When disillusioned Swedish knight Antonius Block returns home from the Crusades to find his country in the grips of the Black Death, he challenges Death to a chess match for his life. Tormented by the belief that God does not exist, Block sets off on a journey, meeting up with traveling players Jof and his wife, Mia, and becoming determined to evade Death long enough to commit one redemptive act while he still lives.
11 Dec The Seventh Seal (1957)
Folded Narrative Folding
Bergman is much loved because of his sheer passion, its intimate rawness and the ability to present it visually. He was able to sustain that uncomfortable ability for decades, but this film also has something else — unique in his work — a particularly complex narrative architecture.
Ordinary stories are just there, with no recognition of being told: but those are remarkably uninteresting. Nearly everything worth reading, hearing or seeing has some sort of the recognition of telling, often by putting the telling explicitly in the story as in ‘Hamlet.’ Sometimes it gets turned on its head when the telling element becomes the focus, as in’Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.’
But here that notion of one fold in space becomes seven. The story we see is: a game, a collection of visions, a mural, a book of the Bible, a performance by players, an obsessive religious ritual, and the movie itself (the seventh seal). Each encapsulates the other. We have seven characters that advocate or represent each of these, apart from the `crusade’ of real life.
This is so complex and so finely woven it changed the entire world. Everything that came after sees it as perhaps an unwelcome spectral visitor, perhaps a template (see ‘Ninth Gate’), perhaps as a stack of parts from which one borrows. But everyone sees it and is changed.
My favourite working filmmaker is Greenaway. He says of this, that when he saw it, he knew he had to be a filmmaker. I believe most of us who actually see this will be similarly changed.
Bergman was never able to weave as fine a narrative lace again.
Posted in 2002
Ted’s Evaluation — 4 of 3: Every cineliterate person should experience this.
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