One is loathe to add the chorus of attacks on Woody Allen.
Don’t hit a man when he’s down, but his New
Yorker parody “Death Knocks” actually did a huge disserve to the extent
that it diminishes Ingmar Bergman’s The
Seventh Seal (1957), which is currently being revived at Film Forum, as part of a Bergman retrospective. Seeing the
film over 60 years from its original release, it’s hard not to regard it as a classic treatise on the medieval world in its mixture of the
sacred and profane, in its grotesquery and humor and in the ongoing scholastic dialogue between the Knight Antonius Block (Max Von Sydow) a
former pilgrim, who wrestles with belief and asks, “why can’t I kill God in
me?” and his side kick Jons, (Gunnar Bjonstrand), the realist who refuses to
admit the presence of the unknowable even when it stares him in the face. It is the Knight who challenges Death (Bengt Ekerot) in chess, the film's famous leitmotif that Allen turned to gin rummy. Flagellants, jesters, witches burning at the stake and the plague are all part of the
parade which is a dark version of the Fellini circus. Of course the movie is
also a metaphor for contemporary life. “This bloody talk of doom," Jons remarks. "Is that
sustenance for a modern man?” Death is everywhere. “A skull is more
interesting than a naked wench” says one character and doubters and believers
are united in the their struggle to find agency in the face of inexplicability.
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