Continuing on their way, the knight and squire encounter a troupe of performers, including a couple named Joseph and Mary who have a young child.

They visit a seemingly deserted farmstead, where the squire catches a man named Raval trying to steal the bracelet of a plague victim. This Raval is the very theologian who, years earlier, convinced the knight to join the Crusades.

The plague has inspired extreme behavior. A group of flagellants files past, some carrying heavy crosses, others whipping themselves, doing penance. The knight and squire encounter a girl (Maud Hansson), held in a cage, who is going to be burned at the stake; her captors explain that she slept with the devil, drawing down the plague. The knight questions the girl about the devil, who should know if God exists. "Look in my eyes,” the woman says. "The priest could see him there, and the soldiers--they would not touch me.” She is almost proud. "I see nothing but terror,” the knight says. Later, as the woman is being prepared for burning, the squire says, "Look into her eyes. She sees nothing but emptiness.” "It can't be,” says the knight. We are left, almost until the end, with the possibility that although Death exists as a supernatural figure, there is no larger structure in which God plays a part.

Some filmmakers are born. Ingmar Bergman was made. Self-made. Born in Uppsala in 1918, he was the son of a Lutheran minister whose strict upbringing included the punishment (recalled in the films) of the small boy being locked in a cupboard “with things that will eat your toes.” His first postwar films, not much seen today, are uneasy mixtures of Italian neorealism and Hollywood social drama, and even the titles ("It Rains on Our Love," "Night is My Future”) suggest their banality. He was not at ease in the world of small realistic gestures and everyday behavior, and only when he drew back into more serious issues did he begin to find his genius, in films like "To Joy” (1949) and "Sawdust and Tinsel” (1953). "The Seventh Seal” and “Wild Strawberries,” both released in 1957, mark his coming of age as an artist. Both are about men near the ends of their lives, on a journey in search of meaning.

Bergman's spiritual quest is at the center of the films he made in the middle of his career. "The Seventh Seal” opens that period, in which he asked, again and again, why God seemed absent from the world. In "Through a Glass Darkly” (1962), the mentally ill heroine has a vision of God as a spider. In the austere "Winter Light” (1962), Bjornstrand and von Sydow appear again, in the story of a country priest whose faith is threatened by the imminence of nuclear catastrophe. In "Persona” (1966), televised images of war cause an actress to simply stop speaking. In the masterpiece "Cries and Whispers" (1973), a woman dying of cancer finds a faith that her sisters cannot understand or share.

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