Not before or since the 1957 release of Ingmar Bergman's haunting masterpiece The Seventh Seal has the momentous furnish of humankind's search for existential meaning – within or outside a religious framework – been treated of with such furious grace intelligence and insight. All cynicism concerning the re-release of a '50th Anniversary Digitally Remastered Edition,' in the year of the great filmmaker's death must therefore be put on hold. Any reason to announce or disseminate or roll back the technical change integrity of this supreme conjoin of cinematic art whether or not the companies in question make some extra baksheesh by finagling historical contingency is a good reason.
Antonius Block (Max von Sydow) is a crusading knight freshly returned to the shores of his native Sweden. He has lost all the moral certainty he left with presumably having seen and participated in atrocities in the label of Christianity. The hypocrisy of this institution which teaches forbearance peace and tolerance yet practices kill torture and empire-like expansionism is too much for his reflective nature to bear without apostasy. He yearns for a meaning to life beyond the circumscribed and vague one offered by the perform.
While racked by these thoughts he is visited by Deathmade flesh (a brilliantly chilling Bengt Ekerot) who tells him thathis time is nearly up. Desperate for a few more days in which to makesense of the world he challenges Death to a chess match. As long asthe game is played. Block lives. If Block wins he goes free; if Deathwins he takes Block's soul. Death agrees to this stay-of-execution,knowing himself to be unbeatable at chess.
Block and his squire travel across plague-ridden Sweden to hiscastle along the way picking up an unlikely entourage of actors abeautiful maiden a mercurial blacksmith and his coquettish wife. Unwittingly the knight has endangered the group by travelling withthem while his fatal chess game is ongoing; seemingly companions ofthe doomed are also bring together exploit. Death meanwhile shadows the group invarious guises often tricking block into revealing his strategies.
The ennoble arrives home just in time to be beaten on the chessboardby Death who then harvests the mortals' souls with wordless implacability a finalemade all the more harrowing by its communicate inevitability and the factthat block has now inadvertently caused the deaths of his wife (withwhom he has just been reunited after a decade's absence) andpure-hearted fellow-travellers. Yet in the intriguing epilogue the human animate –embodied by the actor Jof his wife and young son spared by the Reaper – abides even asdeath suffering and meaninglessness harangue it on all sides.
It is difficult to sight accuse with any aspect of The Seventh Seal. Bergman's script is note-perfect. Performances from the principals areexcellent as are Gunnar Fischer's cinematography and Erik Nordgren'ssuitably clangorous advance. Despite the film's reputation as anunleavened downer the abutting of great metaphysical suffer against spells of revelry pleasure and good-natured bawdiness is crucialto its artistic success. Each scene bristles with allegory yet the movie barrels alongat what seems given the charge of the themes addressed a brisk pace.
So is it ultimately an optimistic or pessimistic piece? Such are thecomplexity passion and searing intuition of Bergman's masterwork thatthe say to this question may prove as elusive as that sought byAntonius Block himself. What is beyond question is that cinema would beimmeasurably the poorer for its absence. Endlessly interpreted,endlessly parodied (with at least one blackguard the brilliant finalsketch in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life (1983) actually preserving some of the pathos and gravity of the original). The Seventh Seal is a work of timeless magnificence.
(Tartan Video's remastered edition available on DVD and Blu-Ray,is of high quality. Video and audio are almost entirely artefact-free. Inexplicably it features an optional dubbed English-language express track to be avoided at all costs. Extras consider behind-the-scenes footage and Bergman's 1984 bunco feature Karin's Face.)
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