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Religious Allegory In The Film 'The Seventh Seal'

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Yuniska Castaneda Joann Falcon ENC1102 12/05/17 The Seventh Seal I. “What will happen to us who want to believe, but cannot?” A question that can resonate with a copious amount of us. The fear of the unknown, fear of a death with no afterlife but also a fear of one with a promise of possible damnation, fear of death in general. Antinous Block (Max von Sydow) the main protagonist of the film The Seventh Seal faces this internal dilemma throughout the entirety of the motion picture with no real resolution found for it. A parallel made to those felt in real life, deliberately done so by director Ingmar Bergman. The seventh seal is a 1957 Swedish film which brought Bergman into the limelight with its release in the western world. Everything about Bergman’s work in the late nineteen fifties stupefied American moviegoers everywhere, with its stunning cinematography and disconcerting imagery full of religious allegories. The seventh seal was considered Bergman’s way of exorcising his theoretical demons, his own personal fear of death. To Bergman’s utter delight and joy, he was not alone with those sentiments. The film was originally written as a screenplay with the title ‘Painting on Wood”, it was later performed at Sweden’s Radio Theatre in 1954. Bergman later changed it to the seventh seal, the title was taken from the Book of Revelations, an appropriate title considering the timeline of the film. The film is set in the Middle Ages at a time when the Black death was

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