The Seventh Seal

• 1. Introduction

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  A knight kneels on a grey rocky beach and looks up to find Death waiting for him. This is the opening of The Seventh Seal, a 1957 Swedish film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. The knight, played by Max von Sydow, proposes a wager. He will play chess against Death, and he believes he can stay alive as long as the game continues. Death, played by Bengt Ekerot, agrees to the match. The story unfolds in Sweden during the Black Death, as the knight and his squire travel through a country emptied by the plague. The title comes from the Book of Revelation, from a passage that begins, "And when the Lamb had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour." That word, silence, sits at the center of everything the film asks. Why would a knight bargain with Death rather than simply submit? What is the "one meaningful deed" he wants to perform before he dies? And why did this slim film, shot on a punishing schedule, become one of the most analyzed works in the history of cinema?

• 2. The Chess Match

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  Antonius Block returns from the Crusades with his cynical squire Jöns to find the country ravaged by plague. The knight challenges Death to a chess match, convinced he will survive as long as the pieces are still in play. The match is not played all at once. It pauses and resumes across the film as the travelers move through villages and forests. In a church, Block enters the confessional and pours out his doubt to the figure he takes for a priest. He asks about the chess tactic that might save his life, and only then realizes he has been speaking to Death the whole time. Late in the story, Death tells Block, "No one escapes me." The knight knocks the pieces over, but Death calmly restores them to their places. On the next move Death wins and announces that their next meeting will be the last time, for all of them. Death asks whether Block achieved the meaningful deed he wished to accomplish, and the knight answers that he has.

• 3. The Silence Of God

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  "Faith is a torment - did you know that?" Antonius Block says this as he eats wild strawberries with the actors. He compares belief to loving someone out in the darkness who never appears, no matter how loudly you call. In the confessional scene the knight pushes further, asking why God should hide himself in a mist of half-spoken promises and unseen miracles. He wonders what will happen to those who want to believe but cannot. Death, impersonating the priest, refuses to reply, and that refusal is the point. The phrase the "silence of God" runs through the whole work. The biographer Melvyn Bragg suggests this idea may trace back to Bergman's father, a chaplain in the State Lutheran Church, who punished his son with silence. In Bergman's original radio play, sometimes translated as A Painting on Wood, Death in the Dance of Death is not played by an actor at all. The figure is represented by silence itself, described as mere nothingness, mere absence, terrifying, the void.

• 4. From Wood Painting

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  Bergman first wrote the material as a play called Trämålning, or Wood Painting, in 1953 and 1954, for the acting students of Malmö City Theatre. Its first public performance was on radio in 1954, directed by Bergman himself. He then staged it in Malmö the following spring. In the autumn it was staged in Stockholm, directed by Bengt Ekerot, the same man who would later play Death in the film. In his autobiography, The Magic Lantern, Bergman called The Seventh Seal an uneven film that lay close to his heart, made under difficult circumstances in a surge of vitality and delight. He began the script while recovering from a stomach complaint at the Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm. Carl-Anders Dymling, head of Svensk Filmindustri, at first rejected it. Dymling only approved the project after the success at Cannes of Smiles of a Summer Night. Bergman rewrote the script five times. It would be the seventeenth film he had directed.

• 5. A Modest Production

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  Bergman was given a schedule of only thirty-five days and a budget of $150,000. Almost everything was shot in or around the Filmstaden studios in Solna. Only two sequences were filmed elsewhere. The opening scene of Death and the knight playing chess by the sea, and the closing dance of death, were both shot at Hovs Hallar, a rocky, precipitous beach in north-western Scania. The film's most famous penultimate image was captured in a rush. In The Magic Lantern, Bergman recalled that most of the actors had already finished for the day when the Dance of Death beneath the dark cloud was needed. Assistants, electricians, a make-up man, and about two summer visitors who never understood what was happening had to put on the costumes of those condemned to death. A camera with no sound was set up, and the picture was shot before the cloud dissolved.

• 6. The Middle Ages As Mirror

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  Medieval Sweden as portrayed in the film contains creative anachronisms. The flagellant movement was foreign to Sweden, and large-scale witch persecutions only began in the 15th century. The Crusades themselves belonged to an earlier and more optimistic period. John Aberth, writing in A Knight at the Movies, argued that the film only partly captures the thought world of the fourteenth century. He noted Bergman would likely counter that he never meant to make a historical film. A program note at the premiere called it a modern poem presented with freely handled medieval material, carrying a mid-twentieth century existentialist angst. Aleksander Kwiatkowski, in Swedish Film Classics, defended it as a universal, timeless allegory, pointing to the jury's special prize it won at Cannes in 1957. Much of the imagery comes from medieval art. Bergman said the image of a man playing chess with a skeletal Death was inspired by a church painting from the 1480s in Täby kyrka, north of Stockholm, by Albertus Pictor. Historians Johan Huizinga, Friedrich Heer, and Barbara Tuchman all described the 14th century as a period of doom and gloom, and Tuchman called it a distant mirror of the 20th century.

• 7. Praise And Lambasting

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  On its Swedish release, the film met a divided response. Its cinematography was widely praised, while Bergman the scriptwriter was lambasted. The critic Nils Beyer, writing for Morgon-tidningen, compared it to Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc and Day of Wrath, judging Dreyer superior but saying it is not just any director one feels like comparing to the old Danish master. He praised Max von Sydow, describing his character as a pale, serious Don Quixote with a face as if sculpted in wood. Hanserik Hjertén, for Arbetaren, praised the cinematography but then called the film a horror film for children. Abroad, the reception was warmer. The film ranked second on Cahiers du Cinéma's Top 10 Films of the Year List in 1958. Bosley Crowther had only positive things to say in his 1958 review for The New York Times. Pauline Kael called it a magically powerful film. In 1961, Bergman won the Nastro d'Argento for Director of the Best Foreign Film.

• 8. An Object Of Parody

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  Death as a white-faced man in a dark cape, playing chess with mortals, became a favorite target for parody. In the final scene of the 1968 film De Düva, a fifteen-minute pastiche of Bergman's work, the protagonist plays badminton against Death and wins when a passing dove's droppings strike Death in the eye. The film imitates the style of Bergman's cinematographers Sven Nykvist and Gunnar Fischer. The work is parodied again in Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey in 1991, where the heroes challenge Death to several contemporary games. The 1993 Animaniacs episode "Meatballs or Consequences" pays homage as Yakko and Dot play checkers against Death to win back their brother Wakko. Music drew on it too. Scott Walker recapitulated the plot in his song "The Seventh Seal" from Scott 4. On Iron Maiden's 2003 album Dance of Death, the title track was inspired by the film's final scene. Guitarist Janick Gers described figures on the horizon starting a little jig. The story keeps finding new forms. In 2016, composer João MacDowell premiered in New York City the music for the first act of an opera version, sung in Swedish, tied to the Ingmar Bergman centenary in 2018.