While Bergman, who died in seclusion on the remote Baltic island of Faro last Monday aged 89, is now on his merry way, it is hard not to think of the director as a figure quite like his own creation Antonious Block . . . the impassive knight, played by Max von Sydow in The Seventh Seal, who tries to ward off Death by playing against him a cunning game of chess. Block knows it is only a matter of time before Death claims him but he is determined to tease out the answers to some of life's big questions before he does so.

While many think of Bergman today as old-fashioned . . . a Scandinavian miserabilist whose films were bleak, nihilistic and did little but remind us that we are all going to die (and let's face it, there certainly was a lot of that), there was a time too when Bergman was a colossus, heralding in the era of the arthouse film. (If anything, his death now will hasten a reappraisal of his work. ) It was Bergman who first opened film up to that kind of philosophical and psychological inquiry. He hunted metaphysical big game like no director before him, peering into the dark corners of the human psyche. He made viewers sit up and take film seriously.

Over the course of his formidable career (the kind of career that would be impossible to any director today . . . he honed his craft in over 50 films) Bergman evolved into a daring filmmaker, seeing film as a legitimate artform to explore weighty issues such as God, existentialist despair, age and relationships. His viewers were confronted with severe close-ups of his actors' faces . . . an attempt to lay bare every psychological nuance.

In two of his greatest works, Persona (1966) and Cries and Whispers (1972), he conducted searing interrogations of the female psyche that were abrasive to watch but left viewers stunned.

Other masterpieces that have stood the test of time include Wild Strawberries (1957), Scenes from a Marriage (1974) and his autobiographical ode to childhood, Fanny and Alexander (1982).

As Bergman got older, his works increasingly became vehicles of austere inquiry, sometimes at the expense of the viewer. Still, it is difficult to bring to mind a director today who can match Bergman's penetrating genius with career resilience.

"Not a day has gone by in my life when I haven't thought about death, " the director once said.

Bergman, it seems, made films as a way of coping with his own despair.

The Seventh Seal is one of his greatest works and it is as stunning, fresh and relevant today as it ever was, despite the familiar and much-parodied images of Death and the chess game. An allegory about life, death and the absence of God, Bergman once described it as "the film that is most personal to me". The Seventh Seal is not just a thrilling introduction to his work.

It also shines a light on how Bergman perceived himself in the role of artist. In one scene, the knight's squire Jons (Gunnar Bjornstrand) approaches a painter in a small church who is drawing terrifying murals of death and madness on the walls.

It is an exchange that might represent how Bergman would like to have been remembered:

Jons: "Why all this daubing?"

Painter: "To remind people of death."

Jons: "That won't make them any happier."

Painter: "Why make them happy? Why not scare them?"

Jons: "Then they won't look at your picture."

Painter: "Yes, they will. A skull is more interesting than a naked woman."

Jons: "If you scare them. . ."

Painter: "They think. . ."

'The Seventh Seal' is at the Irish Film Institute from 24 - 30 August