Great actor Max von Sydow died on March 8th 2020. (I liked his every film I saw .)
Wikipedia informs:
from Ingmar Bergman's 'The Virgin Spring', 1960
Frank M. Snowden, The New Yorker, March 3 2020:
“…You can see this even into the twentieth century with that
wonderful film by Ingmar Bergman, “The Seventh Seal,” where the plague is a metaphor
for what Bergman was worried about in 1957, which is nuclear war. One can see
that it has all the things that I’ve been talking about with regard to the
plague, including the danse macabre with which the film ends. You’d see
paintings of the Grim Reaper coming, and it really is an example of the
persistence of this artistic response to death….”
Wikipedia informs:
"The Seventh Seal is a
1957 Swedish historical fantasy film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman.
Set in Sweden during the Black Death, it tells of the journey of a medieval
knight (Max von Sydow) and a game of chess he plays with the personification of
Death (Bengt Ekerot), who has come to take his life..."
from Ingmar Bergman's 'The Virgin Spring', 1960