“ Oh, Jeanne, to reach you at last, what a path I had to take“ Bergman and Bresson share many things: they are both believers and revolutionary filmmakers, the first true modernists in movie’s history. It could be interesting comparing The Seventh Seal with Pickpocket (1959), by Robert Bresson.
#Black death 2010 movie analysis free#
Antonius Block imprisoned in life.Īt the profilm level, the most interesting detail from the staging is surely the confessional’s grid that divides the protagonist from the Death: it becomes a metaphor of life as a prison of a spirit that tries to free itself towards the absolute. Modern man is grippeded by the consciousness of his own impossibility in knowing: he seeks in vain for an answer to the absolute doubt, which unfortunately is impossible to find, and it’s thanks to this doubt that he carries on his own infinite and conflicting knowledge’s process. Do you hear me?”Īntonius Block is the figure of the modern believing man, who, unlike the medieval man, no longer blindly believes in a logical system that explains the creation and the functioning of the world, but he’s doubtful about the real existence of something after death. “s it so hard to conceive God with one’s senses? Why must He hide in a midst of vague promises and invisible miracles? How are we to believe the believers when we don’t believe ourselves? What will become of us who want to believe but cannot? And what of those who neither will nor can believe? Why can I not kill God within me? Why does He go on living in a painful, humiliating way? I want to tear Him out of my heart, but He remains a mocking reality which I cannot get rid of. The confession, however, assumes different traits from the ordinary: in fact it’s not the friar to ask the confessed, but it is the same confessed to ask questions, through the confessor, to something immanent: Remaining within the relationship between death and the protagonist, we move on to the most important scene of the film, the one where Antonius Block confesses to a friar, not knowing that the confessor is the death itself. So let’s start analyzing the most significant scenes of the work.
The journey is the one towards home, after the Crusades, and the protagonist is Antonius Block, accompanied by his loyal squire Jöns. And the seven angels which had the seven trumpets prepared themselves to sound.”īergman uses the journey’s theme to conduct his analysis of the most important issue of humanity. And the angel took the censer, and filled it with fire of the altar, and cast into the earth: and there were voices, and thunderings, and lightnings, and an earthquake. And the smoke of the incense, with the prayers of the saints, ascended up before God out of the angel’s hand. And another angel came and stood at the altar, having a golden censer and there was given unto him much incense, that he should offer with the prayers of all saints upon the golden altar which was before the throne. And I saw the seven angels which stood before God and to them were given seven trumpets. “And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour.
The medieval context then becomes fundamental for the presence of the plague that gives the world an apocalyptic scenario, in which people becomes figures of the different ways that the human being has to relate to pestilence, and therefore to death. In fact the story proceeds from painting to painting: using The Middle Ages as context, the filmmaker chooses a medieval means of expression, that is the allegory. We assume that the movie comes from a Bergman’s theatrical pièces of the same Bergman: Wood Painting (to deepen the complex relationship of the filmmaker with the theatre, we recommend our article on Persona). The opera needs an analysis that starts from his more explicative sequences before we lead it, however, we throw an initial look at it. Already taking only into consideration the magnitude of the question posed, we define the absolute masterpiece of Ingmar Bergman, the best Swedish director of history: The Seventh Seal (1957). There is no life without death, everything starts from it: all the philosophies, all the sciences, everything starts from the comparison with the end of our existence. “What is there after death?”: all the questions that the man has posed throughout his life can all be enclosed in this one question. We recommend to read only after watching the movie, not before, in order to not lose the joy of the first vision. This article reveals the plot and the explanation of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, focusing on the meanings and the events described.