The Seventh Seal Book

The Seventh Seal is probably the best-known work of one of the world's great filmmakers, the one which most clearly bears Bergman's unmistakable signature. The opening scene sets the tone: a stoney beach under a leaden sky, the knight alone with his thoughts, then the approach of black-clad Death, whom the knight invites to play a game of chess. Bergman's medieval allegory of faith and doubt is dark with the horrors of witch-burning and the plague. But it is also shot through with bright flashes of peace and joy, symbolized in the milk and strawberries offered to the knight by an innocent family of actors.

In a finely written appreciation, Melvyn Bragg describes his own first encounter as a student with this extraordinary film, and how it revealed to him another cinema, quite different from the Hollywood with which he had grown up. He also recounts his later meeting with Bergman, and how the marks of his powerful personality are everywhere in this troubling but inspiring masterpiece.