The silence of God, the obstacles to faith, and the good ol’ Meaning of Life are the themes of Ingmar Bergman’s iconic Swedish art film, set in the time of the medieval Crusades. Death himself (Bengt Ekerot) shows up to claim the life of a knight (Max Von Sydow) who’s been away from home for ten years, but the knight challenges Death to a chess game. This buys the knight more time to ponder his own inability to achieve religious faith and to observe the simple pleasures and follies of a group of troubadour actors.
No one makes movies like this anymore. Bergman’s concerns are The Soul and The Big Questions, with no politics to get in the way. His main influences here are imagery from five hundred-year-old church frescoes and the theater. In its own way, this is also an apocalypse film (the title comes from the Biblical Book of Revelation), with God’s wrath taking the form of The Black Plague that killed off half of Europe at the time and turned much of the other half into superstitious wretches.
The Seventh Seal was popular in its day for its blend of cerebral material with deft drama and bawdy Shakespearean humor, as well as for its great acting—Max Von Sydow was only 26 years old here, but he could pass for a man in his 40s. The film’s popularity continued into the 1960s when it became a favorite of college film societies and today it sits on the shortlist of definitive European art cinema.