THE SEVENTH SEAL

THE SEVENTH SEAL: When a film becomes as iconic as The Seventh Seal it runs the risk of becoming an unwatchable antique. Like a piece of fine china kept behind protective glass, audience’s tend to admire it by reputation rather than dusting it off and appreciating the actual craftsmanship that went into its creation. Certainly, Ingmar Bergman’s film has much more to offer than its oft-repeated image of Death as a pale, moon-faced chess player. In fact, much of The Seventh Seal carries over the blissful joie d’ vive of the director’s previous film, Smiles of a Summer Night, only balanced with the thematic weight of religious meditation and questioning of faith that would mark his later work. But there I go again, making the film seem like an unwieldy, unwatchable chapter of cinematic history rather than a living, breathing entity unto itself. Frequent Bergman collaborator Max Von Sydow is charged carrying the weight of the director’s loftier ideas in the form of Antonius Block, a knight freshly returned from the Crusades to find his homeland besieged by plague...and his own mind fraught with religious doubt. When faced with the aforementioned vision of Death, he challenges the chilling figure to a game of chess, forestalling his designated departure until he can complete one final task. Here is the soul of The Seventh Seal, but its heart lies in Bergman’s traveling troupe of actors, including Gunnar Bjornstrand as Block’s cynical squire, Jons, whose hides his own faithlessness under a mask of sarcasm. It with this character that Bergman communicates most clearly his own ideology, that perhaps Man is forced to invent and enforce his own moral code...rather than relying on an imaginary or, worse yet, disinterested higher power. Criterion’s Blu-ray treatment is reverently impressive, with a beautiful transfer (grain structure intact) and several special edition features, including commentary from Bergman expert Peter Cowie, the feature-length documentary Bergman Island and a great overview of the director’s career, Bergman 101 among others.