Life, death, and the existence of God are questioned amid the miasmic stench of the Black Death in Ingmar Bergman’s THE SEVENTH SEAL. Returning home to find it ravaged by the bubonic plague, a medieval knight (Max von Sydow) plays chess with Death in this iconic suffusion of monochromatic doom. A transcendent philosophical allegory and rumination on man’s relationship with life, death, superstition, and faith.

About this series:

This year marks the centennial of the great writer/director Ingmar Bergman. We will present two selections of his work, one in summer and one in fall. This, the first of the two series, focuses on characters in crises both godly and man-made as seen through the lens of Bergman, perhaps the filmmaker most able to express this “Darkness.”