I saw “The Seventh Seal” on Blu-ray: the Knight, the Squire, Mia, Jof and their baby, Lisa and the Smith, Raval the Seminarian turned thief.  But my favorite character was the nameless girl.

She was the last of her village to survive, or not to flee, the plague.  The Squire saved her when Raval would have raped and possibly murdered her.  He decided against raping her himself.  “I’ve grown tired of that kind of love,” the Crusade-weary Squire said.  “It gets a little dry in the end.”  But he wanted her as his housekeeper.  “I saved your life,” he said when she hesitated.  “You owe me a great deal.”  The nameless girl considered a moment more, then turned and followed after him.  He had persuaded her to go a mile, and the second time I watched the movie I realized she would probably go two.

She would have given cold water to Raval, dying of the plague, if the Squire hadn’t physically restrained her.  As Death entered the Knight’s castle to claim their lives, the nameless girl looked to the brightening light streaming through a portal.  She greeted death silently and reverently, believing “Death will open a door, not close it, provide some passage to a brighter world,” according to film historian Peter Cowie in his commentary.  He also pointed out that it was the nameless girl along with the Knight’s faithful wife who were absent from Jof’s vision of the dance of Death.

The nameless girl is the woman Peter described as subject to her own husband so that even if some are disobedient to the word [or, not persuaded by the word], they will be won over without a word by the way you live…^[1]  That Bergman put her in this film surrounded by so much unbelief and fear endears him to me even more.  He knew she exists.  He knew she must be there.  Yet he didn’t presume to know her well enough to put words in her mouth.  Except for her hopeful longing, “It is finished,”^[2] we know her only by her deeds.

“Many years later,” Peter Cowie ended his commentary, “Bergman was asked at a press conference about his true feelings on death.  And he answered, ‘I was afraid of this enormous emptiness…My personal view is that when we die, we die, and we go from a state of something to a state of absolute nothingness.  And I don’t believe for a second that there is anything above or beyond or anything like that.  And this makes me enormously secure.’”

Among the special features on the DVD of Bergman’s “Wild Strawberries,” however, was another interview, “Ingmar Bergman on Life and Work.”  He was much older.  His wife Ingrid (Ingrid von Rosen, not the famous actress) had died.  Perhaps he remembered the same incident with the anesthesia differently, or perhaps it was a different incident.  He described it in Swedish through an interpreter as “an overdose of anesthesia.”  This time he was out for eight hours rather than six.

“The interesting thing was that for me those eight hours were no hours at all, not a minute, not a second.  I was completely gone.  I was completely switched off.  So that was eight hours that were completely gone from my life.  And that felt extraordinarily comforting when I thought that such is death.  First, you’re something, and then you’re no longer anything.  You’re nonexistent.  You just aren’t any more.  You’re like a candle that’s blown out.”

“That gave me an enormous feeling of security.  What complicated the feeling of security and total extinction is Ingrid’s death.  I have incredible difficulty in thinking, in imagining, that I won’t meet her again.  That’s an unbearable thought.  Therefore, two modes of thought have come into violent conflict with one another.  I’ve tried to write about it, but I can’t do it yet, and it may be a while.  What’s more, I often experience Ingrid’s presence…Not as a ghost.  But I know that in some way she’s quite close to me.”