Cinema Classics: The Seventh Seal

We have the pleasure of inviting you to a screening of an Ingmar Bergman’s film within the Movie Classics series:

The Seventh Seal

September 26th, 2019, 6 PM
Forum cinema, 5 Legionowa Street
tickets: 12 PLN (regular ticket), 10 PLN (discount ticket), available at the Forum cinema’s box office (5 Legionowa Street), BCC/LZC’ box office (19 Warszawska Street) and on bilety.bok.bialystok.pl

Bergman’s best-known film (so famous that it has been endlessly parodied in popular culture), The Seventh Seal stars Max von Sydow as Antonius Blok, a 14th-century knight who returns home after a decade fighting in the Holy Crusades to find his plague-ravaged country in a frenzy of self-flagellation and witch hunts. When Death (Bengt Ekerot) comes to claim the knight, Blok challenges him to a game of chess, hoping to gain enough time to overcome his spiritual doubt before he perishes. The film’s darkness and starkness are not just aesthetic choices suggested by the brooding austerity of medieval paintings, but were dictated by Bergman’s small budget and short shooting schedule (in his reminiscence Images, Bergman revealed that the famous “Dance of Death” that ends the film was improvised in a matter of minutes). “The Seventh Seal [was] as important to the development of world cinema as the New Wave in France or the work of Fellini, Antonioni and Bertolucci … [it] continues to enthrall each new generation with its complex investigation of love, self-sacrifice, and the problems of pain and death” (Peter Cowie).