A Film Canon

Like all ultra-canonical films, The Seventh Seal feels like a sustained aesthetic manifesto - a transformation of the language of cinema that has become so inescapable, invisible, and nuanced that its originality can occasionally seem crude or contrived in its primary incarnation. Drawing upon his theatrical heritage, Bergman proposes a return to the heightened imagism of Scandinavian silent cinema, with the critical difference that the camera's visionary potential is now entirely transferred to its objects. As a result, the technical experimentalism of Sjostrom, Blom and Dreyer is largely discarded, with Bergman tending towards simple compositions, a relatively stationary camera (or at least unadorned camera movement), and stark, black-and-white cinematography. Concomitantly, his set-pieces and tableaux accrue an extraordinary, hallucinatory intensity, that ultimately supervenes the excessively discursive dialogue (which nevertheless succeeds as an attempt to achieve a concrete, almost visible linguistic presence) and, placing the audience in a position of primal credulity and terror, is perhaps more dependent upon being viewed in a cinema than any other comparable film. From this perspective, the lusty, amoral, existential and, ultimately, anachronistic medievalism against which the various narrative strands take place - all centring on a returning crusader's (Max von Sydow) contemplation of Death (Bengt Ekerot) in the face of apocalyptic nihilism - feels like the mere prerequisite for this elevation of the visual over every other mode of discourse - or of discourse itself - while the specific power of cinema to achieve this is condensed into the hypothetical, preternatural 'action' that would redeem theatre, painting and other media from death, and the apocalyptic silence that prefigures it; or, rather, into cinema's provision of a deindividuated, omniscient, undead mask, with which to vicariously and tentatively adopt and embody the face on the brink of dissolution into its component parts.