The Seventh Seal

Ingmar Bergman directed The Seventh Seal in 1957 over a thirty-five-day shoot, simultaneously preparing Wild Strawberries. The film won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes that year and established Bergman, then thirty-eight, as the defining voice of European arthouse cinema. The image of Antonius Block playing chess against Death on a Swedish beach has become the most-parodied single shot in the history of the medium, a measure of how completely the film has entered the cultural unconscious.

Antonius Block (Max von Sydow, in the role that launched his international career) returns from the Crusades to find his homeland ravaged by the Black Death. On a beach he meets Death (Bengt Ekerot, in a performance of dry, almost amused authority) and challenges him to a game of chess for time enough to perform one act of meaningful significance. As the game continues across the days that follow, Block joins a travelling family of players (the gentle juggler Jof (Nils Poppe), his wife Mia (Bibi Andersson), their infant son) and his squire Jöns (Gunnar Björnstrand, providing the rationalist counterweight) journeys with him.

The film operates simultaneously as medieval allegory, philosophical drama, and surprisingly tender family-portrait. Bergman's central question (how do you live meaningfully in a world that gives no assurances?) has not aged. Sven Nykvist's photography in the Strawberry Picnic sequence is among the most beautiful images he ever produced for Bergman.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The film that defined what European arthouse cinema could ask of its audience, and the foundational Bergman work in the international consciousness. Seventy years on, the chess-on-the-beach image still works exactly as Bergman designed it.