While I can only echo the fulsome praise that this film has received and clearly deserves, I'd like propose that what makes it so great a work is its perfect balance between on the one hand the knight's grim, existential battle with death and on the other hand the prelapsarian idyll represented by the travelling players.
This kind of double narrative is found across art-forms and time of course, with Tolstoy's Anna Karenina being perhaps the most perfect example in literature. In that novel, Anna and Vronsky's journey to hell accompanied by Levin and Kitty's journey in the opposite direction. For all its grimness, with the Black Death and Death himself, The Seventh Seal is a celebration of the life, love and humour which fill the scenes with Jof, Mia and their little child.
It's not that death can be cheated or overcome, rather that in life and among people we can find a respite from the cold cruel necessity of a meaningless universe. Whether we do so or not is very much up to us, and not the province of religion, state or other authority figures.
This kind of double narrative is found across art-forms and time of course, with Tolstoy's Anna Karenina being perhaps the most perfect example in literature. In that novel, Anna and Vronsky's journey to hell accompanied by Levin and Kitty's journey in the opposite direction. For all its grimness, with the Black Death and Death himself, The Seventh Seal is a celebration of the life, love and humour which fill the scenes with Jof, Mia and their little child.
It's not that death can be cheated or overcome, rather that in life and among people we can find a respite from the cold cruel necessity of a meaningless universe. Whether we do so or not is very much up to us, and not the province of religion, state or other authority figures.