The Seventh Seal

Ingmar Bergman’s critically acclaimed black-and-white medieval movie that reminds me more of a play.

Was browsing around the local library for the Dekalog to continue my episode-watching when I realised that the one and only copy was borrowed. I stumbled upon this and knowing my friend to have expressed her wish to watch it once, I peered with interest at the blurb and its first sentence about a knight, freshly returned from the crusades in the holy country for ten years, challenging Death to a game of chess to decide his impending fate, caught my eye.

I watched the film twice, the first time with the commentary on (this, after a previous bad encounter with Jean Cocteau’s Orphee, which I couldn’t understand unaided), and, not entirely getting the film, I watched it again unaided.

I’m come to think that the entire film revolves around the central theme of Death, which it is preoccupied with, and by implication, Life – the joys of being alive, the meaning of, and what can one know of the otherworld, if there is one (something that the knight’s squire, a cynic, refutes) beyond Death. And, it seems, inevitable in a Bergman film, the idea of religion.

Part of the reason why this film leaves a favourable impression on me, despite the rather stiff portrayal of characters and their movements, and the seemingly random scene-to-scene progression, is because of its medieval theme. I haven’t really seen a film that brings medieval times so much to life. The attire, which is strange enough to belong to that era, yet carries a rugged simplicity about it, fitting an era which had much less of the splendours of our current generation, the general simple make-up of the flimsy cart and the wagons, the modes of transport, the tavern with its straw laiden floor and the swine trodding them alongside the humans, the solemn yet messy procession of flagellants flogging themselves for God’s glory without pomp and ceremony – all these, probably a side-effect of a low-budget movie shot within 52 days in the summer, produced the ordinariness that lends the film an authenticity of portrayal of those times that I believe most other modern films cannot match up to.

Something of the medieval nature of the film is given by the ‘random’ scenes in the film – it just does not flow the way Hollywood movies and their equivalents do. How does a solemn round of chess with Death flow seamlessly into a lively tavern scene, or how does a scene of a medieval play synchronise with a (mock)bawdy scene of the seduction of an actor by a smith’s wife? To me this is reminiscent of a Shakespearean play – bare settings, stiff acting, scenes that are plainly separate and distinct, instead of melting into each other in a trend of continuity that seems to be all the rage these days. The beauty and essence of Bergman’s film is arguably in his Message, as evinced through the speech of the artistes, and the accompanying gestures and facial expressions. It has too much of a staged-up, dramatic, pregnant with meaning feel to be truely realistic. But then again, that wasn’t its aim.

Death is the central concern of the film, I see in the Knight a reflection of myself at my most doubtful moments regarding God’s existence. The Knight is tired of his life, which has been a meaningless search. What for? For definite knowledge of God’s existence, it seems. He does not want belief, he wants knowledge. He wants to know for sure that He exists, and not have Christ live painfully and in such a humiliating way, behind shrouds of doubt and speculation. He wants certainty, and it is in part for this knowledge that he desires a wager with Death, as the latter seeks him, in the form of a fateful game of chess in which Death would spare him if he wins, but claim him if he loses. I didn’t see it the first time round, but this is evident in the Confessions encounter he has with Death, and later, when, at the last chess encounter with Death, when the knight responds that Death will reveal his secrets when he comes to claim the knight and his friends the next time they meet. Unfortunately for the knight, Death replies candidly that he does not know anything, that he is ‘unknowing’. Belief (which seems impossible for the knight), or cynicism (of which his realistic Squire is the embodiment of), seems to be a necessary choice that the wavering knight has to make.

In a sense I am tempted to see the Knight as the representation, Everyman, in this allegory of every man’s universal wager with Death.

I cannot, however, figure out a couple of questions that remain lingering after I viewed the movie twice. Firstly, as the disbelieving son of a pastor/priest/church figure of a Father, Ingmar Bergman, I believe, associated more with the Squire than anyone else in the play, as Peter Cowie, the movie critic who gave the commentary, claims. If so, I cannot quite reconcile his ending with the consistent portrayal of the Squire’s ’superiority’ over the Knight in everyday matters – the Squire’s realism makes him the ’saviour’ of the mystic girl who would have been raped if not for his intervention, an aid to the smith and indirectly a help in the reconciliation of the smith and his wife, an equal ’saviour’ to the poor Joseph who was bullied at the inn, and Justice when he branded the seminarist. In stark contrast the Knight is the one whose idealism and subsequent pessimism tortures his inner soul, which had to be soothed and temporarily revived through Joseph and Mary’s hospitality over a bowl of wild strawberries and fresh milk. Why then, is the Squire also in the Dance of Death, when the more religious amongst them, his girl and the Knight’s wife, as it were, are not included? Why give the final triumph to religion?

And the weirdest part is that Joseph and Mary and little Michael, a parellel with the Holy Family, are the only persons in the fateful party who escaped from Death for the moment at the end of the story.

It is hard to reconcile this with the obvious portrayal of religious characters throughout the movie in a bad light. The seminarist resorts to stealing and attempted rape, the priest (I’m not sure if it is) at the head of the flogging procession stops to address the crowd in derogatory terms, insulting them and instilling fear if only for the purpose of turning them towards Christ and their salvation in this way. The priests are said to have been more approving of immolation for one’s sins than eternal suffering in hell. Death is twice disguised as religious personnel, once as the priest at Confession and another time as the monk who has broken the arms of the witch. Yet the pious are given such wonderful acclaim. Joseph and Mary and Michael are saved, the Squire’s girl tries to save the Seminarist when he is struck by the plague despite his earlier attempts to rape her, and she and the Knight’s wife are spared from the solemn Dance of Death. The only plausible way of reconciliation seems to be that Bergman, whilst distrustful of religion and its fanatic, oppressive leaders (not surprising, given his childhood), is nevertheless drawn by the good-naturedness of the pious, which I believe he credits to their simplicity rather than their piety.