Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman’s obsession with life’s unfathomable questions began at an early age. The son of a strict pastor, Bergman developed the love/hate relationship with God that would eventually define his life and career. Combining his crisis of faith with his towering talent as a writer and director, he has forged a body of work as profound as it is prolific. His films are distinguished by an astonishing beauty that coexists with intense and unflinching emotional honesty. In 1957, Bergman took a passage from the Book of Revelation and a story about a particularly high-stakes chess game and turned them into one of the most unforgettable films of all time.
The Seventh Seal is the film Dostoevsky might have penned if he’d been a screenwriter. In its allegorical depiction of man’s search for truth and meaning, its questioning of God’s existence, and its stark portrayal of death, Ingmar Bergman’s early masterpiece may be the most deeply challenging film ever made.
Antonius Block (Max von Sydow) is a knight who has returned home from the Crusades, only to find that Death (Bengt Ekerot) has come for him. Unsatisfied at having wasted his life in the service of his holy mission, Block challenges Death to a chess game in hopes of gaining time—and perhaps knowledge of God’s ultimate purpose. Accompanied by his squire Jöns (Gunnar Björnstrand, providing the existential realist foil to von Sydow’s idealistic innocence), Block finds his homeland plague-ravaged and fear-stricken. In the wake of the Black Death, his countrymen have fallen prey to cowardice and superstition; sects of self-flagellating, cross-dragging fanatics march shrieking through the streets, and young women are burned at the stake for witchcraft. En route to his castle and wife, Block meets a couple of actors travelling with their infant son, while Jöns finds companions in a female “housekeeper” and a loutish blacksmith whose wife has run off with the actors’ colleague. Throughout their journey, Block and Death continue the game, with the fate of the whole group hanging in the balance.
As if the chess symbolism weren’t enough, cinematographer Gunnar Fischer provides Bergman with plenty of other potent black-and-white images: dark forests, foreboding thunderclouds, and especially the implacable white-faced visage of Death (Ekerot’s black-robed figure remains the screen’s most indelible Grim Reaper). Some of them—notably scenes involving a young witch and a parched plague victim—sear themselves into the mind and leave feelings of unease that linger long after Erik Nordgren’s ominous score has faded.
Indeed, Bergman’s medieval tableaus look more like Hell than the work of a benevolent and compassionate God. In essence, he asks the question every child wonders when introduced to the concept of the Almighty: How can God let bad things happen when He’s supposed to love us? What makes The Seventh Seal so provocative is that Bergman refuses to allow the standard shoulder-shrugging, leave-it-to-Jesus answer. Like Block, he can’t just let the issue go, even as he recognizes the inevitability of his own death. Yet by the film’s perfect, ambiguous ending, Block finds a kind of redemption and acceptance, and Bergman comes as close in his own quest for truth as any filmmaker has ever done.
Although The Seventh Seal is Bergman’s best-known film, he has directed almost fifty features, establishing himself among the world’s great filmmakers. His influence can be found in everything from Woody Allen movies to Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life and Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey. He has earned five Oscar nominations as screenwriter and three as director, and three of his films have won for Best Foreign Language Film. Although his last feature directorial effort was Fanny and Alexander (1982), he continues to write for both film and television, and to direct for the Swedish theatre. His most recent screenplay, Faithless, was directed in 2000 by his longtime collaborator and companion Liv Ullmann.