The Seventh Seal

How this film uses it

Bergman's Death is a figure you can see: pale, robed in black and perfectly willing to talk. The chess game means death can be delayed, bargained with and gambled against, so it no longer feels simply inevitable. The film asks whether arguing with death matters if we already know how it ends.

Where to see it

The beach chess game. The knight and Death sit across from each other as if this were completely ordinary, and the game begins.

How this film uses it

The film came out 12 years after Hiroshima, in the shadow of the Cold War and the nuclear threat. The 14th-century plague stands for the mid-20th-century bomb. The silence of God stands for the silence of any force that might stop annihilation. You can see right through Bergman's medieval setting, and the modern fear underneath is the point.

Where to see it

The flagellant procession, people who whip themselves as penance. The medieval religious response to a death no one can understand mirrors the secular responses to the nuclear threat.

How this film uses it

Gunnar Fischer's photography keeps arranging people in tableaus, still compositions that look like medieval illustrations. You see silhouettes against the sky, processions and the chess game at the edge of the sea. The look tells you this story belongs to the history of images as well as the history of events.

Where to see it

The opening. Death and the knight are at the shore, in a composition that recalls a medieval church painting.

How this film uses it

The knight wants proof that God exists, in a world where that's exactly what can't be proven. The chess game is his method. By delaying death long enough, he hopes to do 1 thing that shows life has meaning. Bergman's point is that the quest was always impossible, and that knowing this is wisdom.

Where to see it

The knight's confession scene. He tells Death his strategy. The confession shows the trap of looking for evidence of something that can't have evidence.

How this film uses it

The knight asks God for proof. In the confessional he asks why God hides himself, and all he gets back is silence. Bergman designs this silence with care, so it feels like a particular kind of nothingness that is present in the room. That silence is the film's statement about God.

Where to see it

The knight in the church confessional. His questions about God fill the space. The silence that follows carries the film's religious weight.