The Seventh Seal

You probably saw the Seventh Seal in college. See it again. I reveal too much by saying how much it cheered me up, not, obviously, from the subject matter, but from it's deep humanity, humor, honest spirituality and searching intelligence. I had a caricature of this movie in my memory that suggested it was a gross existential waddling, but this was just a way of avoiding the deep end of the pool. It's absolutely excellent.

Death is not the heavy in the movie - there is a true evil character, a seminarian who had convinced the knight to join the Crusades. Max Von Sydow's war-weary knight returns to a plague-ravaged Sweden, and what happens is a dense, frightening and funny survey of human experience. But the characters are human beings first and allegories incidently - no small feat. The social dynamics - between fear and love, religion and satire, hatred and friendship- of this medieval settting read absolutely modern. The themes of this movie are genuinely timeless,

The knight plays chess with death with bemusement, and he reconciles to his doom with fondness for life, frustration with God, terror of emptyness and gut-hollowing dread.

By way of contrast, Bush is a man playing checkers with Death, convinced he will win.

It also reminded me of another Swedish iconography of death.
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