Hacker Cinema
The Seventh Seal
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1957 · Film · 96 min
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
When disillusioned Swedish knight Antonius Block returns home from the Crusades to find his country in the grips of the Black Death, he challenges Death to a chess match for his life. Tormented by the belief that God does not exist, Block sets off on a journey, meeting up with traveling players Jof and his wife, Mia, and becoming determined to evade Death long enough to commit one redemptive act while he still lives.
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11 comments on Hacker News
Thanks! Here's the full list: 2001: A Space Odyssey, 8½, Aguirre the Wrath of God, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, All That Heaven Allows, Apocalypse Now, Ashes and Diamonds, A Woman Under the Influence, Barry Lyndon, Bicycle Thieves, Breathless, Casablanca, Céline and Julie Go Boating, Chinatown, Chinese Roulette, Citizen Kane, City Lights, City of Pirates, Contempt, Daisies, Damnation, Dishonored, Earth, Electra My Love, El Topo, Eraserhead, Eyes Wide Shut, Film Socialisme, Fitzcarraldo, Fuego en Castilla, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Holy Motors, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, In a Year with 13 Moons, India Song, Inland Empire, Irma Vep, Koyaanisqatsi, La Dolce Vita, La Jetée, Late Spring, L'Eau de la Seine, Le Voyage dans la Lune, Lolita, Los Olvidados, Lost Highway, Lucifer Rising, Man with a Movie Camera, Metropolis, Mirror, Mulholland Drive, Night Music, Ordet, Orpheus, Persona, Pickpocket, Playtime, Psycho, Rebecca, Rosemary's Baby, Rumble Fish, Scarface, Seven Samurai, Sherlock Jr., Singin' in the Rain, Stalker, Sunset Boulevard, Taste of Cherry, Taxi Driver, Testament of Orpheus, The 400 Blows, The Blood of a Poet, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Color of Pomegranates, The Green Ray, The Holy Mountain, The Isle, The Lady from Shanghai, The Night of the Hunter, The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Seventh Seal, The Spirit of the Beehive, The Tales of Hoffmann, The Tree of Life, The Turin Horse, Time of the Gypsies, Tokyo Story, Touch of Evil, Trans-Europ-Express, Ugetsu, Un Chien Andalou, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Vampyr, Videodrome, Wavelength, Werckmeister Harmonies, Wild Strawberries, Moonlight Sonata, Stellar, The Haunted House Biased toward European art cinema, experimental work, and directors who broke conventional narrative rules.
Frankly, I can't understand such movies aren't monetized more. I can imagine there' some money to be made from ads, especially from movies most people will never watch anyway.
My teenage daughter will most likely never watch The Seventh Seal. Unless she stumbled upon it on Youtube or something.
The best way to reduce piracy of copyrighted works is to cut the copyright period by 75% relative to current standards. To be fair to individual living authors who hold their own copyrights, this would mean copyrights persisted 18 years past the author's death, or for 24 years after date of publication for for-hire contract jobs.
This is comparable to the lifetime of technical patents, and so would allow for a reasonable period to collect revenue from the work that can be used to finance new works and so on.
Otherwise, you just have consolidated interests squatting on material and collecting rents for no justifiable reason. It's entirely ridiculous, for example, that a 1957 film like the Seventh Seal isn't yet in the public domain.
This kind of reasonable change to copyright law would go a long ways towards justifying legal crackdowns on piracy of more recent works, I think.
The Magician, Wild Strawberries, Through a glass darkly, The Virgin Spring and the Seventh Seal. These films are 50 years old! Being in these films alone would be enough to qualify as a cinema legend and he still had nearly 50 years to go! Extraordinary!!!
Stellar performance as the weary knight in "The Seventh Seal", a film more than 60 years old. Well worth seeing today and to some - with the elements of a plague in the background - of particular contemporary relevance.
> things you can binge watch for a month?
this should get you through March :) ...
The Seventh Seal (1957) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050976/
The Last Man on Earth (1964) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058700/
The Omega Man (1971) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067525/
The Andromeda Strain (1971) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066769/
Dawn of the Dead (1978) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077402/
Outbreak (1995) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114069/
12 Monkeys (1995) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114746/
Cabin Fever (2002) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0303816/
Resident Evil (2002) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120804/
28 Days Later (2003) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0289043/
Children of Men (2006) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0206634/
28 Weeks Later (2007) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0463854/
I Am Legend (2007) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0480249/
Blindness (2008) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0861689/
Carriers (2009) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0806203/
Daybreakers (2009) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0433362/
Black Death (2010) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1181791/
Contagion (2011) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1598778/
Maze Runner: The Death Cure (2011) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4500922/
World War Z (2013) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0816711/
Maggie (2015) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1881002/
Train to Busan (2016) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5700672/
The Girl With All The Gifts (2016) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4547056/
93 Days (2016) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5305246/
Cargo (2017) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3860916/
It Comes At Night (2017) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4695012/
Rabid (2019) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5628902/
The Hot Zone (2019) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4131818/
edit: There is actually a Wikipedia page for the genre (duh!): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Films_about_viral_outbreaks
> I have thousands of non-fiction (mostly self-improvement) books in my reading list on GoodReads, but almost never bother to read any.
> The last few books I read were mostly filled with fluff, anecdotes, stories, jokes, and trivialities.
> I thought that online content was roughly equivalent to 80% of what I'd get from reading actual books for 20% of the effort.
For self improvement and pop-business books, it's more like you can get 99% of the value from 5% of the effort by reading about the book, or skimming it, rather than reading it closely.
> Are books worth it?
You need to know what this "it" is first. I don't mean that flippantly. Do many people find reading books useful or enriching or valuable? Oh, yes, certainly. Now: worth what? To you? Are films worth "it"? Are Casablanca, The Seventh Seal, the Up documentary series, Manos: The Hands of Fate, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Mars Attacks!, and Debbie does Dallas, worth "it"? Are they all replaceable with a bunch of 5- to 15-minute Youtube videos?
> Is it more true for some fields than others?
Self-improvement, pop-business/leadership books, and generally anything written to sell consulting services (there's a lot of that in both those categories) are regarded as kinda jokes. If you're looking there for wisdom you're combing the desert for a pearl.
> Is it more true for older books?
The filter is that if a book is still considered good decades, centuries, or millennia after it was written, it very probably is good. Good books somtimes don't pass this filter (these are periodically rediscovered) for various reasons. But almost no bad or low-value books pass it.
> Isn't most of the information from books freely available online?
Not at all. Start studying any topic past the surface level and the only way you'll get any further "online" is buying or pirating ebooks. Keep digging—not even that far—and you'll find some that do not exist in digital form, not even on Library Genesis. If you want to seriously learn about a topic, pick up a good academic book on it, then follow up on all the books they (very probably) mention in their introduction as other major works on the topic, and maybe also the books that book directly credits as references. Often this is a faster and more accurate way to learn what the expert consensus of "foundational" works in a topic is than trying to find that out online, let alone trying to learn the information contained in those works purely online, without books (usually impossible).
> Am I missing out?
What is "it"?
> One issue for me is that books are a very big time investment. I read very slowly and I don't remember everything I read either.
Take notes.
> Even if I wanted to read books, I just don't know which ones I should start with, out of the 1000 "must-read" books in my reading list.
Stop. Pick, like, five that seem really important or that you just most want to read. Aim for variety, don't pick five all on the same topic. Ignore the rest until you're done. Don't even think about them. If you're not going to finish five there's no damn point in maintaining and stressing out over a list of 1,000. They'll still be there when you've finished your five.
One further note: as hinted at by the movie comparison above, reading a book is a process and that process is part of the effect of the book. The time it takes, the curation or generation of material by one author or editor or a team of same working together, the focus and intention of the creators, these matter. Reading 200 blog posts is not the same experience as reading a book, even if they mostly cover the same territory. A tree can become boards, but boards cannot become a tree.
As you say, it's not perfect, but it would absolutely help us preserve culture beyond what is still classic 75+ years from now.
We have lost the vast majority of silent era films and more historical films will follow since it's illegal for you to save them to digital format without the explicit consent from the content creator. We won't lose Casablanca or The Seventh Seal since they're preserved by historical archives and companies can still make money screening them but TV-movies like Star Wars the Holiday Special is only being preserved by illegal means because nobody bothers enforcing its copyright. Sure, that movie is an abomination, but film historians 100 years from now would presumably want some proof that Lucas made it and that it really was the first appearance of Boba Fett.
I think it is very, very difficult to comprehend some things. Like the absence of something which has been ubiquitous in your life. The intellectual idea isn't hard to grasp, and you can even deduce other consequences from the idea, but gaining a visceral (for lack of a better word.. maybe intuitive?) understanding is far more difficult. I came to this belief when I was a teenager and had just gotten into watching foreign films. I watched a film called Hour of the Wolf by Ingmar Bergman. I was watching Bergman films because I expected (from pop culture references) them to be crazy, abstract, unpredictable, and impossible to grasp. They're really nothing like that, of course, but I mention it so you'll understand my mindset.
Instead of being treated to lingering shots of cigarettes, portraits of tired old women, and eggs breaking on chickens, I was actually treated with some insight. It was entirely unexpected, and I imagine that it was not even intentional on the part of Bergman (though if it was, bravo to him!), but I had a very profound realization of what life must have been like before the introduction of electric lights. The main character can't sleep, and huddles around the light of a candle - a positively claustrophobic little area. Now, I had been in circumstances of dark before. I was a Boy Scout and had been away from ubiquitous lighting before. But it was always with the knowledge that I could reach for a flashlight or lantern. I never had to consider that without those things, if I were afraid of what might lie in the dark, I would be forced to simply endure it and wait for dawn - hours away!
I am sure that I only tasted an inkling of what the subjective experience of people in that situation is. But that experience sticks with me decades later. It helped me realize that simply 'knowing' something intellectually can still starve one of the full picture. It helped me realize how profoundly different a life can be with only small changes to environment. It also was one of the big things (along with the humor in The Seventh Seal which doubled me over and which I did not expect) that drove me to become an avid fan of film. The supra-lingual things that a skillfully made film can communicate never cease to amaze me.
Plenty of films do seem dated in a negative way to me, and I can get that someone expects carefully mastered soundtracks with impressive thumpy sound. But I think there are some films were well made that stand the test of time.
The LA Times ran an article[1] arguing lack of interest in old movies stems largely from new films having a social function that is similar to fashion. I'm inclined to agree. Therefore, while 48+fps might become the fashion, I doubt it's required to retain interest in new movies as referenced in the great-grandparent post.
I certainly wasn't around when The Seventh Seal was filmed, yet I find it astonishingly beautiful and impressive (which makes the parody film De Düva even better.) Of course, I can't talk about it the way one talks about the weather or of theater run films-- "Did you see Argo yet? I want to check it out, the trailer looked cool."
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jul/14/entertainment/la-ca-film-novelty-20120715
To each their own. I enjoy a large assortment of films. The Avengers and Batman Begins - or 12 Monkeys and The Usual Suspects - or The Triplettes of Bellville and The Lives of Others - or 12 Angry Men and The Seventh Seal. Hardly fair to say that someone who would 'enjoy' 'cinema' would 'rather pluck their eyes out' than 'watch' a 'film' like this 'anywhere'.
Interestingly, you used the term 'Film' to describe The Avengers, which some people would jump down YOUR throat for - since this was an almost All-Digital release.