In 1955, von Sydow moved to Malmö and joined the Malmö City Theatre, whose chief director at the time was Ingmar Bergman. Von Sydow had previously sought to play a small part in Bergman's "Prison" (', 1949), but the director rejected the proposition. Bergman and von Sydow's first film was "The Seventh Seal" (', 1957), in which von Sydow portrayed Antonius Block, a disillusioned 14th-century knight returning from the Crusades to a plague-stricken Sweden. The scene of his character playing a game of chess with Death has come to be regarded as an iconic moment in cinema. Von Sydow went on to appear in a total of 11 Bergman films. In "The Magician" (', 1958), von Sydow starred as Vogler, a 19th-century traveling illusionist who remains silent for most of the film. In "The Virgin Spring" (', 1960), he played a medieval landowner who plots vengeance on the men who raped and murdered his daughter. In "Through a Glass Darkly" (', 1961), he portrayed the husband of a schizophrenic woman, played by Harriet Andersson. During this period, he also had roles in films including "Wild Strawberries" (', 1957), "Brink of Life" (', 1958) and "Winter Light" (', 1963). Films starring von Sydow were submitted by Sweden for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in five out of six years between 1957 and 1962. Under Bergman, von Sydow also continued his stage career, playing Brick in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof", Peer in "Peer Gynt", Alceste in "The Misanthrope" and Faust in "Urfaust". In his company were Gunnar Björnstrand, Ingrid Thulin, Bibi Andersson and Gunnel Lindblom, all frequent collaborators of Bergman on screen.