Could you ever image "Casablanca" or "The Third Man" in anything but black-and-white? I love watching black-and-white movies, despite the fact that they often put actors' lives in danger during driving scenes, as they aren't able to tell if the traffic light is red or green.
No such danger in the medieval allegory "The Seventh Seal" which is set in fourteenth-century Sweden during the time of the Black Death, long before motor cars and traffic lights, and tells of the journey of Antonius, a medieval knight, who challenges Death to a game of chess, with his life as the prize. It is one of the greatest movies of all time which established Ingmar Bergman as a world-renowned director.
A regular movie-goer watching this movie may pick up on a few things: the terror, the suspense, the artful composition of the shots. A chess player, though - and that includes me - sees only one thing: that the chess board that decides Antonius’s fate is set up totally backwards.
Here is a correctly set up chess board ...
... .. and here is the (still) correctly set up board early in the movie:
But then things begin to go wrong. You see, when you set up the board, you're supposed to orient it so that the square nearest to each player's right side is light-coloured - the mnemonic "right is light" might help.
The next rule: when you array the pieces, the white queen always goes on the white square, and the black queen always on the black square.
So what do you see halfway through the movie? A black square nearest to each player's right side which changes the game completely!
It also positions the queen on the wrong side of each player's king at the start of the game (always provided the white-queen-on-white-square and black-queen-on-black-square rule is still correctly followed)
To think that Antonius may have lost his life due to an incorrectly set up chessboard ...
