Sweden, mid-fourteenth century. The knight Antonius Block (Max von Sydow) and his squire Jöns (Gunnar Björnstrand), returning to his homeland, ravaged by the plague, after ten years in the Crusades. Block will find the figure of death, which challenges a chess game where you play your own life.
Admirable existentialist allegory which is one of the key titles of European cinema of all time. Its striking iconography has become one of the most recognizable pictures of world cinema.
The filmmaker moves to the big screen their own spiritual concerns through two characters whose disparate ideological positions against the ideas of God and death, make up the whole turbulent and contradictory that accompanied the Swedish author during much of their lifes. And is that both the gentleman as his servant, we can recognize some of the traits that characterized the conception that there was an extraordinary maker: Antonius Block is a Kierkegaardian spirit in the sense that they live in a constant state of anxiety and uncertainty. Want to know if God exists and if there is life beyond death. Not support the idea that the reality may turn to absolute nothingness. For him, God is a necessity and it is this need that practically forces you to believe. This attitude allows relatives of theories of religion of the German philosopher Feuerbach, who believes that God is a human product of their aspirations. Jöns, meanwhile, has a pragmatic character who sticks to the dictates of reason. Counterpoint is realistic and tormented land of his lord. His atheism is clear and acidity exudes humor and irony. His remarkable eloquence contrasted with the character much more content than that to it serves. Both are people disappointed, especially when compared with the vitality that radiates the marriage of jugglers and their young son, individuals in a charming simplicity, whose purity away from any kind of darkness, will end up saving the embrace of the reaper.
Bergman places his story in a context of darkness, superstition and religious fanaticism. To do this it uses an expressionist staging that brings us back to medieval Romanesque, giving us enormous power of visual images and demonstrating to perfection the fear and anxiety that defined a very specific stage of European history.
Despite the comments, not everything is serious and solemn in the film, since it also found the passages of comic and picaresque tone common in the pre- As Bergman in a mirror (i såsom Spegel , 1961). In fact, do not fall into the mistake of interpreting The Seventh Seal as a bleak and pessimistic work in its entirety. As the director strives to emphasize its most vital and light, as if they do this of us understand that it is in those great little moments of everyday life, where the only truth that gives meaning to our existence.
Rating: masterpiece.
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