O Sétimo Selo

I'll be honest with you: I have never really understood Ingmar Bergman, though with a few exceptions, and his critically acclaimed dramas usually simply bore me. The Seventh Seal is one of the few titles I come back to - perhaps because as an atheist, the spiritual aspect of the film passes me by, and unlike the interpreters of Bergman's work, I couldn't care less about the existential discussions of the 1950s conducted in the shadow of the Cold War and the threat of nuclear apocalypse. For me, the film remains a simple game about the fact that you can't outsmart death, or rather, that we all have to face it. Bergman had a lucky hand in choosing the actors, and perhaps even more than Max von Sydow in the main role, I find Gunnar Björnstrand's performance as the knight's squire, Jöns, likable. Perhaps the only thing I would criticize about the film is its overly stylized theatrical expression influenced by the fact that it was practically entirely created in the studio. Overall impression: 75%. (29/04/2020)

But He remains silent... The Seventh Seal is a film that will leave you with a lot of questions about the meaning of existence. You can ask yourself the same questions as the wandering crusader knight Antonius Block, but "I call out to Him in the darkness. But it’s as if no one was there". Don't expect anything more or less from it. However, it raises these questions in tremendously powerful scenes, so that even after multiple viewings, you will still be on the edge of your seat while watching Block's futile battle for life. A completely exceptional film that is rightly a classic and, together with Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, the best "question asking" work. (12/01/2007)

Where are you, my certainty in life? What do you look like when you speak to me? At the moment of death? At that moment, the absolute certainty that I will not tell anyone else about your appearance? Is it life itself for which we live and death that causes life to lack meaning? Should I not ask if I want to live? The Seventh Seal raises questions and is comprehensible enough that every thinking adult can understand it regardless of their religious faith or lack thereof. The characters, each of which embodying a particular philosophy of life, do not have a past on which the actors can base their performances. Each additional pieces of information supports or negates a certain idea, while the firmly fixed character traits do not change. The director, having gained mastery through life and its artistic equivalent (theatre), does not use the actors as mere index cards. He places great trust in them and whenever he has an opportunity to economise on a shot-answer by lingering on the actors’ faces, he takes advantage of it. Even a writer of Bergman’s literary talent has to sometimes concede that the you can’t express the most essential messages with words. 85% (06/09/2011)

A person protecting their life in a chess battle against Death, both players speaking to each other through the bars, intertwined with (dis)belief in God, variously depicted attempts to escape the ubiquitous weight of life, and various human weaknesses dominated by anger or desire. Ingrid Bergman's recreation of sad hope. (15/08/2005)

The Seventh Seal is on the one hand a dark film full of depression and death, while on the other it radiates hope, life and even humour at times. The Crusader's symbolic last stand with Death, or the final view of the horizon with the dead, make this Swedish classic something unforgettable. In short, it is not a supreme or perfect work, but as a pointer back to the past, to the time of the Crusaders, the burning of witches and Death appearing to the people, this film by Ingmar Bergman is an illustrative example of the issue of man's encounter with death. (05/03/2011)