Compare and Contrast Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 The Seventh Seal and David Lynch’s 1978 Eraserhead.
“The Seventh Seal” is a psychological drama from a Swedish village of the 14th century that witnessed the plague’s detrimental effects. The movie has two plots that are interwoven. The first focuses on Block, a discontented crusader who gets back home in the holy land after ten years (Bradshaw, 2007). Having met Death on the way, he tries to preempt his destiny by compelling Death to a chess game where death will stay away from him should he win. The opponents pass one piece of chess at a time on the following days. While, in the sense of their religious faith, the knight sees peasants struggling to understand their imminent doom. Strongly philosophical, profoundly metaphysical, sluggish, and bleak, Ingmar Bergman’s great masterpiece The Seventh Seal has fascinated film fans, shocked and confused college learners, spawned countless parodies and questioned both the faithful and nonbelievers for almost half a century. Long regarded as the best movies of all time, Bergman’s historical soul tale can be uncomfortable to view but uneasy to forgotten.
On the other hand, the 1977 debut of David Lynch’s Eraserhead is a movie based on a man shattered by the weight of significance, by the emotional consequences of having to create one’s self, by the despair of intent. It’s the story about a man who is satisfied with drifting subconsciously but can’t be content just because drifting is shown as a hassle (Rosenberg, 2019). Grotesque, futuristic, post-apocalyptic, alien, oddly bright, sinister, frightening, and hallucinatory are the adjectives that can symbolize “Eraserhead,” a far more expressionist of David Lynch’s films (Bhattacharjee, 2019). However, the film stands firmly embedded in the record books of film history – not just because it unsettles human sensitivities, but also because it gives the idea of rationality a different connotation. The Swiss impressionist painter Hans Ruedi Giger previously called “Eraserhead,” another of the best films ever (Giger, 2018). Therefore, this essay aims at comparing and contrasting both The Seventh Seal and Eraserhead through an evaluation of the elements that stand out in each.
Eraserhead deals with its highly impressive technological feats. The film is made from a tight budget and employs excellent black-and-white cinematography in the ambiance. Cinematographed through the joined forces of Frederick Elmes and Herbert Cardwell, the film’s aesthetics generate an eerie apprehension. One of the signature features in the movie is its clean soundtrack design. Written and directed by Lynch, Fats Waller, and Peter Ivers also perform the main classical pieces in the film. In the screenplay, the small-intensity industrial theme tune renders the audience claustrophobic. Sometimes it makes them crave a diegesis getaway. Spencer threateningly looks into a radiator within his house at an earlier time in the movie. This is followed by the camera, which covers the radiator in a distinctive path shot. Preceded by peculiar steaming echo, this shot indicates something forthcoming. Little, however, does happen. Here, too, Lynch is playing with sheer viewer excitement. Notice that the radiator is the location Henry envisions the heaven.
Similar to Lynch’s Eraserhead, The Seventh Seal, contemplate on the idea of faith. Core symbolic representations are taken from renaissance art and drama. A knight practically attempting to play Death’s chess; Death comes for those alive, driving men and women away in a gruesome parade, a ghoulish dance. Nevertheless, the social order surrounding those depictions has deteriorated. In a morbid dance of the 1300s, Death may surface as God’s acolyte motioning men to judgment as well as to the afterlife. Death (Bengt Ekerot) features in Bergman’s project as an elusive inquisitor of the mysterious, taking the audience into the supernatural. Clear sacramental connotations reinforce the importance of the sequence. Block puts metaphorical and memorial meaning in the quasi-liturgical dialect of the meal: “I shan’t forget this moment. And this shall be to me a sign and a great sufficiency” (Bergman, 1957). There is an expression of the ecclesiastical gesture in a sacred manner that Block lifts the bowl of milk to his mouth like a Eucharistic goblet. The meal is also a communion opportunity as well as an “hour of peace” to this knight/ Additionally, Jof strummed a secularized refutation to the liturgy’s religious music.
Intriguingly, one gets mixed up over what happens throughout the film and what one thinks happens. Eraserhead is an expression of an emotional quagmire. The film’s profound purpose is not to let the viewers make sense of it – empirical, psychological, or philosophical nature. The universe that the movie produces is sinister and dangerous to the public (Godwin, 1985). The environment is entirely healthy, though for the personalities who inhibit it. This is the weird phenomenon that „ Eraserhead “developed. The Seventh Seal is more about aspects of nature than it is a film. Its context is a complicated work that questions the genuine sense of belonging among the living in the world. It does so significantly without assuming any roles: hence depicts all the various human characters in a large fresco, leaving only a few performers, the guardians of art, and thus the caretakers of true religion, at the end (Bonasia, 2018).
References
Bhattacharjee, S. (2019). A Critical Analysis of David Lynch’s ‘Eraserhead’ (1977): Whose Dream is it After All? – RESEARCH REVIEW International Journal of Multidisciplinary. 4. 486-490.
Bonasia, M. (2020). The Seventh Seal: analysis and meanings of Ingmar Bergman’s movie. Auralcrave. Retrieved 28 March 2020, from https://auralcrave.com/en/2018/04/29/ingmar-bergmans-the-seventh-seal-faith-salvation-and-the-true-meaning-of-life/.
Bradshaw, P. (2020). The Seventh Seal. The Guardian. Retrieved 28 March 2020, from https://www.theguardian.com/film/2007/jul/20/worldcinema.drama1.
Giger, H. R. (2018). Giger. Cologne: TASCHEN.
Godwin, K. (1985). Eraserhead David Lynch. Film Quarterly, 39(1), 37-43. https://doi.org/10.2307/1212282