The inspiration for one of the most legendary (and parodied) images in world cinema lies a half-hour’s drive north of Stockholm, up near the ceiling of a small medieval church. A fresco shows a ghoulish skeleton and a young man, dressed in a green robe and a brown hat, hovering over a large chessboard. The mural at the Taby church was painted in the 1480s. It came to life nearly five centuries later, when it led Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish director, to cast Max von Sydow as Antonius Block, a troubled knight, and to pit him against Death in a chess match. Death is everywhere in Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal”. It rages in the Holy Land, where Block and his squire Jons have spent years as Crusaders, and back home in Sweden, where the bubonic plague has started to spread. Before it takes him, Block wants to understand whether his life has made any sense, and what might await in the hereafter. To do so he needs time, and to have time he needs to play for it.

Ingmar Bergman, who uses a great deal of visionary and horrific imagery in his films, much of which is taken directly from literature, art and myth. Most of Bergman’s film’s could be defined as marginal fantasy, but I have restricted the choice to just six. The Seventh Seal (1957) is an allegory, beautifully photographed in black-and-white by Gunnar Fischer. Max Von Sydow is the Knight, riding with his sardonic squire across the ravaged landscape of Europe in the Dark Ages, a world suffering from plague and anarchy during the time of the Crusades. Early in the morning he meets the figure of Death on the beach. Later the Knight confesses in church but it is Death who hears him (and points out that God may not be there to hear his prayers – a viewpoint that seems all too possible when we see the squalor and misery through which the Knight travels).