Визуальная теология (Dec 2021)
The Seventh Seal: The History of Visible and Invisible Confession of Faith
Abstract
The article is devoted to the meaning and role of cinematography in modern culture. The screen image of one or another concept or meaning can influence the formation of historical and religious-philosophical ideas of society. Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal tells the story of the historical events of medieval Europe. The phenomena and facts that are shown in the film do not always correspond to the historical past. The director’s task was different: to answer the questions that the representatives of the post-war generation were contemplating on, using the basis of historical materials. The visual imagery of The Seventh Seal became the basis for the cultural analysis in this article. The purpose of the analysis was to identify the main idea of the film, as well as to reveal its symbolism. The author turns to the theoretical legacy of Sergei Eisenstein, to his theory of intellectual cinema, built on the basis of a simulative way of perception. This method makes it possible to perceive the whole picture in one time space, where the problems of the past and the present have something in common. Thus we get one of the main methods for revealing the meanings of the film images presented in The Seventh Seal and we can understand what the author wanted to say in his film. Berman’s film is a complex multi-level work in which there is a visible layer related to the film’s storyline, and invisible layers related to the religious and philosophical views of the director himself. The first level is to show the history of Europe as the director sees it, namely, through negative stereotypes of the so-called “dark and sinister Middle Ages” (superstitions, negative image of the Roman Catholic Church, witches’ trials). Against the background of these historical events, the main character of the film is looking for an answer to his questions about the existence of God, and therefore the meaning of life. His duel – a game of chess with another character of the film, Death, must solve these questions: the life of a knight will depend on the outcome of the game. The second level is Bergman’s presentation of the Lutheran denomination with critical attitude to Church Tradition, which is quite characteristic of him. Embodying the teachings of Luther about the “visible” and “invisible” side of the church, the family of itinerant actors in the film personifies the image of the living invisible church; unlike the visible Roman Catholic church, it presents a pure and bright image of true Christianity. The third level of the film should be correlated with the post-war modernity, in which Ingmar Bergman lived. Here one can see the influence of Martin Heidegger’s ideas on the work of the director of The Seventh Seal. ‘Dasein’ is one of the key concepts of Heidegger’s philosophy that is relevant to this film. This concept means the existence of a person, which is determined through the experience of their mortality, not in some future tense, but here and now. That is why the theme of death becomes a key one, it determines the meaning of a person’s life, and it also relates to the title of the film. The Seventh Seal is an image of the Apocalypse, and this image is related not only to the end of the world, but also to the end of the life of a single person, when the outcome of his life becomes clear.
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