The Seventh Seal (dir. Ingmar Bergman, 1957)

The Seventh Seal begins with an ethereal rendition of the Latin hymn Dies Irae, playing under a reading from the Book of Revelations:

“And when the Lamb opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour. And the seven angels who had the seven trumpets prepared themselves to sound.”

There to find the answers hidden behind God’s final seal, dour knight Antonius Block (Max von Sydow) awakens on a stone covered beach, having returned from the Crusades a failure. Ingmar Bergman’s meditation on Death and medieval fantasy thus embarks on a quest of its own, taking in everything from arthouse chin-stroking to Hollywood cliché, with its knight challenging Death to a game of chess. Parodied in everything from Woody Allen’s Love and Death to Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey, Antonius Block, plays to stall his demise long enough to gain some proof of God or Satan — or at least commit one dignified act before The End.

As for his leads, Bergman leans on one of the oldest and most persistent character combinations in western culture: the questing, idealistic hero (tall, gaunt, easily awestruck), paired with earthy, practical lackey (squat, well fed, ironic). The Don Quixote and Sancho Panza template has endured numberless variations, reversals, and buddy-buddy updates, from Vladimir and Estragon to Ron Burgundy and Brick Tamland. Bergman’s version, with the knight played by the magnetically craggy and prematurely aged Max von Sydow (somehow only 28 at the time) riffs on the idea of the righteous master and his trusty servant, though a rude scowl from the latter indicates an unbridgeable gulf between them at essential moments.

The strangely clueless Death (Bengt Ekerot) certainly faces a workout — playing chess to harvest one soul, sawing down a tree to claim another. Block, the chess man, hopes to win his reprieve from Death by beating him through “a combination of bishop and knight”, meaningful given his personal experience of the combined forces of religion and the military. When Death finally arrives to claim him and his group, only Block blubbers in prayer. In contrast, his servant Jöns manfully insists on his right to wiggle his toes in triumph at his final moment.

Jöns, the caustically plain-speaking singer of bawdy songs, like Panza emerges as stronger than the knight; although secure in his agnosticism, he still feels for his fellow man, contemptuous for both the martial and religious forces that drive his delusional master. In the end, however, Jöns and Block share the same fate, chained hand to hand in the Dance of Death that only Jof the acrobatic fool can see.

Cinematographer Gunnar Fischer’s camerawork tells the story in high-contrast black and white, capturing iconic and much copied compositions; The Seventh Seal’s dialogue and visual rhetoric rely on an omnipresent sense of the theatrical, enlivening Bergman’s often pretentious prose. Grand, soul-searching conflicts — framed with imposing Christian pageantry and ornament, from Death himself to grotesque medieval artwork — contrast with picaresque interludes.

Bergman has his characters pursue his particular brand of introspection, relying on their human experiences to inspire their spiritual curiosity. The movie fiercely addresses itself to the agony of belief, the need to believe in a God who remains silent, mysterious, absent. It is a work of art that grabs believers and unbelievers alike, demanding an acknowledgement, rather than an answer to the most important question: why does anything exist at all? On his journey home to his wife, the knight accumulates a raggle-taggle entourage of strolling players, whose good-natured innocence he seizes on as a hopeful sign of human decency. Elsewhere, it exists in short supply. A corpse-robber turns out to be a lapsed Christian zealot; the squire is revolted to recognise in him the same man whose firebrand oratory inspired them to join the Crusades in the first place. Block abandons his knightly crusade to find himself on a plague-ridden terrain, questioning God, competing with Death for his own mortality. In this most basic plot description, Bergman’s existential hero weighs every potential conflict from his physical environment to the philosophical significance.

Von Sydow portrays Block as a serious man, an idealist asking serious questions to try and make sense of the senselessness death. It is a burden he shoulders alone. Most other characters with speaking roles act as cynical and witty players, in a manner suited more to bouncing around in a screwball comedy than an existential gloomfest. In some ways, The Seventh Seal resembles a picaresque classic like The Canterbury Tales or Don Quixote, with its lecherous theater troupe director, its sensual picnic with a blacksmith’s wife and a song heavily reliant on braying like barnyard animals

Both the film’s ending and the nature of Block’s "significant act" suggest a curious affection on Bergman’s part toward his little holy family. One wonders if the filmmaker favored these characters because they were the lowest of the actors. As Bergman explicitly establishes in one of the film’s finest flashes of mordant humour: being an actor confers no special privileges in the end.