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.

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