Day 41
Film 33
Directed by: Ingmar Bergman
Written by: Ingmar Bergman
Starring: Max von Sydow, Gunnar Bjornstrand, Nils Poppe, and Bengt Ekerot
The Seventh Seal is a movie that is lost in the art of itself. It is a strange feeling to come across a film like this because as an English major I cannot help but want to disect every scene to find out what Bergman was trying to say. As a lover of film I cannot help but be disapointed because it was a little disjointed, and a little dull (or dated) right up until the end.
I do not think Bergman made this film to be enjoyable, so we can write it off as a popcorn classic. This means we have no excuses to make to appease the drooling masses who will eat up something like Avatar or Transformers without questioning anything and weigh the film on a much harder scale, the 'is it art' scale.
I would say that The Seventh Seal is a piece of art, and a finely crafted one at that. Bergman uses a very basic story to try and describe death. This is no easy task and even though Bergman falls short on any philisophical level, he gets close enough to chill your heart. The movie seems like a thesis paper more than a film concerning that and every character and act seems to be a justification for Bergman's final message.
We are all dragged along by Death's hand, to try and run or fight it is meaningless. We are all just dancing along, and the only people who understand this are the artists.
Or something to that effect. It is hard to get the whole meaning from a single viewing.
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