Classic Cinema: The Seventh Seal by Ingmar Bergman (1957)

I must like this film.  I've seen it about six times in my life.  The first time was at an old art house cinema in Portland, Oregon back in the 1980s.   It had to be seen on one of two nights as part of a double feature and you had to sit there in the cinema and be there when the projectionist and the machine were ready to show it (How things have changed).  They were having an Ingmar Bergman festival that week.  An absolutely stunning film, beautifully photographed in black and white and absolutely worth a repeat viewing. 

The film opens on a beach somewhere in Sweden, a knight, Antonius Block (Max von Sydow) and his squire (Gunnar Bjornstrand) are returning after an absence of ten years on one of the crusades to the holy land.  It is also the middle of the 14th century when the plague is in the process of decimating approximately 1/3 to 1/2 the population of Europe.    Death is not taking a holiday but is indeed hard at work, where he is personified by a man dressed all in black with a white skull-like face (Bengt Ekerot) who introduces himself to Antonius and suddenly the sound of the surf stops.  Death gravely tells him that his time has come, but  Antonius talks him into a game of chess in return for letting him off the hook.  A chess board happens to be conveniently close by on the beach.  It is a leisurely game and in the mean time he makes his visit to his homeland, ravaged by the plague.  

He rides along and the knight asks his squire to inquire of the monk over there for directions to the village.  The squire goes over and notices that the man is a corpse.  When he returns to his mount Antonius asks him what he said and the squire says "He was a man of few words, but most eloquent".  

The stop at an apparently abandoned village and the squire catches a "seminarian", a thoroughly despicable person, stealing jewelry from the dead and attempting rape of a young survivor in the village.  He is denounced by the squire as a scoundrel whom if he meets again in the midst of such dishonorable acts he will brand him for a thief.  

The knight and squire proceed to a church.  The Squire has a cynical conversation with the church painter who is creating in a side chapel a tapestry portraying death, the plague, and Jesus suffering on the cross.  Meanwhile the more devout Antonius is in the sanctuary praying.  and when he notices what he thinks is a priest behind the grating, he takes confession.  In the midst of this he says that he is playing a chess game with Death and that he hopes to win through a clever set of moves which he describes.  Only then does he belatedly realize that this was no priest at all but Death.  

And so it goes.  You know that he will lose his chess game with death. We all will.    In the midst of all this gloom and doom, life goes on.  The scene shifts to a group of traveling performers. It is Jof and Mia (Joseph and Mary) and one of their fellow actors, Jonas.  Just as in a Shakespearean tragedy, the darkness has to be relieved from time to time with comedy.  Jof wakes up and greets the morning, talks to his horse, and then sees a vision, the virgin Mary teaching the Christ child to walk.  When he hurries back to the wagon and wakes up his wife and another actor, they complain bitterly, one about not getting his sleep and his wife who scoffs at the way he is always "seeing things".  

Later as they are performing before an only half interested crowd in the village, they are interrupted by a procession of flagellants, who whip themselves till they are bleeding and carry a cross with the effigy of Christ dying upon it.   Jonas goes off in the bushes with the blacksmith's wife and she takes up with him for a while. Meanwhile the blacksmith (Plog) drowns his sorrows in the local tavern.  The squire tries to humor him with cynical remarks about the transience and fickleness of love and women, but Plog is having none of it.  

There are some fine comic scenes in what is otherwise a very dark theme.  Plog finally confronts Jonas and his wife and gradually his wife switches sides.  Plog wants to do him in with his trusty sledge hammer but is dissuaded by his wife who now promising him food and denouncing Jonas too.    Jonas for his part apologises to Plog and asks him to please kill him.  When he refuses he goes off and fakes his own death with a trick knife.    A short while later he decides to climb a tree, and in a tragi-comic episode Death comes by and starts to fell the tree with a saw.  The man pleads with him, I can't die, what about my play?"  Death: " Cancelled due to death", 

There is, in the end no bacteriology and very little pathology in this film.  It is an eloquent essay on perhaps the largest issues of life and death, God and nothingness and the helplessness and uselessness of trying to find meaning in what happens, ultimately.   One of the characters asks Death "What are your secrets?" and Death replies "I have no secrets."