The Virgin Spring
Brief Synopsis
Cast & Crew
Ingmar Bergman
Max Von Sydow
Birgitta Pettersson
Birgitta Valberg
Gunnel Lindblom
Tor Borong
Film Details
Technical Specs
Synopsis
Medieval symbolism abounds when, via a curse by her jealous half-sister, a young woman is raped by a band of swineherds and her father swears vengeance, only to find an underground spring welling up on the spot where his virgin daughter was raped.
Director
Ingmar Bergman
Cast
Max Von Sydow
Birgitta Pettersson
Birgitta Valberg
Gunnel Lindblom
Tor Borong
Axel Slangus
Axel Duberg
Oscar Ljung
Gudrun Brost
Ove Porath
Leif Forstenberg
Tor Isedal
Allan Edwall
Crew
Karl-arne Bergman
Karl-arne Bergman
Carl-henry Cagarp
Staffan Dalin
Allan Ekelund
Ulla Furas
Lenn Hjortzberg
Rolf Holmqvist
Ulla Isaksson
Ulla Isaksson
P. A. Lundgren
Borje Lundh
Erik Nordgren
Sven Nykvist
Oscar Rosander
Marik Vos
Aaby Wedin
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Film Details
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Best Foreign Language Film
Award Nominations
Best Costume Design
Articles
The Virgin Spring
At the center of the grandly stylized The Seventh Seal is Max von Sydows knight, looking for answers to lifes big questions, playing chess against a robed, hooded Death. While not naturalistic in fact, its highly ritualized, its characters emblematic The Virgin Spring is literally earthier, its characters mired in a brutal life centered on a muddy barnyard and a nearby forest bearing a surprising resemblance to the one in Kurosawas Rashomon (1950). Both locations look more like sets than the real thing, although Von Sydow looks convincing as the roughly clad farmer working alongside his own laborers. His iron version of Christianity, we learn, does not involve turning the other cheek.
The film begins, however, with the farmers pregnant, unmarried drudge of a stepdaughter, fanning flames and invoking the pagan god, Odin. Gunnel Lindbloms Ingeri, as dark and unkempt as her sister is blond, radiant, and spoiled, calls down the forces of the older god upon the favored head of her princess of a sister. It cannot be an accident that the dark, destructive forces of Odin seem in the end to prevail and convey Bergmans own skepticism in no uncertain terms. What is a spring against the life taken from an innocent girl whose worst crime is that shes spoiled, smug and in todays parlance, a bit full of herself as she rides on horseback to town, a virgin bearing candles to honor the Virgin Mary? Birgitta Valberg is as fair and beaming as Lindbloms Ingeri is grimy and resentful. But we identify with characters through their flaws, and so it is Ingeri whos most approachable.
If Lindbloms Ingeri were less cowardly and superstitious, less fearful and recessive, shed steal the movie simply because her unhappy soul is the films most intense, the one who comes closest to breaking beyond the narrow schema of the characters. But shes not fierce enough. In fact, she cringes at the croak of the black crow seen at the beginning and end of the film. Yet Valbergs Mareta is simply too blandly pretty to register strongly enough or work her way into our hearts. Still, she doesnt deserve what befalls her only because she has led a sheltered life, one that has given rise to a naiveté that kills her after she stops to share her lunch with two hungry itinerant goatherds and their adolescent brother.
The rape scene was graphic enough to be controversial in its time. But it has integrity. How can you sugarcoat or soft-pedal so heinous an act, even though Bergman makes it seem a crime of opportunity rather than premeditation, and has the boy throw up after he sees whats happened? (Ingeri, who also witnesses it all, drops the rock she had picked up to throw at the men, and stands frozen in inaction, clearly not happy that her prayer to Odin has been answered so fully.) Fearful, as the consequences of their deed sink in, the two older men flee, dragging the boy along, but not before stripping their victim of her rich garments. So far the score is Pagans 1, Christians 0.
Then comes retribution, inexorably, as unsparingly as the initial crime. The criminals stumble to the edge of the forest and, as night approaches, arrive at the farm, not knowing its where the girl lived. Theyre taken in, offered hospitality, and just before they bed down for the night in an outbuilding, the older one who can talk (his adult sibling is mute) offers to sell the murdered girls garments to the farmers wife who he doesnt realize is his victims mother. She puts him off until morning, saying she must ask her husband. Once alone, the composure she maintained while in the killers presence crumbles. She shows her husband the garments. He grows steely, locks the sleeping wanderers in by placing a heavy timber across the door from the outside, and goes to work.
Ingeri crumbles, confesses her ill will and failure to attempt to rescue Mareta. Herr Tore, the father, appears not to hear her, doesnt react. Instead, he asks her to prepare a sauna and get him his butcher knife. Yanking a birch tree out of the earth, and stripping it of some branches, he bathes ritually in the sauna, dons a leather tunic, and methodically sets about his task, much as he might slaughter livestock. His daughters violators dont stand a chance. At close quarters, he butchers the two men and throws the boy against a wall, killing him, too.
In Bergmans first full-blown collaboration with Sven Nykvist, who was to become his steady cameraman, death is accompanied by an almost claustrophobic rendering of the death chamber, one of the farms work spaces with its pots, fires, pole propping up a roof window through which smoke leaves as swiftly as life departs the killers. None of the panoramic vistas of The Seventh Seal here, nothing picturesque. This is death in a cramped, domestic space. Its death in your face, stylized as the rendering of it may be. If the interaction between Death and the anguished knight in The Seventh Seal suggests a debate between theologians, death here is brutish and visceral.
Does the vengeance even the score to Pagans 1, Christians 1? Several things suggest not, despite Bergman stacking the deck a bit by replacing the incidental music played by a flute with an almost Hollywood-like hymn-singing choir at the end. The avenging father, having gone to retrieve his murdered daughters corpse, cries out, accusingly, to God: You see it, God. You allowed it. I dont understand you. We break the connection with him, and with the film, as God, given something to answer for, doesnt or, rather, answers in His inscrutable way, and is let off the hook. Christianity fails to distinguish itself from the old pagan code, even when the vengeful father adds, unconvincingly: Yet I still ask your forgiveness. He then asks God to cleanse his bloody hands and his sins, and promises to build a church. At which point, a spring gushes from the ground where the dead girls head had lain.
As filmmaking, The Virgin Spring is more than resourceful, as its low budget dictated it had to be. With the actors striding unswervingly through their preordained, emblematic roles in this morality play, its accomplished, and Nykvists black and white cinematography adds a stark visual power that color never could provide. But the Christianity celebrated by the film is much more Old Testament than New. And paganism surrounds it as the dark forest surrounds the cultivated land.
Producer: Ingmar Bergman, Allan Ekelund (producer uncredited)
Director: Ingmar Bergman
Screenplay: Ulla Isaksson
Cinematography: Sven Nykvist
Music: Erik Nordgren
Film Editing: Oscar Rosander
Cast: Max von Sydow (Töre), Birgitta Valberg (Märeta), Gunnel Lindblom (Ingeri), Birgitta Pettersson (Karin), Axel Düberg (Thin Herdsman), Tor Isedal (Mute Herdsman), Allan Edwall (Beggar), Ove Porath (Boy), Axel Slangus (Bridge Keeper), Gudrun Brost (Frida).
BW-89m.
by Jay Carr
Sources:
Bergman on Bergman, by Ingmar Bergman, Simon & Schuster
Images: My Life in Films, by Ingmar Bergman, Arcade
Ingmar Bergman: A Critical Biography, by Peter Cowie, Limelight Editions
Magills Survey of Cinema, essay by Timothy W. Johnson, Salem Press
Filmfacts, December 9, 1960
Ingmar Bergman: An Interview, by Charles Thomas Samuels, from Essays in Criticism, edited by Stuart Kaminsky, Oxford University Press
Inside Oscar, by Mason Wiley and Damien Bona, Ballantine Books
IMDb
The Virgin Spring
Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring on DVD
The Virgin Spring pulled in a wider audience than did many of Bergman's later films of the 1960s. It also cemented the renown of Max von Sydow, Bergman's leading man from The Seventh Seal. Bergman often skipped this title when writing about his career, perhaps because he did not write it, or because it was popular in a conventional way.
Synopsis: Farmer and ex-soldier Töre (Max Von Sydow) has converted to Christianity to please his wife Märeta (Birgitta Valberg) and is sufficiently prosperous to spoil his beloved daughter Karin (Birgitta Pettersson). Karin dresses in finery to deliver candles to the local church, accompanied by her adopted sister, the pregnant and unloved Ingeri (Gunnel Lindblom). Ingeri broods with jealousy and secretly prays to the pagan god Odin to strike Karin down. That leaves Karin alone and unprotected when she meets a trio of herdsmen on the trail - who aren't as friendly as they appear.
Far removed from the psychological ruminations that would soon dominate his work, Ingmar Bergman's third film with Max Von Sydow reaches far into the past for a morality tale about crime and punishment. The original story idea came from an ancient ballad and was enlarged by screenwriter Ulla Isaksson to dramatize the conflict between Sweden's newly adopted Christianity and its old pagan gods. Von Sydow's Töre may have converted but human nature has not, and the most visible addition to the inner lives of the characters seems to be a thick fog of guilt. The working girl Ingeri voices her resentment by calling to her secret pagan gods, and feels all the more debased. Mother Märeta is virtuous but appears to worship the purity of her picture-perfect daughter, to the point that she's jealous of the affection young Karin gives her father.
As for Karin, she's a sheltered and self-centered jewel of the family incapable of recognizing guile or malice. She is pure of heart, but faith alone is far too little to protect her from the world. Karin doesn't return from her trip, and proof of her murder comes in the night. The herdsmen have sought shelter in Töre's own house and present Märeta with the torn and bloodied dress that Karin was wearing only hours before.
The parents are transformed into calculating killers. Töre reverts to rituals of the past, taking his armor and weapons from a trunk and preparing himself by striking his skin with birch branches. The father becomes a warrior once more to take a bloody vengeance.
The Virgin Spring is beautifully directed. We're constantly shown contrasts - pride and charity, familial love and seething resentment. The innocent Karin is despoiled and murdered by three vile wanderers and revenged by her father in an orgy of bloodletting. Both violent events are depicted in powerful, wordless sequences. Töre and Märeta recover their daughter's body with tenderness and are rewarded with a miracle of faith, a harsh fairy-tale ending that provides an emotional release. Töre doesn't understand how God could permit such evil to occur yet humbly atones for his sins with the promise to build a church.
The Virgin Spring is an almost perfect film and as such is often recommended as initial viewing for newcomers to Ingmar Bergman. It was the director's first full collaboration with cameraman Sven Nyqvist. Bergman's 13th century is beautifully created in a spring forest where the last of the winter snowfalls have yet to subside. Töre's little wooden compound is dominated by an imposing carved Christ on the crucifix, yet the dining hall is decorated with definite pagan carvings.
Criterion's DVD of The Virgin Spring looks even better than similar titles from the same company and bears a new Svensk-Filmindusri color logo. The extras are satisfying but we wonder why the single-disc release is listed at Criterion's higher price point; perhaps the new transfer accounts for this. Ingmar Bergman author Birgitta Steene offers a fine analytical commentary and disc producer Johanna Schiller has produced a fine interview documentary featuring both of the film's young actresses, 45 years later. Birgitta Petterson remembers the filming of the rape scene as being bearable because the lead herdsman Axel Düberg was a personal friend. Looking at early portraits of the beautiful Gunnel Lindblom we are struck by her close resemblance to Bergman's other star Bibi Andersson. Lindblom would later become a director.
The disc offers plenty of direct Ingmar Bergman input through audio recordings made at an AFI seminar in 1975. The fat liner booklet contains essays from Peter Cowie and Ulla Isaksson and the original source ballad. A letter from Ingmar Bergman makes a case for not censoring the film's rape scene, which was cut for the first American release.
The only questionable extra is the Introduction by Ang Lee. These spoiler-laden personal ruminations should be given a different function, as they tend to pre-program the viewer to read the film with a single, 'authorized' interpretation. And the use of today's star directors will date the presentation in a way that other Criterion extras do not.
The disc offers a choice of the original Swedish soundtrack with removable English subtitles, or an English dub track.
For more information about The Virgin Spring, visit The Criterion Collection. To order The Virgin Spring, go to TCM Shopping.
By Glenn Erickson
Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring on DVD
Quotes
If you always get your way, you'll please the devil so much that the saints will punish you with boils.- Mareta
See the smoke trembling under the roof as if with fright? Yet when it gets out in the air, it has the whole sky to swirl about in. But it doesn't know that, so it huddles and trembles in the soot under the roof. It's the same with people. They quiver like a leaf in the storm, afraid of what they know and what they don't know.- Beggar
You see it, God, you see it. The innocent child's death and my revenge. You allowed it. I don't understand you. Yet now I beg your forgiveness. I know no other way to be reconciled with my own hands. I know no other way to live.- Tore
Trivia
Miscellaneous Notes
Voted One of the Year's Ten Best Foreign Films by the 1960 New York Times Film Critics.
Winner of the International Critics Prize and deemed by the jury as "too good to be judged for the Palme d'Or at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival.
Released in United States 1960
Released in United States on Video July 1986
Released in United States December 13, 1996
Shown in New York City (Cinema Village) as part of Janus Films 40th Anniversary Film Festival December 13, 1996 - Januar 2, 1997.
Released in United States 1960
Released in United States on Video July 1986
Released in United States December 13, 1996 (Shown in New York City (Cinema Village) as part of Janus Films 40th Anniversary Film Festival December 13, 1996 - Januar 2, 1997.)