review

A medieval knight (Max von Sydow) returning to Sweden from the Crusades finds a land ravaged by the Black Death and hysteria. A demented monk has inspired a cult for self-flagellation; witches, blamed for the plague, are tortured and burnt. As he progresses through this horrifying, devastated country the knight treats each encounter as another step on his path towards knowledge of God and His relationship with man.

The classic centrepiece of the film (which takes its title from the Book of Revelations) is the game of chess which von Sydow plays with Death and which he uses to win himself a reprieve, to gain time wherein to come to terms with God and the remnants of his own faith.

Over the whole of this sombre, brooding film there seems to hang the threat of an even greater disaster waiting to happen, the dreadful Day of Judgement itself.

Clearly influenced by early religious paintings and filling the screen with astounding images of lust, beauty and cruelty, Bergman evoked a marvellous sense of period, of the hardship and squalor of medieval life. Yet there is an allegorical side to the story, too. The plague, the awful possibility of something worse, spoke clearly to a modern generation living in fear of the nuclear bomb. Despite the denouement, in which the knight tricks Death by sacrificing himself to save the two believers, the travelling player and his wife who are perhaps the only hopeful characters in the film, The Seventh Seal is a bleak vision of man's destiny, but so superbly and grippingly made that it instantly established its director's reputation as one of the most significant figures in world cinema.

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the seventh seal
ingmar bergman | ingrid bergman
greta garbo | jean cocteau | fritz lang
aki kaurismaki | erich von stroheim | wim wenders