WATCH PARTY: The Seventh Seal (1957) Ingmar Bergman @ Richard Tucker Library

SWITCH-UP: We'll be in the Meeting Room to the left of the entrance at Richard Tucker Library. I was told this will be a better room. We'll see.

It's weird that I've seen much more obscure Bergman films but not this one.

RUNTIME: 97 minutes

SYNOPSIS (via Criterion.com): Returning exhausted from the Crusades to find medieval Sweden gripped by the Plague, a knight (Max von Sydow) suddenly comes face-to-face with the hooded figure of Death, and challenges him to a game of chess. As the fateful game progresses, and the knight and his squire encounter a gallery of outcasts from a society in despair, Ingmar Bergman mounts a profound inquiry into the nature of faith and the torment of mortality. One of the most influential films of its time, The Seventh Seal is a stunning allegory of man’s search for meaning and a work of stark visual poetry.

BLURBS:
"It is endlessly imitated and spoofed; it is also an august pinnacle of high-risk, high-art filmmaking, and one with a reputation for being far more forbidding and humourless than it actually is." - Tim Robey, The Daily Telegraph

"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." - Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

"We are uneasy to find Bergman asking existential questions in an age of irony [...] But the directness of 'The Seventh Seal” is its strength: This is an uncompromising film, regarding good and evil with the same simplicity and faith as its hero." - Roger Ebert