Das siebente Siegel

Ein tolerierbarer Kult, der tatsächlich mehrere Ebenen für ein Publikum mit unterschiedlichen Vorlieben bietet, so dass ich nicht wirklich böse sein kann über die Popularität, die dieser intellektuelle Film mit dem Tod sogar unter normalen Menschen erlangt hat. (10.04.2014)

Das siebente Siegel ist einerseits ein düsterer Film voller Depression und Tod, andererseits strahlt er Hoffnung, Leben und manchmal sogar Humor aus. Das symbolische letzte Spiel zwischen dem Kreuzritter und dem Tod oder der letzte Blick auf den Horizont mit den Toten machen diesen schwedischen Klassiker zu etwas Unvergesslichem. Kurzum, es ist kein überragendes oder perfektes Werk, aber als ein Beispiel aus der Vergangenheit, aus der Zeit der Kreuzritter, der Hexenverbrennung und des Todes, der den Menschen erscheint, ist dieses Werk von Bergman ein anschauliches Beispiel für das Thema der Begegnung des Menschen mit dem Tod. (05.03.2011)

Where are you, my certainty in life? What do you look like when you speak to me? At the moment of death? At that moment, the absolute certainty that I will not tell anyone else about your appearance? Is it life itself for which we live and death that causes life to lack meaning? Should I not ask if I want to live? The Seventh Seal raises questions and is comprehensible enough that every thinking adult can understand it regardless of their religious faith or lack thereof. The characters, each of which embodying a particular philosophy of life, do not have a past on which the actors can base their performances. Each additional pieces of information supports or negates a certain idea, while the firmly fixed character traits do not change. The director, having gained mastery through life and its artistic equivalent (theatre), does not use the actors as mere index cards. He places great trust in them and whenever he has an opportunity to economise on a shot-answer by lingering on the actors’ faces, he takes advantage of it. Even a writer of Bergman’s literary talent has to sometimes concede that the you can’t express the most essential messages with words. 85% (06.09.2011)

A person safeguards their life in a chess battle against Death, both players speaking to each other through bars, while intertwining (dis)belief in God, variously depicted attempts to escape the ubiquitous weight of life or various human weaknesses with anger or desire in the foreground. Bergman's reproduction of sad hope. (15.08.2005)

But He remains silent... The Seventh Seal is a film that will leave you with a lot of questions about the meaning of existence. You can ask yourself the same questions as the wandering crusader knight Antonius Block, but "I call out to Him in the darkness. But it’s as if no one was there". Don't expect anything more or less from it. However, it raises these questions in tremendously powerful scenes, so that even after multiple viewings, you will still be on the edge of your seat while watching Block's futile battle for life. A completely exceptional film that is rightly a classic and, together with Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, the best "question asking" work. (12.01.2007)