Title: The Seventh Seal
Director: Ingmar Bergman
Years
1956 Genre: Drama
Knight Antonius Block, returning from the crusades in the company of his faithful squire Jons, comes across on their journey in death, which came to take his soul to gain time , Block challenges Death to a chess game, putting at stake his own life. Meanwhile, during the drive home the knight encounters a humble family of acrobats and decides to escort them to his castle.
Presented at the Cannes Film Festival in 1957, The Seventh Seal was the first great international success of the legendary Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, the work that has consecrated with the critics and audiences as one of the greatest filmmakers of our time . Based on a one-act play written by Bergman, Painting on wood, and shot low cost in just one month, the film (whose title is taken from a verse of the Apocalypse, told the opening of seven seals in Day of Judgement) entered in the imagination collective especially for the famous chess game between the protagonist and Death, represented as a sinister hooded figure and wrapped in a long black coat, according to the traditional medieval iconography, a scene that soon became a cult object of quotations and parodies, including one built by Woody Allen in his Love and War . Sweden
Set in the thirteenth century, the film is told through the perspective of the knight Antonius Block, played by Max von Sydow (born Carl Adolf von Sydow), accompanied by her skeptical and agnostic squire Jöns ( Gunnar Björnstrand). Block is a noble and valiant warrior returned to his homeland after fought in the Crusades, whose mind is however troubled by existential anxieties and questions which can not be answered. The central theme of the film is precisely the search for God, an invisible God who seems indifferent to the pleas of his children. Ingmar Bergman paints a dark and violent Middle Ages, with a country ravaged by plague and chaos in which rampant terror and religious fanaticism, as shown explicitly in the sequences of the procession of flagellates and the girl burned at the stake on charges of witchcraft. The narrative alternates expertly records of the tragic and the comic, thanks to the presence of some characters burloneschi and interludes of comedy, to even touch the limit of grotesque. There are also many symbols and references to pictorial art Scandinavia.
As in many other works, here Bergman questions about the complex issues of faith and the relationship between God and man, and our natural fear of the unknown and the end, here are a suggestive allegorical personification of the Death (Bengt Ekerot). Yet The Seventh Seal is not just a film about death, but first of all is a deep reflection on life and its meaning. And Antonius Block, unable to resolve their doubts about God and the soul, suddenly receive the response that awaited encounter with a common family of acrobats, that in their simplicity and their spirit of fellowship will be able to make sense of the course of his human and spiritual to the point that, in conclusion, Block chooses to sacrifice himself to allow his friends to survive. Unforgettable is the final film, with death leading the procession of the dead along the side of a
Sreaming
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