Movies

Ingmar Bergman s The Seventh Seal is a film that explores the themes of transgression, abjection and the very faith of mortal men during dark times. Questions of faith among those who are meant to hold Christianity high, degraded conditions of despair, suicide, disease and the horrors of war are among a few of the examples of abjection and transgression which appear throughout the film.

In The Seventh Seal, the knight Antonius Block and his squire, Jons, return home to Sweden from ten years of horrible fighting in the crusades to find their country ravaged by plague. In the throes of a crisis of faith, Antonius encounters Death. Unprepared to die, Block challenges Death to game of chess in order to buy time to find answers about God and faith. In particular, he is concerned that his pursuit of a life of faith in God has caused him to abandon his wife in order to commit and to witness the horrors of the crusades only to return to a land infested by a horrifying disease.

Intellectually, the conflict of the film is set up when Antonius and Jons arrive at a church where an artist is painting the dance of death. Antonius seeks counsel of a priest in the confessional, stating,  My life has been a futile pursuit, a wandering, a great deal of talk without meaning.  He goes on to give away his strategy to defeat Death in their chess game, only to realize that there was no priest to take his confession. Rather, he finds not only that he has given his confession to Death, but that he has given away his strategy to his very opponent. Meanwhile, Jons converses with the painter while creating a painting of his own, a self-portrait. He presents it and says,  This is squire Jons-world. He grins at Death, mocks the Lord, laughs at himself and leers at the girls. His world is a Jons-world, believable only to himself, ridiculous to all including himself, meaningless to Heaven and of no interest to Hell.

Jons transgressive attitude toward faith and disregard for the taboo of rejecting faith at such a time appears to allow him freedom from the same duty that Block feels towards Christian faith as well as a sense of humor, albeit a dark one, about the horrors of the scenes through which they travel. On the other hand, Block states later, in a picnic with a group of actors whom they encounter, that he considers his faith a burden of unrequited devotion. This same scene is one of few if not the only scene in which he finds any respite from the horrors that surround him, his struggle with faith and battle with mortality. He says,  I ll carry this memory between my hands as if it were a bowl filled to the brim with fresh milk And it will be an adequate sign-it will be enough for me.

Following this scene, the knight and his company encounter a monk who has set a young girl to be burned at the stake as a witch. Though all are appalled at the scene, they see she is too close to death to be saved. Antonius asks her to summon the Devil so that he may ask him of God. In an ambiguous moment, she states that she has, but the Devil is invisible to Block.

A sub-plot involving Jons and the very priest, Raval, who sent the knight and his squire on the pious journey that led Block to abandon his wife and endure so many horrors, expands the breadth of issues at hand. Early in the film, Jons finds Raval raping and robbing a young girl. Jons is quick to threaten to wound him if they ever again meet as he rescues the girl from his grips. Jons goes on to make good on this promise when he finds him humiliating an actor who has joined their company. Later the group encounter him in a forest. At this point, Raval has been struck with the plague.  He stumbles upon Blocks, Jons and company and begs them for water. The very young woman whom Raval had raped leaps to his aid, however, Jons holds her back. He tells her, remorselessly, it s meaningless.

In the final scene, the group meets their end. Antonius pleads with God desperately for his mercy. Jons  girl has a much different reaction. She kneels before Death with a smile, saying,  it is finished.  So, throughout the film, the character of God is ever-present throughout the film, but only in the minds of the characters of the story. Ultimately, it is God s silence that speaks most throughout the journey. The reality of their lives exists, through good and through bad, through the corporeal reality they encounter, as well as the human thoughts and emotions they experience. Much of this reality is expressed through abject conditions of plague, despair and warfare. The lone moment of joy which offsets the overall atmosphere of the movie is not spiritual in a Christian sense, but a moment of Earthly pleasure.