A Filmmaker's Review: "The Seventh Seal" (1957)

“The Seventh Seal” (1957) is a film I have watched a number of times over the years. I have also seen it imitated in other films like “Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey”. But, there is nothing like the dialogue of the original. It is dramatic, it is exaggerated to a great degree and it knows where it stands. One of the great things about this film that I have always loved over the times I have watched it is the characterisation of Death. Death has always been an interesting character to me in many forms. I grew up reading the Discworld Series by Terry Pratchett, to the point that when he died I was at work and had a bit of a breakdown in the staff room. I also loved “The Seventh Seal” because it was always what I thought of death, not in appearance but instead in action and speech. There was not something dark, but something almost inviting about him. Something where he is trying to make you comfortable with being taken away with him and Block just doesn’t accept that.

Block is a character who is incredibly paranoid and really, it is amazing as a progression of cinema to see a character so three-dimensional and the things he says about death are eye-opening for me because it was never how I felt. I always felt that death was the inevitable, that there is really no point fighting it because it’ll happen regardless of what I think. Block wants to fight it because he feels like he isn’t finished yet and this is what I’ve seen in the reality of many people who have died young. There was, a few months ago, a woman on TV who had her cancer treatment stopped by her doctors who went on to treat COVID patients and she said ‘I feel like I still have a lot to do…’ My mind went right back to “The Seventh Seal” and to the way Block carries himself. It went back to the songs that Jons sings and the painting he shows his friend that Block takes off him.

I also feel like Block, though he was paranoid about death approaching, when he is confessing to the ‘priest’, lets down his guard and is naive about Death being around. Death is always around and seriously, I think that he learns something in this scene. There is also that scene with the funeral where the theatre players who are doing a drama about Death suddenly stop playing as a march happens. We see Block’s face and he has a certain smirk on his face which tells me that he isn’t entirely comfortable but he is trying to cope with the fact that this could be him and it doesn’t want it to be. By the end of the film, I think that there is something really important that he learns because of the way he presents himself in the closing.

Death is one of those characters, again, who has always interested me. He is cunning and dark, he is strange and aloof but then again, he is always there and he, in the end, is the most comforting of all. The Danse Macabre can show us this. Even though death is always there as a character to be feared, in the end there is really nothing to fear and you must go off with him into the dance of death. Block learns this throughout the film and on the second or third watch of this film, I realised that some people are scared of dying. People being scared of dying was something that has never occurred to me and it was because of this film, I began thinking about the time where I saw my grandmother’s dead body on the hospital bed. It was “The Seventh Seal” that allowed me to process that better, I was eleven and it was heartbreaking to see my grandmother go. But to see that there is something to learn along the way and something that is conclusive about it made me realise that maybe she didn’t fear it and instead, along the way towards dying, she learnt how to accept it and become one with the character of Death.