The Seventh Seal

1957, Sweden, Ingmar Bergman, 96 min, Swedish with English subtitles
With Max von Sydow, Gunnar Björnstrand, Bengt Ekerot

Introduced by theater historian Arnold Aronson.

“Ingmar Bergman’s dark masterpiece effortlessly sees off the revisionists and the satirists; it is a radical work of art that reaches back to scripture, to Cervantes and to Shakespeare to create a new dramatic idiom of its own. It was released 50 years ago, but it’s as fresh as a glass of ice-cold water.”
““ Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian, 2007

Set in Denmark during the Black Death, it tells of the journey of a medieval knight and a game of chess he plays with Death, who has come to take his life.

The film was ranked #8 in Empire magazine’s “The 100 Best Films of World Cinema” in 2010.

About the Introducer

Arnold Aronson is a theatre historian and professor of theatre at Columbia University. He writes on scenography as well as modern and contemporary theatre for both scholarly and popular publications. His latest book is Ming Cho Lee: A Life in Design and he is co-editor of a new journal entitled Theatre & Performance Design. Aronson has a long association with the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space of which he served as General Commissioner in 2007.