Christianity and faith The title refers to a passage about the end of the world from the
Book of Revelation, used both at the very start of the film, and again towards the end, beginning with the words "And when the Lamb had opened the
seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour" (
Revelation 8:1). Thus, in the confessional scene the knight states: "Is it so cruelly inconceivable to grasp God with the senses? Why should He hide himself in a mist of half-spoken promises and unseen miracles?...What is going to happen to those of us who want to believe but aren't able to?" Death, impersonating the confessional priest, refuses to reply. Similarly, later, as he eats the strawberries with the family of actors, Antonius Block states: "
Faith is a torment – did you know that? It is like loving someone who is out there in the darkness but never appears, no matter how loudly you call."
Melvyn Bragg notes that the concept of the "Silence of God" in the face of evil, or the pleas of believers or would-be-believers, may be influenced by the punishments of silence meted out by Bergman's father, a chaplain in the State
Lutheran Church. In Bergman's original radio play sometimes translated as
A Painting on Wood, the figure of Death in a
Dance of Death is represented not by an actor, but by
silence, "mere nothingness, mere absence...terrifying...the void." Some of the powerful influences on the film were
Picasso's picture of the two acrobats,
Carl Orff's
Carmina Burana,
Strindberg's dramas
Folkungasagan ("The Saga of the Folkung Kings") and
The Road to Damascus, the frescoes at Härkeberga church, and a painting by
Albertus Pictor in Täby church. Just prior to shooting, Bergman directed for radio the play
Everyman by
Hugo von Hofmannsthal. By this time he had also directed plays by
Shakespeare,
Strindberg,
Camus,
Chesterton,
Anouilh,
Tennessee Williams,
Pirandello,
Lehár,
Molière and
Ostrovsky. The actors
Bibi Andersson (with whom Bergman was in a relationship from 1955 to 1959) who played the juggler's wife Mia, and
Max von Sydow, whose role as the knight was the first of many star parts he would bring to Bergman's films and whose rugged Nordic dignity became a vital resource within Bergman's "troupe" of key actors, both made a strong impact on the mood and style of the film.
Death Bergman grew up in a home infused with an intense Christianity, his father being a charismatic
rector (this may have explained Bergman's adolescent infatuation with
Hitler, which later deeply tormented him). As a six-year-old child, Bergman used to help the gardener carry corpses from the Royal Hospital Sophiahemmet (where his father was chaplain) to the mortuary. When as a boy he saw the film
Black Beauty, the fire scene excited him so much he stayed in bed for three days with a temperature.
The Seventh Seal explores the knight's search for meaning and purpose in creating meaningful acts in his life before his death. Despite living a
Bohemian lifestyle in partial rebellion against his upbringing, Bergman often signed his scripts with the initials "S.D.G" (
Soli Deo Gloria) — "To God Alone the Glory" — just as
J. S. Bach did at the end of every musical composition.
Gerald Mast writes: "Like
the gravedigger in
Hamlet, the Squire [...] treats death as a bitter and hopeless joke. Since we all play chess with death, and since we all must suffer through that hopeless joke, the only question about the game is how long it will last and how well we will play it. To play it well, to live, is to love and not to hate the body and the mortal as the
Church urges in Bergman's metaphor."
Melvyn Bragg writes: "[I]t is constructed like an argument. It is a story told as a sermon might be delivered: an allegory...each scene is at once so simple and so charged and layered that it catches us again and again...Somehow all of Bergman's own past, that of his father, that of his reading and doing and seeing, that of his Swedish culture, of his political burning and religious melancholy, poured into a series of pictures which carry that swell of contributions and contradictions so effortlessly that you could tell the story to a child, publish it as a storybook of photographs and yet know that the deepest questions of religion and the most mysterious revelation of simply being alive are both addressed." The Jesuit publication
America identifies it as having begun "a series of seven films that explored the possibility of faith in a post-Holocaust, nuclear age". Likewise, film historians Thomas W. Bohn and Richard L. Stromgren identify this film as beginning "his cycle of films dealing with the conundrum of religious faith".
Portrait of the Middle Ages Medieval Sweden as portrayed in this movie includes creative anachronisms. The
flagellant movement was foreign to Sweden, and large-scale
witch persecutions only began in the 15th century. In addition, the main period of the
Crusades is well before this era; they took place in a more optimistic period. , fresco by
Albertus Pictor Similarly defending it as an allegory, Aleksander Kwiatkowski in the book
Swedish Film Classics, writes The international response to the film which among other awards won the jury's special prize at Cannes in 1957 reconfirmed the author's high rank and proved that
The Seventh Seal regardless of its degree of accuracy in reproducing medieval scenery may be considered as a universal, timeless allegory. Much of the film's imagery is derived from medieval art. For example, Bergman has stated that the image of a man playing chess with a skeletal Death was inspired by a medieval church painting from the 1480s in
Täby kyrka,
Täby, north of
Stockholm, painted by
Albertus Pictor. Generally speaking, historians
Johan Huizinga,
Friedrich Heer and
Barbara Tuchman have all argued that the
Late Middle Ages of the 14th century was a period of "doom and gloom" similar to what is reflected in this film, characterized by a feeling of pessimism, an increase in a penitential style of piety that was slightly masochistic, all aggravated by various disasters such as the Black Death, famine, the
Hundred Years' War between France and England, and the
Papal schism. This is sometimes called the
crisis of the Late Middle Ages, and Tuchman regards the 14th century as "
a distant mirror" of the 20th century in a way that echoes Bergman's sensibilities. ==Production==