The Seventh Seal (1957)

Not rated, but there is some casual conversation about one of the protagonists threatening to rape one of the characters.  There's also a throughline about adultery.  A woman is also burned to death for being a heretic.  Nothing visual is really shown in any of these stories, but the stories are fundamentally about these immoral actions.  Still, not rated.

DIRECTOR: Ingmar Bergman

1957?  Really?  I thought that this was way earlier of a movie.  This is the first time that a date caught me offguard.  Sorry.  Let me start again.

I'm no good at interpreting Bergman films.  I'll admit it.  I crapped the bed when it came to breaking down Persona.  Some things are just too smart for me.  It doesn't mean that I shouldn't write about these things.  After all, if I only wrote about the easy ones out there, that wouldn't contribute anything to the discourse. If I screw up again, like I realistically will, I apologize. I like the challenge.  Just know that I'm in an overwhelming state of anxiety when I write these things.  

The Seventh Seal is the Bergman that most people know.  The stills from the movie alone make every cinematic montage talking about the major movements in cinema.  I bet my dad loved this movie.  I mean, I really like the movie.  I don't think I love the movie.  I'll explain that in a bit.  But I think that my dad was probably all over this movie.  He was way smarter than I'll ever be and I need to stop comparing myself to him.  But this is more of a commentary on taste and hobbies than it is about braininess or bad self-esteem on my part.  My dad was into this era of history.  He loved the Crusades and King Arthur and legends.  I bet he loved The Canterbury Tales.  He died before I even knew what The Canterbury Tales were.  Me?  I can't stand The Canterbury Tales.  It's not a flattering trait for an English teacher.  We're supposed to be obsessed with The Canterbury Tales.  But between having a rough professor in college who taught that to me and having class after class find the text too frustrating without enough payoff, I can safely say that I'm not a fan.

But what I like about The Seventh Seal is that it makes me almost love the idea of The Canterbury Tales because The Seventh Seal, from my limited perspective, pulls off what the original tales tried to.  It doesn't hurt that we're looking at similar motifs and images between both works either.  The Canterbury Tales has a framing narrative of a wager during a pilgrimage about who can tell the most fascinating story.  It's a pretty loose structure, allowing the author to tell a variety of stories commenting on the different social aspects of society. The Seventh Seal gives a more concrete framing story.  Antonius Block is playing a game of chess against Death to win his life back.  The game is slow and he meets a variety of people while Death chooses his next move.  During this time, Block vocalizes his own frustrations while other people's tales --both involving Block and not --color society at the time.  Honestly, The Seventh Seal feels like a spiritual and more successful sequel to The Canterbury Tales.  (That was a sentence that frustrated generations of scholars because I took two seminal works about fate and society and simplfied that arguement into "one's better".)

Like most of Bergman's works, all of which are challenging, The Seventh Seal isn't about one thing. Bergman's really good at making me trip over my words in an attempt to distill art into concepts that are ephemeral.  I can only talk about the things that either I grasped or spoke to me personally.  And, Geez Louise, does The Seventh Seal reflect so much of what I believe when it comes to matters of faith.  I love the fact that the entire movie balances itself on an irony that the protagonist just cannot see.  The opening of the movie is the establishment of the chess game.  Block is talking to the embodiment of Death.  Now, one could argue that the personification of Death is a metaphor and that Bergman is only using an actor to play Death to stress that lower-case death comes for us all and cannot be tricked.  But Bergman makes it very clear in this movie: Death is a creature that looks human.  Block is not the only one to see this specific manifestation of Death.  Death is also crafty and disguises himself as other people, interacting with Block and others throughout the movie.  Death is a character that is both literal and figurative in this movie.

Yet, Block's major frustration is not the attempt to save his own life.  Don't get me wrong.  He's literally doing that.  But he doesn't want to die because he loves life so much.  He does so because he questions his own faith in God.  Now, this is where I love the movie as a Catholic and as a lover of film.  The English teacher / film nerd in me adores the notion that someone who is talking with a supernatural manifestation of Death questions the unimaginable.  He begs God to give him a sign to turn an abstract faith into something tangible while he's talking with something abstract and impossible to imagine. Death, ironically, is the very sign that Block pleads for and he can't comprehend that.  Part of that comes from the notion of the era that the film is set in.  But the reality is that Block laments not having a greater concrete understanding of the notion of God.  The Catholic in me --a Catholic who is often incredibly frustrated with his faith --understands Block's frustration.  Block and I have the same issue:  we may not believe in God, but we need to believe in God.  

I almost want to let that sentence lie because I'm having breakthroughs right now.  I want to add something to it because I want to make my life not seem as bleak as Block's.  I want to live in a world where God exists, thus I will continue to believe in something that naturally seems to elude me.  Block and I have a similar skepticism.  Sin is an active choice to do something wrong, to turn away from God.  But belief, true and earnest belief, is almost like an emotion.  When I don't believe in the chupacabra, there is an element of choice in there.  I can choose to research the chupacabra and that very choice to research is part of my belief.  But if the data says "There is no chupacabra", from that moment, there isn't a choice.  So much about just existing in the world is a test in the existence of God.  For all of the majesty of nature and humanity, there are more grounded explanations that can derived from science.  (I'm also in the camp, thank goodness, that doesn't treat science and faith as mutually exclusive things).  Block, from his confession to Death, has a similar yearning.  He wants to believe in God, especially if he's in sight of his end.  Oddly, I stopped fearing death a while ago.  That has little to do with this, but it's where Block and I separate.  I've made peace with a potential eternal silence.

But the thing that gets me is that there is this recurring theme of Christians kind of being terrible people throughout.  It's a time of the Crusades.  Plague has ravaged the land.  Things are bleak.  But one of the incredibly visceral images that I retain from this movie is the burning of the heathen.  It's very Joan of Arc.  All of the stories, even though they have slightly different focuses, are about people touching on elements of faith and morality.  (Okay, the guy who sees visions is his own thing.) But there's this whole discussion of faith being run through a world where the actual behavior that Christ encouraged is ignored, despite the notion of the moral majoirty seems to be causing problems. Yeah, it's a story about frustrating faith.  That's why this movie hits with me.  

Yeah, I could go deeper.  But sometimes a movie just talks to the things that are on my mind.  It may frame a story differently than what was intended.  But I don't even care.  I like this movie for what I think it is about.