Once upon a time, I was a wee young high school student. I was starting to realize that I loved film: foreign, action, comedy, indie, drama, mumblecore, grindhouse, western, war, period pieces, I was watching everything I could with the exception of Torture Porn (or as one of my favorite professors at Rutgers lovingly titled it, "Gorenography"). There was really only one film studies class offered at my school, so naturally I took it twice. It was my introduction to doing more than consuming a film. It was the first time I ever thought analytically about a film, ever tried to search the film for more than simply the text being offered. I still have several papers from that class.
It's been a while since I've posted because I've been struggling with a horrible lack of attention span and motivation but finding this old paper, one of my first efforts to push back at a film and see what would come of it, made me smile. So I decided to post the paper here, warts and all. There are a bunch of grammatical mistakes and in some cases what I now consider to be very simplistic reasoning but I'm still proud of the effort. There's also one moment where I employ a fairly puritanical ideology to keep the symbolic system I've created working (hint: it's when I start talking about monogamy) and I'm not entirely proud of that, but then again, I was only 17, and I was only just beginning to learn how to write about film. I'm by no means anywhere close to good at doing it these days, but I would like to think that my general pool of references is a bit deeper and understanding of morality a bit more complex. In any case, here it is. On January 17, 2006, I had some real deep thoughts on Ingmar Bergman's 1957 masterpiece (YEAH I SAID IT).
Again, I'm not fixing any of the mistakes and I'm some adding some pictures for flavor. Also, please keep in mind that Wikipedia and Google were not then what they are now. And also that I was a 17 year old Luddite who did not know how to use them that well to begin with.
On the surface, Ingrid Bergman’s film, The Seventh Seal, is one knight’s journey through pestilent Sweden during the Dark Ages. He is returning from the Crusades to his castle, when he meets Death. He forestalls his death by challenging him to a game of chess and then flees, searching for assurance of God’s existence so that he may accept his inevitable loss to Death with peace. Although ambiguous whether or not he finally finds God, he does pray to him before Death takes him and his party of friends, leading the viewer to believe he has found something. The title, The Seventh Seal, however, suggests that this pivots around on the bible’s prophesizing of the Apocalypse with seven signs. When taken this way, Antonius Block’s trek carries not only the personal significance of his search for answers, but of a symbolic display of the seals leading to the Armageddon.
The first seal, according to the Bible, is a warning from God to a prophet concerning false baptisms, messiahs, bibles, and Sabbath days in the form a white horse (Loughran). While in the Bible this probably pertains to the antichrist and other false prophets of the day, this dishonesty can be seen clearly in Raval, the seminarist, who sends both Sir Antonius Block and his squire, Jöns, to the Crusades. He sends them for idealogy and because he says they must humble themselves. Upon their return, however, Jöns finds Raval stealing from a man killed by the Black Plague and preparing to rape a young girl. Jöns is outraged by his lack of morality, considering what they have been through because he sent them to the Crusades. Raval is punished for his indiscretion when he dies horribly from the plague, probably transmitted through the bracelet he stole from the dead man. Furthermore, in the beginning of the movie Antonius washes his face in the ocean and prays, as if to wash away his sins (or baptize himself), but it is not a true baptism because the water is not blessed.
The second seal concerns the worldwide spread of bloodshed of war, and is symbolized by a red horse (Loghran). This is represented by Antonius’s return from the Crusades, of which of he and the squire both insinuate was a horrible and bloody war, and which history has proved to be true.
The third seal is a black horse, which represents starvation and famine (Loughran). While there is no direct reference to a famine in the movie, it is safe to presume that plague lowers the farming population along with the less rural inhabitants. Additionally, in many of the scenes involving food; such as the seduction scene between the smith’s wife, Lisa, and Jonas, the director of the actor’s troupe or the scene in which the central characters share milk and strawberries, the food is treated reverently. If there is not a famine, sustenance is at least not overabundant.
The fourth seal is also the final horse. It is a pale and sickly horse that represents raging plagues and pestilence. This is perhaps one of the most apparent seals in the movie, as the backdrop of all the events in Antonius’s journey is the Black Plague sweeping Sweden. When the knight and his squire first arrive at Elsinore, they go to ask a shepherd for directions to the inn, only to find he has been rotted away from the inn. In the following scenes there is discussion at an inn of the horrible omens and worst symptoms of the plague, there is the man killed by the plague from whom the priest steals, and the scene featuring the church and flagellants’ gloomy parade through the town center, in which some are carrying crosses and several are whipping themselves. The plague also drives the plot by keeping Mary and Joseph, the young performing couple, with Antonius and Jons, because when they tell the knight of their plans to go South they are informed the plague is worst that way and that they should follow him and his squire to his castle.
The prophet goes on to say that the fifth seal of the Apocalypse is God’s persecution of his people, of the innocents (Loughran). The young couple, Mary and Joseph, can be seen to represent this seal. One piece of evidence is their names, which are the same as the parents of Jesus Christ, along with the fact that they are a monogamous, generous, and decent young couple, whereas every other character in the film is hiding something or has an ulterior motive. This couple is persecuted in several ways. They are both actors, which is shown to be an unfulfilling life that Mary no longer wants for them, especially since she has a son. In the scene in the inn, where the smith accuses Jonas of seducing his wife and wants Joseph to pay for it, Joseph is punished by his friend’s indiscretion when they force him to dance like a bear to the brink of total exhaustion. This scene is especially interesting because while Joseph dances the wall behind him shows the dancing shadows of the fire, giving the scene a hell-like atmosphere; Hell generally being considered by the religious to be the deepest suffering a human is capable of. Furthermore, there is the flagellant’s march through the town, in which the townspeople are moved to kneel at their show of suffering, in hopes that the plague will leave. Finally, there is the young girl who is burned at the stake because the townspeople think that she had relations with the devil and started the plague. Although it is unclear whether she did or is simply insane, she clearly is suffering before and during her burning at the stake for something that she did not do.
The sixth seal of the Apocalypse is a procession of celestial signs, including an earthquake, a blackened sun, a blood-red moon, meteorites, the sky rolling back like a scrool, and general terror amongst the Earth’s populations (Loughran). Although these signs are not shown specifically in The Seventh Seal, there is a raging storm the night that Death visits Antonius for the final time. Mary and Joseph, after leaving the group, are terrified by the lightning and hide in the caravan, hoping to weather the storm. This storm can be seen as the sky being ravaged, which is what the sixth sign basically entails.
The seventh seal is somewhat more complicated than the first sixth. As Karin, Antonius’s wife, reads to the others, there is a half and hour of silence and then seven angels blow seven trumpets, and at each trumpet blast, something happens. The first four trumpet blasts ruin the earth, then the sea, the rivers, and then the sky. The last three are very specific and concern the actual Apocalypse (Loughran). The silence is alluded to many times in the movie. Joseph, after seeing the Virgin Mary and the baby Jesus, claims there to have been a great silence, and Jons at one point remarks, “I’m as silent as the grave.” While the silence before the storm is a recurring theme throughout the film, the seventh seal never actually occurs. This could be because it is to be assumed that it never happened, or because it happens next, after the film has finished. The explanation for this could also be that the final reckoning is not in fact a worldwide Apocalypse but is simply the demise of each individual man or woman. This is left open for interpretation.
While the allegorical unsealing of the Apocalypse was not necessarily meant to be part of the film, it can be if the audience wishes to read that into the heavy symbolism littered throughout. This movie is indeed a heavily religious film and by the end, it is up to the individual audience member to glean from it whatever depth of meaning they want.
Works Cited
Loughran, David B. Understand the Revelation. January 12, 2006. http://atschool.eduweb.co.uk/sbs777/prophecy/revbook/seals.html.
No comments:
Post a Comment