The Seventh Seal (digital restoration)
Ingmar Bergman’s cinematic mystery teaches us a great deal about the fear, terror, and disorientation that grip people during a pandemic.
Jof and Mia, a traveling comedy duo with a child, journey through the unspoiled Swedish countryside in a covered wagon. It is the Middle Ages, when millions of people succumbed to the bubonic plague. Believers saw the disease as punishment for their sins, flagellated themselves with whips, and had visions of Armageddon. The knight Antonius Block (Max von Sydow), having returned from the Crusades, sees fear and madness taking hold all around him. When Death comes to claim him, he challenges him to a game of chess: a chance to do one last good deed before he is swept up in the dance of death.
With the mystery film The Seventh Seal, Ingmar Bergman gained international fame in the late 1950s. From then on, he was regarded as a representative of “auteur cinema,” the intellectual response to the emerging American film industry. Notably, despite the apocalyptic tone, Bergman offers hope, as Jof, Mia, and their child escape death and life goes on. The film won the Jury Prize at Cannes.
