The Seventh Seal

In the midst of the apocalyptic vision vouchsafed the apostle John on the island of Patmos, there occurs a moment of strange quiet: "And when the Lamb had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour." It is an interval of cosmic suspense; the hymns of the heavenly hosts are stilled for the only time in all eternity and the seven angels receive from God the seven trumpets which they soon will sound to wake the dead and resume the symbol-choked tumult. The heavens seem empty, and the old earth trembles before its impending doom. It is during this interim, between life and death, that The Seventh Seal takes place.

Antonius Block, a disillusioned knight, returns from the Crusades with his cynical squire just as the bubonic plague is devastating Scandinavia. When Death suddenly appears to claim him, Block proposes they play a game of chess to decide the fate of his soul. He is thus able to forstall his doom, so that he and the squire can wander through the ravaged countryside and closer to home as the game progresses. Along the way they encounter Medieval life in all its variety--from a young girl destined for the stake for witchcraft, to a family of simple traveling actors, significantly named, Mary, Joseph, and their child, Michael (Hebrew for "like unto God"). They move among people who, except for the actors, are obsessed with the dread of death and try to escape their fears through cruelty, crime, self-torture, and superstition. The object of the knight's quest is to know--not just to hope or trust, but to know--whether there is "something beyond the darkness" before he dies.

Ingmar Bergman needs no praise for those Brattle patrons who saw his delightful Smiles of a Summer Night. And just as that earlier, lighter master work examined the forms and varieties of eros, so The Seventh Seal probes the modes and species of fides. Every form of Christian faith seems to be present here--what Kierkegaard prayed for and what made Nietzsche gnash his teeth. Gunner Bjorstrand as the jaded, worldly squire voices a despairing stoic atheism that sounds perhaps too contemporary for the middle of the fourteenth century. Nils Poppe as the peasant Jof, on the other hand, accepts his visions of the Virgin and Child with the same simplicity and sureness as he does the goodness of being alive: doubt could not arise in his mind with regard to either. It is between these two pure extremes that the knight, Max von Sydow, agonizes, the pain of his struggle exacerbated by the other forms in which faith presents itself: as terrified fanaticism in the monks and soldiers--in the flagellants, as a masochistic disease.

The main reason why not one should miss The Seventh Seal is that it is a masterfully constructed piece of cinematic art. The cast performs with high distinction; lighting, costumes, sets, and makeup evoke the late Middle Ages with the authenticity of a Durer woodcut; and the entry of the flagellants is surely one of the most appalling scenes ever filmed. But Bergman's Gothic allegory will also trouble audiences philosophically, for it retains its symbolic ambiguity to the end and will not permit a facile interpretation or glib dismissal of any sort. For the Eliot House Anglicans as for the Adams agnostics, then--as well as for all the peculiar intermediate species between--The Seventh Seal can serve as a needed tonic, by raising once again the religious question in all its jagged complexity; like Bergman's knight one finds it equally hard to believe and not to want to believe, as he sees the church's agents light the faggots round the stake, andthe smoke disappearing into the vacant intersteller spaces beyond.