Modernity and Director's Will
In the world described and influenced by the Bible, there is such a principle that God is the Creator. Then we might as well do a deductive reasoning, that is:
God created everything;
Everything contains death or may be called death;
So God created death.
This is an absolutely correct structural organization syllogism. The main premise of logic is that man constitutes a whole, which is placed in the larger circle of the concept of creation of the Creator. The same is true of the minor premise of logic, the death of the god of death is contained in the end of the individual destiny destined for human beings. The deduction process of proposing the conclusion that "God created the god of death" from the major and minor premise is to cancel the man in the middle. In this process of re-centering, the appearance and disappearance of man is self-evident. But this proposition can appear here because I, the author, are describing this relationship, and where should I appear as a human being, or if I want to put human beings in the relationship between God and Death? Woolen cloth? In fact, it can be easily concluded that God created man, and the end of man is death. Taking God as the immortal existence (life) and death as the ultimate end (death) as the precondition, we can also propose another form of relationship, that is, :
Will the three concepts in this proposition necessarily have the so-called death of the concept from life to death? The answer is inevitable, because the state of people here is indifferent, either life or death. In this closed system, there must be a concept that will die, the god of death is dead, so the rest may be people, Possibly God. According to our daily experience, it is inevitable and ultimate that people will die, which is in line with everyone's factual knowledge, and the most paradoxical point is that no living person can say that he has seen the god of death, but death is real, if false There is no escape from it, so what is really unknowable in the relationship between the three is precisely the relationship between man and God.
Adhering to this idea into Bergman's "Seventh Seal", the story begins with Max von Sydow as a knight who participated in the Crusades and Gunnar Bujornstrand as a servant. The knights and servants who participated in the crusades were fashionable at that time. With the rather solemn religious music and apocalypse-like voice-over, the desolate natural scenery of Dajingbei emphasized the background and tone of the story. -The sense of the end of the world with the mixed induction of heaven and man in the Middle Ages. After several superimpositions, a surreal god of death appeared, which is undoubtedly a surprise, and the knight did not agree with the god of death on when to die. The chess placed on the beach was used as a A tool for procrastinating has naturally become a necessary foreshadowing of the narrative. From the perspective of romantic symbolism, chess, which is logically used to spend time, is undoubtedly a serious competition for the story. There are also traceable narrative guarantees. After the knight and the god of death reached an agreement to start playing chess, the knight became as if nothing had happened just now, called the servants to continue on their way, and then encountered a corpse with only a human skin left on the way to the town. When the story entered the second act, it turned to a small performance troupe. The clown actor who was troubled by mosquito bites got up early, rinsed his mouth and exercised. Corresponding to the previous scene when the knight saw the god of death, the clown actor witnessed the miracle of the Virgin Mary teaching the Holy Child to walk. This is undoubtedly true. Another surprise, and then the rest of the troupe got up one after another, imagined their future life, and had some trivial arguments...
Narratively, the unfolding of the next scene For the knights and servants in the previous scene, the main body of the narrative changed just because the two rode by on horseback, and two paragraphs of focus were launched. There has been an obvious change between the ascension of the Virgin Mary. Although this change has a strong contrast, it lacks a foreshadowing in progress. Compared with the unyielding fate of the previous scene, this scene is constructed by An Zhi Destiny. There is no longer so much uplifting character, and tends to form a deconstructed contrast between knight and servant characterization. Structurally, the externalities of the two two-line narratives unfolding with different focuses also form an omniscient irony.
By analyzing the contrast and contrast of the first two paragraphs with different focuses, it is enough to see Bergman's narrative intention in "The Seventh Seal", which uses irony to expand and contrast. And this intention runs through the whole film, such as the confession of knights and death in disguise; ascetic people and dead villages; murals seeking forgiveness and ascetic actions actually flogging themselves; snarky priests and insensitive masses; black and white The unruly villagers and the ignorant and kind-hearted clown actor, etc... Next, the knight saw the clown actor's wife and the cute children, the knight came up to talk, and a group of amicable clown actor husbands returned, bringing a stolen bracelet to his wife , the servant returned with the girl who was half pushed and grabbed. The group ate wild strawberries and drank milk in a warm mood. The knight shared his understanding of faith and the vision of life he longed for... At this time The second game also happened to be played. Death was obviously puzzled why the knights could laugh at the calmness of the chess game. For the newly formed team and knights who traveled through the forest, this also represented the arrival of a dramatic turning point. Both the characters and the audience see some hope of victory over death.
The next scene of the story is both the caravan's journey through the forest, the ironic reconciliation between the blacksmith and his wife and the concubine; the concubine's false suicide but self-defeating true death; the firing squad insists on burning the girl to kill the plague, the knight and his servants are helpless to witness, the knight faces death. Asking questions, they are also sincerely pained and puzzled. They can't do anything to watch all this happen, and they also feel the pain. The villagers who once tempted knights and servants to go east also died of plague. Then the third game was played. The knight who had witnessed the tragedy of human relations had almost lost the faith and self-confidence that he depended on to survive, and only had anxiety. The dramatic turning point came again as promised. Facing the risk of losing the whole game of chess, the knight also chose to play the game. The most rogue troublemaker.
Play through three chess games, and then look back at the story structure. In the first act, the unfolding of the chess game is a purely narrative construction. The main characters appear on the stage and their respective images are explained. The two focused presentations roughly determine the overall tone and subtly change the direction of the story; the second act follows the previous one. The tone of sadness and joy unfolds smoothly, but it still uses multiple sets of contrasts to achieve a second game with a relatively upward attitude (hi); in the third act, the plot goes up and down along the slightly climax of the second act. , along with the girl's burning at the stake at the beginning of the second act to reverse the story again, and finally reached the third game that was destined to end tragically. Under the overall structure, "The Seventh Seal" presents a return structure in which the ending has long been anchored, and it is easy to break twice in the middle and gradually move closer to the established fate. , Bergman did not completely turn from sadness to happiness and then sadness. The survival of the clown actor family rewrote the tragedy of being completely taken away by death, and also completed the ironic ending of sadness and joy. And such a structure verifies the power of the story under repeated comparisons.
Then in the whole story, the knight of the active character and the clown of the passive character enter into it with the symbols of their respective classes at that time, which is similar to the two levels of life and death. The two levels of class have a symbolic meaning here. In a sense, their endings have been reversed, thus completing the continuation of their lives, and thus the effect of irony has become stronger. However, under the detour of the return structure, the effect of irony has obviously become detoured, and the overall strength is weakened, which makes it unable to achieve a real criticism of the society at that time, but in a little joke and seriousness, pointing to It has a slightly positive sense of positivity. The Middle Ages, when the Black Death ravaged, was undoubtedly dark, and the inevitable death was undoubtedly accelerated in such an era, and the era would continue to move forward without stopping. The high class of knights and clowns The symbol of the lower class is analogous to the journey of life with death as the end and new life as the starting point, and yearning for the future wholeheartedly. From the point of view that the existence of life represents the future as an undeniable truth, the knight’s inevitable and meaningless sacrifice is the affirmation of life. The powerful and necessary meaning of death has won space for the new life, which also endows this formalist work with real practical significance.
Then, we can also continue to extend that the ultimate goal of human beings - death, as a set ending is waiting for everyone, maybe all those who have doubts about this ending point should silently ask themselves, life is meaningless, and the ending point is Nothingness, what is the purpose of life? This is precisely the intractable problem brought about by rationality in modernity, a problem that has no answer. Therefore, when the goal with "meaning" and the goal without "meaning" appear at the same time, what connects the two is undoubtedly the action of life in the world, that is, the action, when applied to the original proposition, it becomes:
In the same way, we can also get that meaningful goals or meaningful actions or actions inevitably lead to meaningless ends, and existence (Death) becomes one of the means to cover up nothingness (God). This is the theme of the story, and it can be reversed from this. This is what Bergman intended to create the stage of time and space in the film, the return of the structure, the contrast of light and shadow, and the drama of the performance. The use of artificial space is exactly the reason. Emphasize the pretense of story and characters.
But in fact, in my opinion, this story has a slightly incorrect answer after all, which is why this story is slightly optimistic. Just like in life, after all, there must be some of the most real problems waiting to be solved. Giving ourselves some consoling meaning. Then back to the movie, it became the knight who knew that he was bound to die and could not escape, so why did he insist on playing chess with Death to get a reprieve? Apparently he has a purpose here, which is to ask where is God? Why silent? And we know that the purpose behind this hard goal does not exist, so in fact, the driving force of the whole story is contradictory: after the arrival of death, in the face of the fact that the end cannot be rewritten, how to face the self in the rest of life, this is the real Most Effective - Dramatic Core. The actions that revolve around this core are the ultimate representation of the narrative around the story. The knight has found the value of his protection: the happy moment, truly living as a person who can experience life, that is, humanism.
God-Man-Death as the necessary correctness of deductive reasoning (which comes from ideal formal logic); in contrast to the possibly correct inductive reasoning of Death-Man-God (which comes from empirical everyday life), they fit together. It formed the Hume's fork offered by Bergman, and this "fork" also directly destroyed the foundation of "movie", because the deduction of God-Man-Death is based on Death-Man- God’s induction is established, and objectivity comes from the strength of induction, but at the same time, it is limited by Bergman’s own experience as the author, so here we can finally propose the modernity of Bergman’s film language: both the subject quest and endless questions about it. Even if the rationality of the subject under Bergman's lens is so close to the rationality of questioning that it is infinitely close, the gap will always exist, and what exists in between is human nature itself.
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