someone really awesome showed me this video:
it really moved me. it’s no secret that i’m really a huge fan of stories from the perspective of insects. read ‘the cartographer wasps and the anarchist bees‘ by e. lily yu for a great example.
i dunno, i just really like how bug-perspective puts things into human-perspective. insects like ants and bees and wasps have little societies and hierarchies that are built around strange little rituals and scents and other things just like humans and our lives are pretty insignificant and inconsequential, just like bugs. so stories like that feel familiar, yet distant and interesting.
i don’t like a bug’s life tho.
anyway, watching this video made it apparent that i need to finally sit down and watch ‘the seventh seal.’ in fact, the pairing of this video with the source text is a beautiful composition, in my opinion, because it uses humans to tell a bug’s story, plus it’s very, very well edited. having never seen a bergman film before in my life, i made some different associations with the video than i might have.
the seventh seal gets a lot of hype and when it comes to movies from the ’40s -’60s, it seems like a lot of movies are lavished with praise because they were ‘first’ to achieve a certain aesthetic rather than illustrating their point well. i can’t think of an example, however.
so i expected the seventh seal to be a long, boring affair that really didn’t make much sense. instead, it was the opposite. well-paced (for its time), filled with exciting characters and dialogue that was compelling and existential. the beauty was that it wasn’t overly complex, like i assumed, but rather simple and heartfelt.
so go watch these things i guess.