Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Seventh Seal is a 1957 Swedish historical fantasy film by Ingmar Bergman about a medieval knight, Antonius Block, who returns from the Crusades to a Sweden ravaged by the Black Death. He plays a game of chess against Death, believing he can stay alive as long as the game continues.
The Seventh Seal was written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. Max von Sydow played the knight Antonius Block, and Bengt Ekerot played Death.
The title of The Seventh Seal refers to a passage from the Book of Revelation that begins, "And when the Lamb had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour." The motif of silence points to the "silence of God," a major theme of the film.
The Seventh Seal was made on a budget of $150,000 with a schedule of only thirty-five days. Most of it was shot in or around the Filmstaden studios in Solna, with the chess scene by the sea and the closing dance of death filmed at Hovs Hallar in north-western Scania.
The Seventh Seal grew out of Ingmar Bergman's play Trämålning, or Wood Painting, which he wrote in 1953 and 1954 for the acting students of Malmö City Theatre. Its first public performance was on radio in 1954.
On its Swedish release The Seventh Seal drew a divided response, with praise for its cinematography but criticism of Bergman as scriptwriter. Internationally it won the jury's special prize at Cannes in 1957, ranked second on Cahiers du Cinéma's 1958 list, and is now regarded as a masterpiece of cinema.