A knight . . . is returning from a protracted absence on a crusade. On the seacoast of his native land he encounters Death and begins playing chess with him. Their game is interrupted as Block (the knight) and his squire, Jöns, ride on to new adventures, while the viewer is introduced to Jof the juggler, his wife, Mia, and their baby son. . . . Jöns and Block ride up to a little gray stone church, where Block tries to ease his soul in the confessional, only to find he has been confessing to Death concealed behind the grille. . . . Riding on, Block and Jons become thirsty, and the squire, looking for a well, encounters the seminarian Raval, who had persuaded Block . . . to go to the crusade. . . . Squire, knight, and (a young) girl travel on to Embarrassment Inn, where Mia, Jof, and Skat are performing. . . . Jöns makes the acquaintance of Plog, a smith who is disconsolately looking for his wife, Lisa, whom he suspects of having run off with some actor.

The scene moves to the juggler's wagon, where the knight is meeting Mia and the baby. . . . The knight joins them in a frugal meal: wild strawberries and milk. He invites the juggler and family to join the knight's party for the dangerous ride through the forest. The knight moves off to continue his chess game with Death. . . .

At dawn the travelers encounter Raval . . . now mortally sick of the plague and begging for water. . . . The knight resumes his game with Death, and Jof and Mia, with their . . . son, slip away through a menacing storm. Death finally checkmates Block.

2.  Bergman on the Meaning of The Seventh Seal:  In my film the crusader returns from the Crusades as the soldier returns from war today. In the Middle Ages, men lived in terror of the plague. Today they live in fear of the atomic bomb. The Seventh Seal is an allegory with a theme that is quite simple: man, his eternal search for God, with death his only certainty.—Ingmar Bergman, program note

3.  Bergman and Religion:  The title of the movie derives from the Book of Revelations in the Bible. God's book of secrets is described as a scroll with seven seals. On the day of last judgment, the seventh seal will be broken, and man will know the secrets of God. After the opening of the scroll, however, there will come great destruction, in seven vials of wrath, and then a voice from heaven will proclaim, 'It is done.' These words are, of course, the only words spoken by the strange girl Squire Jöns befriends. The title of the movie indicates that Bergman wants to take his characters up to the point of last judgment. Whether or not they learn God's secrets is debatable; Bergman himself has implied that they do not.—John C. Stubbs, in Film Study Guides: Nine Classic Films (1975)

4.  Bergman and Faith:  In Bergman's films . . . the protagonists imagine a belief in Fate, History, God, Happiness, or something else. They cannot, however, live according to these premises, since reality constantly revises their view. In practical, everyday life they are forced to deny God's existence. They still leave evil and the devil as a force in life, a power opposed to themselves. Without, however, throwing the major questions overboard, the question that possesses them can never be solved—the question of happiness and fellowship, of practical daily life.—Jorn Donner, The Films of Ingmar Bergman (1972)

5.  Bergman as Director:  The Knight at his chess game with Death in The Seventh Seal: (all Bergman's protagonists) dance to the strings pulled by their creator, expressions of his ironic despair at the Russian roulette of existence, his questioning of the nature of belief. Bergman can appear almost sadistically brutal to these people of his invention; and then, suddenly, he lets up, flooding the screen with images of innocence and delight. Pain and pleasure alternate: the revolver hammer clicks again on an empty chamber, and the relief is exquisite. These flashes of happiness and tranquility [like] the picnic in The Seventh Seal, . . . are outdoor moments, summer moments held against the Swedish night.—Penelope Houston, The Contemporary Cinema (1969)

6.  Bergman's Treatment of Women:  What is striking about Bergman's treatment of women is not the philosophical role they are called upon to play in his films. It is, rather, his treatment of their characters. Bergman offers a much different explanation for the inability of his female, as opposed to his male, characters to find purpose in a universe without direction. His men fail largely because their pleas go unanswered; his women are ensnared at a much more elementary level of human development. Their lives lack meaning because they are rooted in biology and an inability to choose a style of life independent of the female sexual role. In this sense Bergman is arbitrarily far harder on his women than on his men. They are depicted as if on a lower notch of the evolutionary scale. . . . Bergman insists that because of their physiology, women are trapped in dry and empty lives within which they wither as the lines begin to appear on their faces.—Joan Mellen, Women and Their Sexuality in the New Film (1973)

7.  Bergman Interviewed by Jonas Sima:  In The Seventh Seal Jöns, the atheistic squire, says: 'We live in a ghost-world.' The Knight, [Antonias] Block, is seeking knowledge of a god who really exists. But the god remains silent. He exclaims: 'Why can't I kill the god within me?' But when he sees the happiness of the Jof family, he exclaims: 'Faith is great suffering.' In my view this is a rather unpleasant sort of faith, but in the film the Knight himself, on the contrary, is rather a decent fellow. We really feel he is a struggling soul. Chiefly I'm thinking of the execution scene, in which the Knight is more interested to know whether the Witch has really seen the devil, than he is in her physical sufferings. But Jöns, the atheist, gives her some water.

Ingmar Bergman:  It's two sides of the same thing. I couldn't agree with you more. To the fanatical believer physical and spiritual suffering is beside the point, compared with salvation. That is why, to him [the Knight], everything happening around him is irrelevant, a mirror-image, a mere will-o'-the-wisp. But Jöns, he's a man of the here- and-now. He feels sympathy, hatred, and scorn; the other bloke is like the echo department of a large organ, placed somewhere up in the rafters.

Jonas Sima:  Which figure did you feel closest to at that time—1956?