Home / Films / The Seventh Seal

Directors / Bergman

(04/08/2007)

I've seen The Seventh Seal three times now I think. The last time was this week in the Phoenix cinema in Oxford. I went with some friends, including a self confessed 35 year old Bergman virgin - who loved it.

I was slightly surprised to find that I loved it too this time. It hasn't been my favourite Bergman film, though it is the classic and seminal Bergman gloom-pic. I had found it laboured and over-allegorical on previous viewings, but although I couldn't help laughing out loud at some of the scenes that have been parodied by other directors over the years, I was nevertheless very much engaged throughout.

The one moment that sticks in my memory and keeps replaying in my head is when Antonious Blok the knight is sitting with the couple and their baby son, eating strawberries and drinking fresh milk in the evening sunshine, talking with the woman while her husband is playing the lute. He picks up the brim-full bowl of milk and says, "I will carry this moment with me, holding it carefully, like this bowl of milk." Then, as he sits down to continue his chess game with Death, he is smiling and unafraid, though he knows he is going to die. Death asks him why he is smiling, but the knight doesn't tell. For a moment, Death is unsettled, but then hints that the couple and their son may also be on his list. At this, the knight's face drops and his brief interlude of fearlessness is over.

This film doesn't have easy answers; it doesn't have answers at all, just questions, doubts, fears...

For myself, death doesn't hold the same horror, or fascination, as it seems to have held for Bergman. I'm curious to find out what it's like to die, but I'm not ready to go yet. Death says to the knight, when he protests that he's not yet ready to die, "You all say that," but is that true? When you're old and tired, or have been ill for a while, then perhaps there comes a point when you are ready to go. A natural death in old age is no tragedy, though to bury one's child is more difficult. Bergman, as it happens, lived to the age of 89.

When I was about 13, I realised that I could never experience ceasing to be, since there would be no 'me' there to experience it, so from the perspective of my own life as directly experienced, I can never die. I can imagine my own death by first imagining a world 'as it is', and then imagining it without me in it, ...and when I imagine that, I have a feeling of loss, but it's all in my imagination: I can never experience any of that.

In fact, when I die, it won't be 'me' that disappears, it will be everything else that disappears. As long as I hold on to the direct experience of being alive, I can never die. Right up to the very last moment, my experience can only be of being alive. Oh, and the 'very last moment' is the very same moment I was born in, because since the world began, there has only ever been one moment, and we're still in it. The days, weeks and years exist within this moment, not the other way around.

Good film. Really good film. Thought-provoking, ...and as beautifully crafted as a mediaeval tapestry.