Seventh Seal has been a benchmark by which all other great foreign films are judged. It launched the international career of its director, Ingmar Bergman, and made a star of its 27-year-old leading actor, Max von Sydow.

The Seventh Seal and the other Bergman masterpieces that soon followed it -- Wild Strawberries, The Magician, and The Virgin Spring -- were as important to the development of world cinema as the New Wave in France or the work of Fellini, Antonioni and Bertolucci in Italy. Bergman's work proved that essential philosphical and human issues could be explored on film and still reach a wide audience.

Peter Cowie says: Bergman is exorcising his own demons, his own dread of the eternal darkness, and to his surprise and delight this process has appealed to audiences in practically every corner of the world. It is as thought for the first time in the movies someone had dared to ask in public those most intimate and basic questions that each of us ask in private; to illustrate and analyze on screen the doubts and fears, yearnings and aspirations, for which most filmmakers cannot find a visual language.

David's Review is coming in the mean time here is on from Kansas State University.

The Seventh Seal (1957)
Film looks at disease, good and evil
Review by: NIKOLA ZYTKOW, Collegian

People are dying like flies, some say Judgment Day is near, and Death plays an actual game of chess with men. This sets the stage for Ingmar Bergman's "The Seventh Seal" (not to be confused with "The Seventh Sign").

This 1957, black-and-white movie depicts the travels of a knight returning from the Crusades who finds most of medieval Europe ravished by the Black Plague.

The knight not only struggles with the sights of misery he witnesses but also with his own faltering convictions of good and evil and heaven and hell. He senses his own immortality and spends a majority of the movie seeking answers to haunting, ageless questions, such as why an all-powerful God would let this horrendous disease kill so many innocent people.

The movie, which is in Swedish with English subtitles, takes a while to get used to. But after the initial shock of having to read subtitles instead of being fully able to relax and sit back, the storyline captivates.

Bergman, who also directed and wrote "The Serpent's Egg," "Scenes From a Marriage" and "Face to Face," is well known for his provocative films. "The Seventh Seal" doesn't disappoint in that aspect.

Bergman presents horrifying images, accompanied with dramatic music, of peasants and priests hovered over crosses, announcing the end of the world. Crawling, legless plague victims follow them
as the music reaches an eerie climax and a woman is burned at the stake after being accused of witchcraft.

Even with these grim undertones, the film manages to generate humorous scenes, mainly revolving around a caravan of actors that the knight and his companion run into on the way back home. They are the last hope of the people; they have nothing left but humor to keep their minds off their circumstances.

Overall this is no sword-fighting, dame-winning sort of adventure; rather it is a venture into the souls of men and their weakness against nature, as well as a quest to understand the greatest mysteries of man.

If nothing else, it is a good peek into the pages of history

Copyright 1995, Student Publications Inc. All rights reserved.   This document may be distributed electronically, provided it is distributed in its entirety and includes this notice. However, it cannot be reprinted without the express written permission of Student Publications Inc., Kansas State University.

THEY KNEW INSTANTLY THAT THEY COULDN'T FINISH THEIR ACT BECAUSE THE SEVENTH SEAL WAS BROKEN.