On what Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957) does that its iconic imagery sometimes obscures.

The Seventh Seal is primarily known for its central image: a medieval knight playing chess with Death. This image has been reproduced and parodied so many times that approaching the film fresh is difficult. The image has become shorthand for a certain kind of serious European cinema, which is ironic because the film itself is anything but ponderous.

The film is structured as a series of encounters during a plague: the knight and his squire travel through a landscape of death and religious crisis, meeting various people whose relationships to mortality and faith represent different philosophical positions.

The squire Jöns is as important as the knight and is often less discussed. Where the knight is locked in metaphysical anguish — he cannot believe in God and cannot accept that God does not exist — Jöns is a pragmatist who has resolved the question in the negative and lives accordingly. His section of the film is funnier and more worldly, and his relationship with the knight is the film's emotional center.

Bergman was thirty-seven when he made this film. The urgency of the questions it asks — whether life has meaning, whether faith is available, how to face death — has the quality of real urgency rather than performed philosophical depth.