The Seventh Seal - Ingmar Bergman

Welcome to my blog

Welcome to my blog. It is not without reason that I have chosen this film as the first post ever, certain it will bring good vibrations our way.

In any case, what a better way to start, than with a master!

The Seventh Seal is Ingmar Bergman's 1956 gem of a feature. I don't think I am really suitable to give an impartial opinion on this movie, because I simply love it in an almost morbid way. Maybe because of its landscapes, barren and desolated; maybe because of its close-ups: paintings, section-views of a human's spirit; maybe because of the beauty, angelical, yet full of vitality and passion, of the female interpreters; maybe because of its hieratic stillness, alternated with the utmost dynamicity, the timeline blurring at the edges, both in the movie, and in real-time; maybe because of Antonius Block and his obsessive quest, exemplar of the struggle we face against fake spirituality, and his all-consuming receipt of the final strike of the scythe.



Block is a noble knight, returning to his native Sweden after ten years spent fighting in the Crusades, with his faithful squire, who shares the same whole-heartedness, only to find a country ravaged by the Black Death, and people trying what they can to save themselves from what they think is a divine curse. We come to identify with him, and we come to love the simple goodness of Jof (Joseph) and Mia (Mary), and their symbolic role in this allegoric tale, which grabs us by the throat from the start, with the scenes of desolation in a plague-ridden Sweden. The realism of the small countryside village where the story first develops is proof of Bergman's mastery with the alternation between wider frames and close-ups, between general and particular, between society and inner individual life, and their collision, a theme dear to the Swedish master, as we can see in later films, such as Persona.

But I'm digressing now. It's time for you to enjoy the show: whether it is for the first or the tenth time, I know you will...

The Seventh Seal - Ingmar Bergman

By: Antonius Block

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