A knight (Max Von Sydow) and his squire (Gunnar Bjornstrand) return from the Crusades to find their native Sweden beset by the Plague in the 14^th century. Despair ravages the land. On his way back to his wife and their castle, the knight invites several travelers he meets on his journey to join him: an acrobat (Nils Popppe), his young actor wife (Bibi Andersson) and their infant son, a woman the squire rescues from rape, and a blacksmith and his wayward wife.

Meanwhile, the knight is visited by Death (Bengt Ekerot) and challenges him to a game of chess, hoping to find some proof that God exists and possibly delay his fate. The film’s title is a reference to the Book of Revelations and a passage which states, “And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour.”

Written and directed by Ingmar Bergman, The Seventh Seal is perhaps “the” European art film. It has been mimed and parodied repeatedly over the years, mostly in TV cartoons. The existentialist debate and search for the meaning of life that takes place among black and white imagery of medieval Europe is the stuff that has launched many a college term paper. I saw it for the first time my freshman year of college.

Though not an historically accurate portrait of medieval Sweden – the existential debate is probably more common to Swedes of the 1950s than those in the 14^th century – Bergman’s examination of pastoral life and the fear and loathing that roamed the countryside during the doomsday plague is fascinating. He is extremely critical of the clergy, who convinced villagers to go off and fight in the Holy Land or now accuses the people of being responsible for the Plague. They come off no better than frauds or thieves in Bergman’s view.

A soldier”s despair and search for meaning is vividly portrayed in Von Sydow’s eyes. The chess scenes he shares with Ekerot are probably the chief reason to see the film. I was also mesmerized by the two “visions” that apparently, no one but the acrobat can see; one of the Virgin Mary walking a child and the film’s seminal climactic shot, Death pulling his latest victims hand by hand across a hillside.

The film was the winner of the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1957 and opened in the U.S. in October of 1958.