Double Feature! Special Event: 'THE SEVENTH SEAL'/ 'EXTREMELY LOUD & INCREDIBLY CLOSE'

Academy Award nominee Max von Sydow joins Cinematheque in person for an evening that begins with his 1957 performance as a medieval knight playing chess with "Death" in the iconic Ingmar Bergman film THE SEVENTH SEAL and ends with his recent Oscar-nominated performance in EXTREMELY LOUD & INCREDIBLY CLOSE (nominated for two Academy Awards: Best Picture and Best Supporting Actor).

Discussion between films with actor Max von Sydow.

THE SEVENTH SEAL DET SJUNDE INSEGLET 1957, Janus Films, 92 min, Sweden, Dir: Ingmar Bergman

Arguably Ingmar Bergman’s most iconic film and the movie that helped create the international arthouse cinema craze of the 1950s. While the Black Plague rages all around, medieval knight Max von Sydow plays a game of chess with Death … but who will win? Often imitated and parodied but never equaled, THE SEVENTH SEAL is an astonishing, protean masterpiece: a film to storm the gates of Heaven with. Winner of the Special Jury Prize at Cannes. "Bergman's spiritual quest is at the center of the films he made in the middle of his career. THE SEVENTH SEAL opens that period, in which he asked, again and again, why God seemed absent from the world." - Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times. In Swedish with English subtitles.

EXTREMELY LOUD & INCREDIBLY CLOSE 2011, Warner Bros., 129 min, USA, Dir: Stephen Daldry

Eleven-year-old amateur inventor, Francophile and pacifist Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn) discovers a mysterious key among the belongings of his deceased father (Tom Hanks), who died a year earlier in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Determined to keep his vital connection to the man who playfully cajoled him into confronting his wildest fears, the young boy embarks on an urgent search for the lock the key will open. As Oskar crosses the five New York boroughs on foot - encountering a range of people (including an excellent Max von Sydow) who are each survivors in their own way - he begins to uncover unseen links to the father he misses, to the mother (Sandra Bullock) who has become so emotionally distant and to the whole noisy, dangerous and often wondrous world around him. Adapted from the acclaimed bestseller by Jonathan Safran Foer. Nominated for 2 Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Supporting Actor (von Sydow).