The Seventh Seal (1957)
Directed by Ingmar Bergman, 1957.
Plot
A knight named Antonius Block returns from the Crusades to 14th-century Sweden and finds the country being eaten alive by the Black Death. On a gray beach at the opening, Death himself — black cloak, pale face, a face the entire second half of the 20th century would steal — comes to collect him. Block proposes a chess game: as long as the game continues, he lives.
What Block wants, more than survival, is to use the delay to find one piece of evidence that God exists. He travels through a country full of flagellants, witch burnings, and ruined churches, accompanied by his squire Jöns — an exhausted cynic who stopped asking the big questions long ago. They meet a family of traveling actors: Jof, Mia, and their baby, who turn out to be the one portion of creation that seems actually alive, actually in grace.
Block loses the chess game. But he manages to distract Death long enough for Jof, Mia, and the baby to escape. The film ends with a silhouetted Dance of Death on the horizon — a line of the dead being led across a hilltop by the reaper — as Jof watches from below.
What It’s About
The film is the founding text of what people started calling “existential cinema.” Block is the medieval version of a mid-century European asking: does God exist, and if not, how do I live the time I have left? He refuses easy answers. The flagellants’ hysteria disgusts him. The witch he meets, tied to a stake and about to be burned, insists the Devil is inside her eyes — and Block looks into them desperately hoping to see something, because even the Devil would be proof.
Bergman was the son of a Lutheran pastor and had a complicated lifelong fight with silence-of-God theology. The Seventh Seal is his first full working-out of that fight. The knight’s longing is treated as sincere, not foolish. But the film’s answer isn’t theology — it’s Mia handing Block a bowl of milk and fresh strawberries in a summer meadow. In the middle of plague and fear, one shared meal becomes the only evidence of grace he gets, and it’s enough. The moment is almost embarrassingly direct.
Formally, the film is austere — stark black-and-white, theatrical staging, dialogue that reads like Strindberg. But it moves quickly and has a surprising streak of humor (Jöns gets most of the good lines).
Connections
- Ingmar Bergman — his international breakthrough; the first film to make “Bergmanesque” a word
- Fyodor Dostoevsky — same theodicy register as The Brothers Karamazov; same fight with a silent God
- Jean-Paul Sartre — the knight’s anguish is Sartrean anguish in medieval costume
- Existentialism Is a Humanism — the film illustrates the problem Sartre’s lecture tries to solve
- Nausea — existence without guaranteed meaning, approached religiously rather than secularly
Lineage
Predecessors: Medieval danse macabre imagery; Strindberg’s dream plays; Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc; Dostoevsky.
Successors: Woody Allen’s Love and Death; Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (the Grim Reaper scene); Bill & Ted’s chess-with-Death; basically every piece of pop culture that has personified Death since 1957 is downstream of this film.