"The Seventh Seal" significantly helped Bergman in gaining his position as a world-class director. When the film won the Special Jury Prize at the 1957 Cannes Film Festival, the attention generated by it (along with the previous year's "Smiles of a Summer Night") made Bergman and his stars Max von Sydow and Bibi Andersson well known to the European film community, and the critics and readers of "Cahiers du Cinéma", among others, discovered him with this movie. Within five years of this, he had established himself as the first real auteur of Swedish cinema. With its images and reflections upon death and the meaning of life, "The Seventh Seal" had a symbolism that was "immediately apprehensible to people trained in literary culture who were just beginning to discover the 'art' of film, and it quickly became a staple of high school and college literature courses... Unlike Hollywood 'movies,' "The Seventh Seal" clearly was aware of elite artistic culture and thus was readily appreciated by intellectual audiences."