Tarot in film quiz: Bond, Varda and Jodorowsky

This quiz checks whether you remember the best-known tarot scenes in film. Directors love the deck because one card on a table sets the mood at once: mystery, choice, foreboding. So a reading often opens a film or turns the plot, and a close-up of a card works as a hint to the audience.

The most famous example is the 1973 James Bond film Live and Let Die. The fortune-teller Solitaire, played by Jane Seymour, reads tarot for the villain, and the Scottish artist Fergus Hall painted a deck especially for the film. Bond tricks Solitaire with a deck in which every card is the Lovers.

Agnès Varda opened Cléo from 5 to 7 in 1962 with a tarot reading and shot that scene in color, although the rest of the film is black and white. Alejandro Jodorowsky filled The Holy Mountain with images of the arcana, and later worked with Philippe Camoin on restoring the Tarot de Marseille. In Now You See Me, four magicians are brought together as a team by tarot cards.

Film has a downside too: it taught audiences to fear certain cards. Death or the Tower on screen almost always signal disaster, while in a real reading Death usually means the end of a chapter and the Tower the collapse of something built on a lie.

Each run draws three questions from a pool of eight: films, characters and one movie myth. Every answer comes with an explanation, and the run ends with a full review. A flawless run earns Tayna keys. And next time a card turns up on screen, you will be able to read it more deeply than the screenwriter intended.

None of this makes tarot films bad. They tell their own story rather than teach you to read, and they are more fun to watch once you know what lies behind each image.