In these days of uncertainty, panic, and apocalyptic speeches, I felt like returning to The Seventh Seal (1957). The story of the knight Antonius Block (Max von Sydow) and his squire Jöns (Gunnar Björnstrand) returning home from the Crusades to find the desolation caused by the Black Death is more than appropriate to me. In the middle of the 14th century, the world experienced its deadliest pandemic, and the population of the European continent was drastically reduced; some figures indicate more than 50 million deaths. The one also known as the black death is a worthy protagonist of any horror film. But for Bergman, the story of the deadly pandemic served as medicine to exorcise his own demons. Death was one of the many recurring themes in the filmmaker’s work, perhaps the one that obsessed him the most.

When the Lamb opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour. And I saw the seven angels standing before God, and seven trumpets were given to them. (Revelation 8, 1-2)

The end of humanity has been one of the themes that cinema has flirted with the most. Aliens, natural disasters, pandemics, and zombie apocalypses have always been the order of the day to reduce the Earth to pure ashes. But in The Seventh Seal Bergman puts theatricality aside and makes us confront the inevitability of death from an intimate level and thus provides a unique forcefulness. Antonius Block’s great fear is not death or being overtaken by the Black Death, it is the uncertainty of what is coming in the afterlife. The absolute black, the nothingness, the silence, is what strikes fear into Antonius’ soul. His cry to the creator demands a response, a sign that encourages him for the journey without return. From the first sequence on that beach when on his knees we see him make a vain attempt to communicate with God, his face is transfigured, and we can feel the disbelief circulating through his veins. The trip to our knight’s house runs parallel to another odyssey. One that seeks to find answers from God, from a woman condemned for being possessed by a demon, from a minstrel and his wife, or from death itself. He refuses to leave this world without knowing what awaits him when he closes his eyes for the last time.

The seventh seal and the end of humanity

When death, in the macabre face of Bengt Ekerot, comes for our tormented protagonist, he challenges him to a game of chess. The condition is that for the duration of the game, you delay your mission. With time against and death moving its chips Antonius hurries back home. Cinematographer Gunnar Fischer (1910-2011), a frequent collaborator of the director, captures the essence of this existential drama. The close-ups, which Bergman liked so much, are the spearhead for the compositions of each sequence. The image of death and the knight playing chess on the shore of the beach is an unmistakable emblem of cinema. There will be more popular, more romantic, more heroic ones, but this print summarizes one of the most important periods of Bergman’s work.

Novelist and film critic Kim Newman referred to this film as a medieval fable influenced by Bergman’s enthusiasm for Akira Kurosawa’s samurai films and an interest in celebrating simple pleasures as indicative of more complicated torments. And that was Bergman, in everyday life he found the deepest essence of life, in his talks during his sacred meals and his characters with devastating monologues or in his walks through the dream and his acuity to show it on screen.

The Seventh Seal is a must-see reference work for every cinephile and a key piece in the history of cinema. Bergman uses cinema to exorcise his demons to the sound of death that commands the troupe that dances on the hill to the rhythm of the melody that we all have to dance to.