As we have continued along this project, we’ve begun to notice that there aren’t any international films taking home the ‘Best Picture’ trophy. While we’re reviewing the main winners then, we’ve decided to recognise some of the most famous non-English speaking pieces every three weeks, starting with Ingmar Bergman’s renowned film The Seventh Seal.
Plot Intro
A knight (Max Von Sydow) returns from the Crusades to his home of Denmark, where the plague is killing people off left, right and centre. He meets Death (Bengt Ekorot), who wants to take the knight, but the knight convinces Death to have a Chess match. If the Knight wins, Death will leave him to live a longer life. With his demise delayed, the Knight sets off on a series of encounters to try and have a meaningful experience, because he’s found that his life has been empty (poor thing).
Doug says...
I hardly know how to review this film, having not really been able to make head or tail of it. But here goes…
It feels like a deliberately allegorical piece (similar to mother! last year) with overly floral language and Death hovering around and playing a deeply symbolic game of chess with The Knight. It’s also got huge set pieces - the moment when a whole parade of flagellants chorus in, whipping themselves, is tremendous.
But it’s not entirely clear to me, on a first watching, what the allegory actually is. Certainly something to do with death - that’s obvious. But as a piece, it feels like a nightmarish collection of scenes about mortality and plague, all artfully shot with Camera Angles and monochrome symbolism. I’m sure it has many layers of meaning, and a quick glance at the wikipedia page shows that it is very highly regarded and considered a masterpiece of cinema.
It’s just that none of these layers particularly presented themselves to me upon watching. I fully accept that these may be films where one has to go back and watch repeatedly to extract a proper understanding, but surely there has to be something keeping you engaged? As it was, I wasn’t bored but I was often confused.
Ultimately I don’t have much to say about it, because of the non-comprehension. But whereas with other films I found them dull and unimpressive, I can’t help but feel with this one that I was simply not getting it. It felt somehow important and influential, but I don’t think I’m of the right mindset to get it, or be prepared to dig into it further.
I was confused and felt like I wasn’t understanding it, but couldn’t shake the feeling that it was me not getting it, rather than the film not being excellent.
Highlight
I really did find the flagellant scene huge and impressively done. It was a shake-it-up moment for the slow moving and quiet pace of the rest of the film.
Lowlight
I didn’t really understand what was going on, and I do think some of the bits - including a woman who could ‘see the devil’ were just a bit too odd for me.
Mark
4/10
Paul says...
So, I woke up this morning, right, and I had a mild symbolic hangover, so I had a symbolic snooze. When I finally got up, I had such a depressing sense of nihilism that I made a symbolic cup of coffee and finished my most recent symbolic Netflix binge, and that made me feel a lot better. I also had a symbolic tidy up of the flat and ate two symbolic bagels as well, but then I worried that I had succumbed to the puppet strings of global materialism, so I flagellated myself profusely to achieve spiritual atonement.
This is basically a Day in the Life of Ingmar Bergman, an innovative and artistically-driven director who famously had bad experiences with heavily religious father figures whilst growing up. The Seventh Seal was his first international big hit, and sealed him (pun intended) as one of the most prolific movie directors in the world. It also threw Max Von Sydow into the public eye too.
The Seventh Seal gets a lot of mockery, and for good reason. Monty Python, French and Saunders and one of the Bill & Ted movies are among those who have exposed the film’s obscure and esoteric nature. The film is basically a series of vaguely-connected scenes which each dissect man’s preoccupation with death, as well as the way in which man uses their faith and an intangible God to cope with Death, and the true value of life in the knowledge that Death is inevitable. It’s not exactly Bridget Jones’ Diary, is it?
During the film, man faces Death mostly due to the onslaught of the Black Plague, which either kills off characters or drives other characters to murder their peers in the name of God or survival, such as a woman being executed for seeing Satan, or a cuckolded man trying to avenge himself on the man who stole his wife. The Knight watches all this with emotional detachment and sense of shame for his species, and is tired of slaughter and death, hence his obsession with finding meaning in a world that is decaying. Parallels can easily be made between the Crusades in this film and the Second World War in real life, with war-weary soldiers returning home searching for peace and unity. The Plague that ruins the Knight’s hopes of solace could be a recreation of further conflicts in the world in or before the late 1950s, or the wave of paranoia around Communism. But whatever political or social events Bergman was influenced by, I think he is basically saying that mankind constantly searches to peace, but also constantly hurts and destroys each other, using religion or faith as their excuse. Can the Knight find one example of true humanity amidst this torment? Will humanity prove itself to be worthy of life? Is Death not cold in that flowing black cape which I’m pretty sure can be found in the darkest recesses of Zara?
These are big and complex questions, and I can see why Film Studies students get so orgasmically excited about this film. Whilst the attempts at philosophising are interesting and perfect for an emotional discussion after several bottles of prosecco, the film is heavy going. If you try and understand it, your head hurts, and as Doug says, it probably needs several viewings to fully connect everything. There are several small scenes such as a church architect drawing a caricature of himself, some songs and play-within-play performances and a squirrel on a tree stump which I know from my experience as an English Literature student bear a huge amount of meaning and are probably mentioned in the myriad of essays written about the film. If you try to watch the film casually without getting involved in the Bigger Issues, you’ll see just a weird collection of scenes and indistinguishable Scandinavian peasant folk.
As much as I was interested in The Seventh Seal, films like this are not great entertainment (unless you wear all black and hate capitalism). It surpasses Shakespeare’s tragedies in the amount of philosophical layers it has, and indeed much of it felt Shakespearean with the morbid humour, asides, and flowery soliloquies. I think it would have been easier to read the script rather than see it performed. I think I’m going to have to watch The Golden Girls to fully recover from this thoughtful, nihilistic slump I have found myself in.
Highlight
The Dance of Death at the end is pretty haunting. You can find pictures of it - Bergman filmed it on the spur of the moment and made the actors improvise because he wanted to film it in front of a particular cloud formation that he saw. Artists, eh?
Lowlight
The attempts at humour are awkward and contrived. God knows whether we’re supposed to laugh. Or feel anything other than dread at the onward march of DEATH.
Mark
3/10
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