First Thoughts (Sorta) on "The Seventh Seal"

As in 1988, I’m breaking the “First Thoughts” rules here, but with good reason. No, this was not the first time I’d seen The Seventh Seal. But I consider it part of a certain school of canon classics that you aren’t really, truly watching the first time, because the first time, you’re not engaging with the movie—you’re engaging with its mystique. The Seventh Seal features some of the most (incoming word I generally avoid) iconic imagery in all of cinema, and has itself become a kind of buzzword for inaccessible foreign cinema. So a first viewing can end up amounting to demystification, since Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 triumph is wildly accessible. It’s a black and white subtitled classic with fart jokes! And it clocks in at  96 minutes! What’s that, like, half as long as an MCU movie?

To be sure, it begins looking an awful lot like what you’ve heard it is. Bergman fills his frame with a forebodingly cloudy sky, and fills his soundtrack with doom-filled strings and choir, and then a Bible verse: “And when the Lamb had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven.” We meet our protagonist, the knight Antonius Block (Max von Sydow) on the beach (rocky terrain though it may be), praying, waves breaking around him. And then he sees the figure familiar to anyone who’s vaguely heard of The Seventh Seal (or the Bill & Ted movies): the scythe-carrying, white-faced, black-cloaked figure we all fear.