The Seventh Seal

Because the image of a man playing chess with Death has been quoted so often — posters, T-shirts, advertising, endless parody — that it has almost stopped carrying weight, while the film itself is far quieter and stranger than that single frame. Bergman was not writing a fable about dying. He was asking how a person should live when God will not answer. Seventy years on, the silence has not lifted.

十四世纪，十字军东征结束。骑士 Antonius Block 和侍从 Jöns 回到瑞典，发现家乡正被黑死病吞没。在海边，Block 遇见了死神，提出用一盘棋作赌注——只要棋局不结束，他就能继续活着。影片跟着这群人穿过瘟疫中的乡村：一对带着婴儿的流浪艺人、一个被指控与魔鬼往来而将被烧死的少女、一队边走边鞭打自己的苦修者。棋局在中途中断了几次，又几次重新开始。

Script and sources

The film grew out of Bergman's own one-act play Trämålning (Wood Painting), written in 1953–54 for the acting students of Malmö City Theatre. He began the screenplay while hospitalised at Karolinska in Stockholm with a stomach complaint, and rewrote it five times. Carl-Anders Dymling, head of Svensk Filmindustri, had turned it down; Bergman only got the go-ahead after the Cannes success of Smiles of a Summer Night — on a schedule of thirty-five days and a budget of $150,000.

Cinematography

The cinematographer was Gunnar Fischer. Every scene but two was shot in or around the Filmstaden studios in Solna, outside Stockholm; the exceptions are the opening chess game by the sea and the closing Dance of Death, both filmed at Hovs Hallar, a rocky, precipitous stretch of coast in north-western Scania. The film is black and white, and there is hardly a redundant camera move in it.

Performance

Max von Sydow's Antonius Block is the real discovery here, and the beginning of his long collaboration with Bergman. Bengt Ekerot plays Death with almost no expression at all — a white face and a dark cape. An easily missed coincidence: Ekerot had earlier directed the stage version of Wood Painting in Stockholm. He directed the play before he acted its Death.

Where the images come from

The chess game is not Bergman's invention. He said plainly that it came from a medieval church painting of the 1480s in Täby kyrka, north of Stockholm, by Albertus Pictor. The title comes from Revelation 8:1: when the Lamb opens the seventh seal, "there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour." The verse is quoted at the very start and again near the end, and that silence is the film's central proposition.

Legacy

It premiered in Sweden on 16 February 1957 and won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes the same year. The initial Swedish notices were in fact divided: the photography was widely praised, the writing was not, with one critic calling it "a horror film for children." What canonised it was the international response — Cahiers du Cinéma ranked it second on its 1958 top-ten list, and it has since appeared on nearly every "greatest films" list, including the Vatican's 45 films of 1995.