Product Details

• Rating: Unrated
• Format: NTSC
• Original language: German, Swedish

Amazon.com essential video
Made in 1960 and set in medieval Sweden, Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring is based on a folk ballad. It also examines a society in transition from Norse pantheism to Christianity. The film starkly contrasts Ingeri--a dark, feral, Odin-worshipping foster daughter to a Christian family headed by Max Von Sydow--and their own daughter, a pretty and blond but also vain and naïve girl named Karin, whom Ingeri resents. They travel out together to a distant church where Karin is to offer votive candles to the Virgin Mary. However, en route, Karin is raped and murdered by two desperate goatherds, accompanied by a 13-year-old boy. By coincidence, the goatherds then seek refuge with Karin's parents and even try to sell them her clothes, which proves to be a mortal error.

Bergman was greatly influenced by Akira Kurosawa when he made The Virgin Spring, as evinced in its ominous use of dark and shade and lengthy sequences without dialogue. However, this is more than pastiche. Although the Christian ending with which Bergman feels obliged to conclude the film doesn't quite sit well in a movie in which God is as palpably absent as in any Bergman movie, the slow, remorseless pace of the murder and subsequent retribution bring to mind Krzysztof Kieslowski's A Short Film About Killing in their sense of the futility of vengeance. --David Stubbs

Customer Reviews

Excellent Introduction to Bergman style
Most Bergman novitiates will probably start with "The Seventh Seal," but "The Virgin Spring" is one of his most easily approachable films and a good intro for those unfamiliar with Bergman's ouevre. The film has more plot than later Bergman works, which makes it accesible for American audiences (indeed it won the Academy Award for Best foreign film). The story concerns the rape and murder of a young girl on her way to church, and the revenge exacted on her killers by the girl's family. Bergman took the idea from a Swedish folk ballad and transformed it into a dark medieval tale of murder, vengeance, religion, and finally, redemption and forgiveness. The film contains many items which are hallmarks of the Bergman style (overt use of symbolism, the questions of faith and the existence of God) as well as marking the early work of the incredible Sven Nykvist, Bergman's chief cinematographer. The scenes of violence are contrasted with scenes of tranquil beauty (Karin riding through the forest, the final tableau). Many critics regard this as a minor work in the Bergman canon. While that may be, it remains a dark, beautiful entry in a challenging body of work. It may be minor, but it's still Bergman.

The Problem of Evil

Bergman was the son of a Christian pastor and a lifelong atheist. He spent considerable intellectual capital trying to work out why humans were so desperate for a God. He also devoted significant artistic effort to depicting a world where people call out to God but God doesn't answer.

The Virgin Spring is set in medieval Sweden, a time when Christianity was ascendant, but some people still prayed to their old pagan gods. In the opening scene, Ingeri, a foster daughter, invokes Odin to call down a curse on Karin, the favored only child. In the next scene, we see the patriarch Tore (Max Von Sydow) and his wife Mareta (Birgitta Valberg) praying to a lurid statue of Christ on the cross. The rest of the movie goes deep into this tension between the forbearance of Jesus and the bloody justice of the Norse pagan gods.

The story, based on a 13th century Swedish ballad, is simple and stark. Karin, accompanied by Ingeri, sets off to deliver some candles to the church. While riding through the woods they get separated. Ingeri meets an old hermit, a pantheist, who shows her his secret stash of magic relics. Repulsed, she flees deeper into the forest. Karin meets two goatherds and their younger brother, and offers to share her lunch with them. They lead the naïve girl to a glade by a stream, and there they rape and murder her. They strip her of her fine clothing, intending to sell it, and flee.

Unfortunately for them, the first farm they come to is Tore's. Unaware of what has happened, Tore gives them dinner and a bed for the night. After dinner, the goatherds offer Karin's blood stained dress for sale to her mother. Hiding her shock, she hurries away to tell Tore. Without hestitation, Tore prepares himself with a purifying bath, then bursts into the guesthouse and takes revenge on the goatherds. In a final act of rage, he kills their younger brother as well.

Ingeri returns during the night, and the next day she leads them to Karin's body. When Tore lifts up his daughter's corpse, an underground spring gushes forth from beneath her. In a masterful scene, shot almost entirely from behind Tore, we watch him absorb the emotional impact of his daughter's death like a body blow. He raises supplicating hands to demand of his God why He let this happen. He then decides to build a sturdy church on this spot. It's his way of trying to control and appease the inexplicable evil that has descended upon his life, and, perhaps, his way of atoning for the evil he has done in return.

Christianity has struggled for centuries with this simple question: if God is so just, all-powerful and merciful, why does he allow so much evil to exist in this world? Christianity's most pernicious and effective response is found in the story of Job. It's pernicious because it blames the victim for his own misfortune, which is all the justification generations of psychopaths, warlords and totalitarians have needed to inflict their evil on innocent people who can't or won't strike back. It's effective because it locates the response to misfortune in the only place a human can control, which is his own reaction to what befalls him. Bergman, like Dostoievski's great apostates, cannot respect a God who allows the rape and murder of a young girl. Not respecting, he also doesn't believe.

For Bergman, nothing exists beyond human actions and their consequences. Tore knows that killing the goatherds won't assuage his anguish, and that killing the boy is morally questionable at best. Yet neither he nor Mareta hesitates in the slightest when it comes time to take revenge. Bergman is showing us what a difficult God this Jesus is. As Dostoievski pointed out so brilliantly in The Grand Inquistor chapter of the Brothers Karamazov, Jesus is both too much like us to obey without question and too pure in his responses to emulate successfully. In the end, having taken a bloodthirsty, pagan revenge, Tore is praying to a God whose example he can't follow and who can't or won't protect him from the suffering of this world. These intellectual contradictions and emotional conundrums are the polluted springs from which flowed the dour, life-denying Christian Protestantism inflicted on Bergman as a boy.

This is the first feature length collaboration between Bergman and Sven Nykvist. Nykvist captures the war of sunlight and shadow that occurs during early spring in the northern latitudes. He also provides some vivid tracking shots through the latticework of the unleafed forest. Lingering closeups on faces became a Bergman trademark. Here they work to great effect, showing us Karin's spoiled innocence, Ingeri's conflicted resentment, Tore's ambivalent rage.

The Virgin Spring is one of Bergman's greatest achievements. By refusing to impose a viewpoint on his simple story, he gives us the room we need to absorb its tragic and universal dimensions. This movie stays with you long after the credits stop rolling.

Divine justice and a miracle...in an Ingmar Berman film?
It is surprising. Yet, this is the gist of "The Virgin Spring", a film based on the 13th century Scandinavian ballad "Tore's Daughter at Vange", recounting the rape of a virgin girl, the father's revenge and a spring miraculously flowing from the spot where she is killed.

What at first may seem an ordinary tale becomes a sublime morality play, thanks to director Ingmar Bergman's incorporation of symbolic images, psychological tension and imaginative cinemagraphic techniques, fittingly designed so as to complement cameraman Sven Nykvist natural, three-dimensional style. Bergman then puts this all to great effect by pitting Christian virtues of kindness, purity and familial love against the savagery and superstitions of Norse paganism.

He portrays New Testament symbols through the patriarch Tore (Max von Sydow) reciting grace while sitting at the centre of the dining table in a manner reminiscent of Da Vinci's portrait of The Last Supper. His wife Margeta's (Birgitta Valberg) piety is shown when she prays before a crucifix, then inflicts pain upon herself to suffer Christ's agony. Their daughter Karin's (Birgitta Pettersson) innocence is reflected in a clean-faced girl dressed in a silken dress made by "fifteen seamstresses" and the grace she recites before the goatherds when she breaks and shares bread with them.

In contrast, paganism is portrayed in the pregnant foster sister Ingeri (Gunnel Lindblom) whose face is besmirched and dressed in an unadorned and dirty garment. She curses Karin by invoking the Norse god of death and war Odin, then places a toad in a loaf of bread (symbols of death and the devil), not so much out of pagan ritual, but jealousy and spite of her. When Ingeri meets a sinister old man whose home in the ford is filled with Viking idols, he foretells the fate of Karin and the goatherds as though he were Odin answering her supplication. Lastly, the coarse, ragged and filthy goatherds trample the gleaming white candles Karin intended to deliver to the church, signifying their savagery.

To delineate goodness from a filmic point of view, Bergman shows nothingness all around to focus attention on the actor's character role. The scene of Tore wrestling a lone birch tree to the ground and stripping its branches is one such example. He does this also when Karin is riding a horse and the sea is set in the background. This is Bergman at his best painting a metaphor of Karin's purity and the father's rite of purification. We see this motif again at the end when Ingeri gathers the spring water into her hands and cleanses her face as though to absolve herself.

As for evilness, the depiction of the rape scene is disturbing, just as it should be, but not as overtly graphic as many films have since become on this subject. The scene, which was edited when it was first shown and released for subsequent home videos, is shown in its entirety to underscore the violation of Karin's chastity, the despicable crime and wickedness of the goatherds.

The same holds true of Tore avenging Karin's rape. Bergman doesn't bloody the camera lens. He lets us see the patriarch's tense facial expressions and brute physical strength as he thrusts the dagger into one brother, burns another in an open fire and throws the youngest against a wall. It is Old Testament vengeance exacted for a sin, equally as violent as the rape, but at the same time it is Bergman's way of adding psychological tension and posing a moral dilemma to the viewer. Who has the right to kill another human being? Why did God let this happen?

For some, the death of their only child in the forest may prove too heart wrenching. Others may find solace in the spring that gurgles forth once Tore lifts Karin's head -- hence the title, "the Virgin...Spring". Interestingly, there is a church and spring in Karna, central Sweden said to be the spot where this incident occurred, just as Tore vows to God he would build as penance for the deaths of the goatherds.

So, there you have it, a tense, thought provoking and cathartic film! It's one of Bergman's best, and the perfect companion film to "The Seventh Seal".

Moreover, Criterion has put together a rather comprehensive DVD package. With this superbly remastered film is a 28-page booklet featuring essays from film scholar Peter Cowrie and screenwriter Ulla Isaksson, along with a letter from Bergman on the controversial rape scene and the poem "Tore's Daughter at Vange".

This director-approved edition also includes:
* Audio commentary by Bergman scholar Birgitta Pettersson
* Introduction by filmmaker Ang Lee
* Video interviews with actresses Gunnel Lindblom and Birgitta Pettersson
* Audio recording of Bergman at the 1975 American Film Institute seminar
* Optional English dubbed soundtrack
* English subtitles