Solid
Ingmar Bergman's 1960 film The Virgin Spring (Jungfrukällan) is, despite its winning the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1961, one of his lesser outings. Part of this is, no doubt, due to the fact that the bulk of the film was not written by Bergman, but by novelist Ulla Isaksson, who based her thin script upon a medieval ballad called Töre's Daughter At Vänge. The title of the film is a double entendre which refers to the chaste lead character's outing during the springtime, and a rivulet of water that emerges from where her corpse is eventually found by her family after she is raped and murdered. Compared to the films which preceded it, it lacks the emotional heft of The Seventh Seal or Wild Strawberries, and compared to the films that followed it, it lacks the filmic daring of Persona or A Passion. It is an odd film in the Bergman canon, and ranks with Cries And Whispers and The Serpent's Egg as one of the few filmic mediocrities the director ever crafted. Its characters are wooden, almost unintendedly comic, their motivations and reactions are wholly stilted and artificial, and the symbolism is often heavyhanded. Fortunately, it's only an hour and a half in length. It's little wonder that only a dozen or so years later horror filmmaker Wes Craven (and Sean Cunningham) would launch his forgettable career with a film heavily influenced by, if not flat out based upon, it, called Last House On The Left.... Yet, the reason why this film fails to live up to the high standards of most Bergman films- although, by contrast, it's still worlds better than 99.9% of the Hollywood crap churned out today, all boils down to that most important, yet overlooked, reason why all films fail or succeed, and that's because, despite being a visual medium, a film must be well written, with well developed characters and a scenario that can emotionally affect a viewer, be that in the archetypal or realistic vein, to succeed artistically. This film never gets off the stylistic fence and decides whether it is a realistic film nor a symbolic allegory. Thus it fails on both scores, and the bulk of the blame for that can be laid upon the pro-Christian leaning script of the novelist Ulla Isaksson, who wrote an earlier Bergman film, So Close To Life, a few years before. While there is no comparing Wes Craven's 1972 filmic spin on this theme, Last House On The Left, in any cinematic nor artistic terms to The Virgin Spring, in one odd way, Craven's later film does seem more relevant, for it never attempts to find reasons for, nor make sense of, its anomic violence, thus it cannot fail, on that level. Bergman's film asks the big questions, and when its own silence bellows forth no answers, its hollowness only too easily engulfs its own inquisitions, which displays flaws the lesser film could only dream to be vilified for.

Extremely powerful film that asks some tough questions about God.
After seeing THE SEVENTH SEAL, I wanted to explore other works by Bergman. I checked this out on NetFlix - thank God for NetFlix! - and I have to say that it is now one of my favorite films. This is in no way a pleasant film experience, but it is one that needs to be seen. It is the story of a young, virginal teenager who comes from a very religious family in Sweden. As she is riding on horseback to carry out a task for her father, she is raped and murdered by a pair of disgusting goatherds in the forest. However, as fate would have it, the goatherds unknowingly arrive at the young girl's home for shelter. Let's just say that by the end of the film, they'll wish they hadn't. This film asks many questions about God's mercy and grace. Why does God allow horrible things to happen to good people? Where is God in those moments? Many films would go on to explore this territory. I believe that this is one of the first - or atleast, one of the first to explore this topic with such powerful results.

See this film once, and you'll never forget it. There are long scenes without dialogue that build a mood and allow you to simply observe the world that Bergman has created. Never before have I seen a film that benefited more from it's quiet moments.

For all of it's ugliness, this really is a beautiful film. I highly recommend it. I can truthfully say that it had an impact on me. What more could I have asked for than that? In a world where we are smothered by the likes of BANGKOK DANGEROUS and the over-hyped DARK KNIGHT, it's especially important to cherish films like THE VIRGIN SPRING.

Exploration of good and evil
Ingmar Bergman's film "The Virgin Spring" is based on the Swedish folk ballad. It is set at the time when pagan worship was intermixed with newly arrived Christianity. The film explores the meaning of good and evil and how it affects us in every day life. According to the story, it is customary that a young virgin maiden brings candles and offerings to the Church on a high holiday. Karen, an only daughter of a wealthy trader and his wife is to deliver them to the church herself. Her escort is a female servant, pregnant and unmarried who spends her time cooking, baking and taking care of household chores. Karen is young, pure, innocent, blond; her servant is dark haired, thin and worn out from the hard work and pregnancy and for all that resentful. While Karen is adored, pampered and spoiled by her parents and servants, her servant girl is tormented and criticised about everything about her. Both of them are day and night. In the process of delivering candles to the church, naive Karen runs into three shepards and offers them some food. Before long, two elder ones attack her, rape her and murder her. She is stripped off her clothes and left in a ditch as her servant girl is watching it all in horror. Circumstances bring shepards to Karen's parents house where they are offered food and shelter. In gratitude, shepards offer Karen's mother Karen's clothes for sale, not realizing that it is murdered girls' mother they were selling clothes to. As pregnant girl servant makes it to the village and explains to Karen's father what has happened and she confirms that shepards are rapists and murderers, Karen's father decides to ravenge his only child's death. All three shepards are murdered and household sets out to finding Karen's body. It is at the place where Karen's body is found that some of the most powerful scenes from the film transpire. Her father is asking God how God could allow that a young, innocent girl has such terrible fate. In the nature where everything is so calm and beautiful how could God take away precious life of an innocent girl? It is after Karen's body is removed, that everyone realizes that she was laid under a spring of pure water of life. So the revenge was futile. Karen is dead, her tormentors are dead, life will never be the same for everyone involved, but must start new, fresh and pure with everlasting pain that will be reminder to what happened to a young maiden and everyone who loved and resented her.

"You allowed it to happen!"
Karin (Birgitta Pettersson), the spoiled but lovable only surviving child of wealthy householder Tore (Max von Sydow) and his wife Mareta (Birgitta Valberg) is raped and murdered as a dark and gypsy-like free spirited servant, Ingeri (Gunnel Lindblom) looks on. Later, the rapists unwittingly ask for shelter from the night at Tore's house. Their identity is discovered, Tore slays each of them (even a young boy who accompanies them but who didn't participate in the crime), Karin's body is discovered, and a healing spring miraculously gushes from the spot where she was violated and slain. The film closes with everyone kneeling in prayer.

Your typical "Song of Bernadette" sort of flick? Nope. It's Bergman, and that means that the apparent piety of the film needs to be read through a glass darkly. The film, both visually and thematically, is really a study in contrast between darkness and light: camera shots accentuate the interplay between the two, and so do the moral dynamics of the characters and the action. Karin is a combination of spoiled and innocent child; Ingeri, tempest and depth; Tore, piety and fury; Mareta, self-hatred and maternal love. Nothing in the world is straightforward, unambiguous, simple. Even the "religious" ending of the film is immediately prefaced by an agonized Tore, on his knees but nonetheless defiant and angry (again, the contrast), shouting out to God: "You allowed it to happen--the death of an innocent child and my vengeance! You allowed it to happen! I don't understand you!" The Job-like rebel--and yet in the very next frame, Tore says: "Yet still I ask your forgiveness. I don't know any other way to live." This magnificent scene reminds one of the story from Auschiwtz, in which interned rabbis, after an all-night session, determined that God was guilty of crimes against humanity, but then adjourned for morning prayer.

Bergmam originally intended "Virgin Spring," filmed immmediately after "Seventh Seal," to be the first in his God trilogy. Eventually, however, it was excluded from the trilogy. Yet the theme of all five films, from "Seventh Seal" to "The Silence," are of one piece: how to live in a world where God is either absent or malevolent. It's a good question.

The performances in this film, by the way, are magnificent. Pettersson is the perfect spoiled, innocent girl, and Lindblom's darkness and anger are frightening. Von Sydow is frightening in a different way as the avenging father. But perhaps the finest performance is given by Valberg, whose Mareta is a loveless, desperate woman who clings to her only surviving child by spoiling her, and who apparently tries to make deals with providence by physically punishing herself.

INGMAR BERGMAN, OPUS 21
***** 1960. Directed by Ingmar Bergman. A prize in Cannes and Academy award in the Best Foreign Language Film category. This adaptation of a ballad of the XIVth century tells the story of a young virgin who's raped in the forest by three vagrants while riding to the church. I don't know what to admire most in this film: Ulla Isaksson's screenplay that is so keen with its references to fairy tales (the Little Red Riding Hood, for instance) or the description of the antagonism Paganism/Christianism, Sven Nykvist's photography which literally re-creates before our eyes paintings of the Middle Ages or at last the formidable artistic fusion that existed between Ingmar Bergman and his actors. No place for improvisation in Bergman's cinema! I also must praise this Criterion release because of the added boni, such as the 2005 Gunnel Lindblom/ Birgitta Pettersson interview or the recorded seminar given by Ingmar Bergman in the American Film Institute in 1975. Masterpiece.