The Seventh Seal

The Seventh Seal is an interesting film for many reasons, not the least of which because it is completely insane. Those who know anything about the film know one thing, that a knight, returning from the crusades, plays chess with Death. And maybe that is all we need to know.

A central theme throughout the film is the issue of the end of the world. Doomsday and the book of the Revelation of St. John the Divine keep cropping up, providing a constant reference to the end. The title itself comes out of the first verse of the eighth chapter of the book of Revelation, "And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour."

It is interesting to note that this film is largely beyond man's ability to discuss. When people speak of it today, they generally talk more about Ingmar Bergman than about this film which made him famous.

This seems really to be the only good way to talk about the film and still retain any amount of peace, for the movie is almost purely a story of despair and emptiness. God is dead, and death is all there is.

This leads me to one last issue (though I shall return to this film in later posts). It seems that at any point when someone wishes to argue against the supernatural (usually God) the only way they are able to do it effectively, within fiction, is through the supernatural. Bergman attempts to say all things are empty after death, but to do so he uses a personified Death. If Death is a person, he must have come from somewhere.