Directed by Ingmar Bergman / Screenplay by Ingmar Bergman

The Swedish theatre and film director Ingmar Bergman was already fêted throughout Scandinavia when his historical fantasy The Seventh Seal - his seventeenth picture - won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes and propelled its creator onto the global stage as one of the leading directors of world cinema. The Seventh Seal also marked the beginning of Bergman’s long working relationship with his fellow countryman Max Von Sydow, an actor whose international reputation would eventually take him to Hollywood to star in pictures as diverse as The Exorcist (1973), Flash Gordon (1980), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), and many more besides. In The Seventh Seal, Von Sydow plays a disillusioned medieval knight returning from the Crusades to find his homeland ravaged by plague, violence and cruelty. When Death himself appears (an imposing performance by Bengt Ekerot), the knight challenges him to a game of chess, hoping that this will delay his own demise for long enough to let him perform just one meaningful deed in a life he has come to regard as wasted. There follows a sequence of grim vignettes exploring themes of morality, faith and the human condition, culminating in the knight and his companions being led away in the Dance of Death, silhouetted against the horizon in an unforgettable closing image. The Seventh Seal’s existential chess game has enjoyed a long afterlife in popular culture, often referenced in music videos and films, most memorably the 1991 comedy Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, in which the time-travelling high school boys get the better of Death by challenging him instead to games of Cluedo and Twister.

Framed Dimensions: 330mm x 410mm

Acrylic on 300gsm Arches oil paper
Glazed, mounted and framed

Supplied with signed letter of authenticity from Barnaby.