'The Seventh Seal,' 1957

'The Seventh Seal,' 1957
(Handout)
Ingmar Bergman, the writer-director, brings his hero, a knight returning home from the Crusades, face to face with mortality -- not just his own, but everyone's. Max von Sydow, as the knight, plays chess with Death as he struggles to find meaning in a countryside ravaged by the plague and superstition. He cries out to a god "who must be somewhere." Does he receive a response? In the climactic image a string of travelers dance with the Grim Reaper "away from the dawn" (as Bergman put it in the screenplay), "while the rain washes their faces and clears the salt of the tears from their cheeks." Will the knight be among them? And what does it mean that the rain clears the salt of the tears from their cheeks? These questions are the source of the movie's tension but not of its magic. Bergman delivers supernatural adventure with the detail and nuance of experience and the white heat of revelation.