Aftertaste:
The 20 minutes theory:
There is a controversial theory that whether you’re attracted to the first 20 minutes of a movie or not defines your ability to fully dive in and enjoy the rest of the movie. If a movie fails to get you on hooked at the beginning, it is considered to be a bad movie. In The Seventh Seal, Antonius met death and played chess with him within the first five minutes of the movie. The scene is not only one of the most influential throughout the history of filmmaking, it was also placed in such early beginning of the film that it immediately gets you on hooked.
Barriers:
No matter if it’s the grids in between death(supposedly priest) and Antonius during the confession of his doubts in church, or wooden gate between the dying young witch and him when attempting to reach God through devil within her, there are always physical barriers whenever Antonius was one step away from the answer of his uncertainty. The blockage could metaphorize Antonius’s disbelief or the inconceivable nature of God, his prayer was never directly answered in his favour nonetheless.
Morality:
Raval’s death was one of the moral challenges Ingmar gave to the viewer. During the scene we see Raval attempting to approach the crew while screaming in pain, “Can you give me some water? I don’t want to die! Can’t you take pity of me? Can’t you even comfort me?”. There’s the girl who instantly picked up her water bottle and tried to help regardless of their previous conflict, without considering the consequences the act could bring to the whole crew. There’s also the pessimist Jöns who both physically and mentally held her back by saying “It doesn’t help, I know it doesn’t help at all. It’s completely meaningless, can’t you tell I’m comforting you?”, although we have no idea if he knows that water doesn't help. As a guy like Raval who has no redeeming qualities at all, would you still help him when he's suffering? Both of the possible answers are demonstrated equally and it's completely up to the audience's morality to decide which approach is more appropriate. I would've sided with Jöns simply because I can't bear the thought of bringing risks or contagion to people around me, even though I respect the girl's noble response.
Balance:
Although the movie is only 1 hour and 36 minutes long, it could be hard to watch dealing with many serious topics like morality, religion and death. However, this film is very well balanced between the ghastliness and wholesomeness or humour. There are humorous bits like the love triangle between blacksmith Plog, Skat and Lisa, also death physically murdering Skat, which lightened up the atmosphere once in a while.
Besides the chess game at the beginning, one of the most influential scenes in the movie history was the Death’s dance at the end of the movie, which was a vision of Jof when the family successfully escaped death. Jof verbally described his poetic vision while the camera cut back and forth from medium close-ups of his face to long shots of silhouettes of everyone holding hands and eerily dancing in a line on the hill contrasting the rainy sky. Everyone is dancing in such Strange way as if they’re unwillingly being dragged, which made sense since they’re being dragged by death. It is really interesting how Antonius’s wife and Jöns’s girl aren't part of the dance since they're seemingly more accepting of death's arrival. At the end of the movie. The camera cut back to Mia joyfully in disproval of Jof’s vision while holding Mikael, “You and your dreams and visions…(smiles)", as the birds were chirping on the bright sunny day, the family slowly walked away from the camera towards the ocean. As mentioned in the Cinematography section, this family scene is also extremely bright compared to the ill-lit death's dance and other scenes of the movie.
Moments like these are the sips of lemonade in the world of The Seventh Seal, which is full of bitter lemons. No matter how dreadful the whole movie felt, Bergman still granted you bits of hope in the world of despairs by ending the movie with the acrobat family successfully escaping death and live happily ever after, which made the film less laden and more tolerable.
Faith:
“Faith is like loving someone in the dark who never comes, no matter how you call.”
The church confession scene is one of my favourites of all time. The cinematography is magnificent as mentioned in the section above, the struggle Antonius faced is also extremely relatable to me as a church raised Christian, who only recently started to evaluate my faith. “Is it so terribly inconceivable to comprehend God with one’s sense? Why does he hide in a cloud of half-promises and unseen miracles? How can we believe in the faithful, when we lack faith? What will happen to us who want to believe, but cannot? What about those who neither want to nor can believe? I want God to stretch out his hand, uncover His face and speak to me.”, also the fear of emptiness after death, "If God isn't real then life is a preposterous horror. No man can live faced with Death knowing everything's nothingness.” In a way, I could understand Antonius's denial of disbelief imagining the existential crisis it could bring when someone decided their entire perception of the world is fake. What is real then? Who has the right to prove God isn't real? When cultures of almost all western countries are built on Catholic or Christianity due to colonization by Britain, for example, Christmas or homophobia, how is the world going to change when we try to completely erase the religious part in us?
Precise poetry:
This is a precisely poetic movie. For instance, Jof explaining the Death dance during the scene, “I can see them over there under the storm-laden skies. They’re all there, Blacksmith and Lisa, the knight and Raval, Jöns and Skat…and the grim master, Death, invites them to dance. He wants them to hold hands and dance in a long line. And the grim master leads with scythe and hourglass. Skat brings up the rear with his lyre. They move away, away from the dawn, in a solemn dance, away to the dark country. Whilst the rain washes over their faces, cleans their cheeks of tears of salt.”, or Antonius’s description of his fear during confession, “I want to confess as honestly as I can, but my heart is empty. And emptiness is a mirror turned into my own face. I see myself and am seized by disgust and fear. Through my indifference for people, I’ve been placed outside of their society. Now I live in a ghost world, enclosed in my dreams and imaginings.”, all lines are powerful and straight-forward. From Antonius describing his doubts to death, to Jöns aggressively questioning Antonius’s faith, this movie contains lots of personal and emotional audible poetry. Its simplicity leaves a lot of blanks space for the audience to further reflect, therefore gives an extremely strong aftertaste as a short movie.
Covid-19 vs the Black Death:
Living through an actual pandemic in 2020 also made the movie extremely relatable even though it was made 70 years ago about the 1300s. For instance, monks disgustingly insulting cursing death on random citizens his preach and ridiculous ritual that scares people away from religion is the equivalent to the millionaire preacher Kenneth Copeland in the USA nowadays blowing the coronavirus away or people burning down 5G service towers because apparently, they caused the COVID-19. Stupidity in humanity remains after 700+ years, and as a Christian it makes me sad how most of these people just so happened to be religious. Please check out the videos below if you’d like a laugh.
Kenneth Copeland Blows "Wind of God" on COVID-19: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi_qX50zv7k
Billionaire Preacher Saves Us All, Charles Cornell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue6qVIbtzsg
Final thoughts:
Overall, The Seventh Seal is painfully realistic and philosophically stimulating, which left me in deep thoughts for weeks after the first watch. Although I had to rely on subtitles since it’s a Swedish film, I enjoyed the process of re-watching it for the analysis since more interesting details surface the more I watch, for example, Jöns seems way more compassionate on second/third watches when my first impression of him was just a controversial, grumpy, aggressive and pessimistic atheist. The score was fantastic since it’s able to build the tension without being too distracting, just small pitch differences in a simple choir can turn the scene from wholesomeness to straight horror, which I think is very admirable.
The acting of all characters is marvellous, especially Antonius played by Max von Sydow when he was only 27 years old, the maturity and calmness in a struggling knight he was able to capture is gorgeous. Also, the girl played by Gunnel Lindblom which were only physical performances with one line at the end of the movie. I love that traits or morality of all characters live in grey areas instead of sharp black and white, while all being understandable and empathizable even if you don’t agree with their perspective. it’s like this film is cutely telling the audience: it’s okay being religious or not, we’re all going to die.