The Seventh Seal" - which is a reference to the Book of Revelation - is one of the greatest movies of all time which established Ingmar Bergman as a world-renowned director. Set in Sweden during the Black Death, it tells of the journey of Antonius, a medieval knight, who challenges Death to a game of chess, with his life as the prize.
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)
And to think that Antonius may have lost his life due to an incorrectly set up chessboard ...
