THE SEVENTH SEAL
DET SJUNDE INSEGLET
1957,
Janus Films,
92 min,
Sweden,
Dir: Ingmar Bergman
Arguably Ingmar Bergman’s most iconic film and the movie that helped create the international arthouse-cinema craze of the 1950s. While the Black Plague rages all around, medieval knight Max von Sydow plays a game of chess with Death … but who will win? Often imitated and parodied but never equaled, THE SEVENTH SEAL is an astonishing, protean masterpiece: a film to storm the gates of Heaven with. Winner of the Special Jury Prize at Cannes. "Bergman's spiritual quest is at the center of the films he made in the middle of his career. THE SEVENTH SEAL opens that period, in which he asked, again and again, why God seemed absent from the world." - Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times.