ending calm waves which is also something I see now. Showing the foreshadowing of a rough time ahead and then the calm at the end where nature has taken its course and things worked out as they should.  

You made a great comparison to the light and shadows and trees in Wild Strawberries. As said in the text about the use of the northern landscape in the cinema in Swedish and Danish film.

I am a huge Fellini fan and the scene you picked in L’Amore was an excellent comparison to the scenes in The Seventh Seal in it's hypocrisy of religion and being set on the rocks along the shore. It was directed by Rosselini and co-written by Fellini. I had totally missed the fact that Fellini was the old man in the film – he looked too slim to be him but them again it was 1948

• Don Gonzalez

  Don Gonzalez

  Oct 10, 2020Oct 10 at 11:26am

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  Thank you, Ida! I'm a huge Fellini fan too! I remember when I was a teenager and saw La Strada on late TV. It started my love affair with Italian cinema. :-)  

Quiz: Damn - the quiz results are now blocked!
I can't copy and paste them. 

Questions about: 
1)Dryer - The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)
2)Robert Hamer - Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)
3)Michael Leach directed ?? I guessed
4)Peter Greenway - The Draughtsman Contract (1982)
5)Carol Reed - The Third Man.