Bergman in Transition
by Peter Cowie

Ingmar Bergman was enjoying one of the happiest spells of his life while making The Virgin Spring (1960). On a personal level, he was felicitously ensconced in his fourth marriage, to the concert pianist Käbi Laretei. And, professionally, he was delighted with his new cameraman, Sven Nykvist (his regular collaborator, Gunnar Fischer, had been shooting a Disney feature during the winter and was unavailable for preproduction work). It was Nykvist’s first opportunity to work at length with the maestro (he had done some exterior shooting for Sawdust and Tinsel [1953]), and the two men found an instant affinity for each other. Nykvist would bring to Bergman’s cinema an altogether fresh look: more natural, three-dimensional location photography, less expressionistic studio work.

Bergman has never acknowledged The Virgin Spring as a major achievement. It rates barely a mention in either of his autobiographical books, The Magic Lantern and Images. Yet he recognizes that the Academy Award it won, in 1961, helped his career from a financial and prestige point of view. And, despite the director’s reticence, four decades later, the sheer sculpted purity of the film, and its powerful narrative thrust, confirm The Virgin Spring as one of the highest peaks in the Bergman range.

This is one of the few films that Bergman directed from a screenplay by someone other than himself. Ulla Isaksson, who had scripted Brink of Life for him two years earlier and was a much respected novelist, gives considerable inner tension—and moral ambiguity—to what began as a simple thirteenth-century Swedish ballad. That source tells of a young maiden who is raped and murdered on her way to church, and of how her father wreaks ruthless vengeance on her aggressors.

The film maintains the setting and period, when Sweden was shifting reluctantly from paganism to Christianity. Ingeri, the family’s foster child, worships Odin—the prime divinity in the Norse pantheon, standing for war and death—in secret, for Töre (Max von Sydow) and, especially, his wife, Märeta (Birgitta Valberg), are committed to the fledgling Christian faith. Some of the retainers have never seen a church, while others describe such buildings with awe and reverence.

The collision between the kindly spirit of the New Testament and the pent-up savagery of paganism runs as a leitmotif through the entire film. The heathen world and its superstitions are symbolized by the sinister old man at the ford, who cherishes his box of relics and terrifies Ingeri, and by the rapist’s furious trampling on the gleaming white candles that tumble from Karin’s bag. The pagan significance of fire, earth, and water emerges in several scenes: from the opening shots of Ingeri blowing alight the morning fire at the farm to the close-ups of a sparkling stream in the forest and, finally, of the water that flows from beneath Karin’s corpse as Töre lifts her head in sorrow.

The Christian idiom marks such scenes as the beggar’s gesture of fealty to Töre’s wife when she serves him food, and the grace recited by a gullible Karin as she shares her bread and water with the men who are about to violate her. Marik Vos’s costumes emphasize the distinction between the ancient and modern approaches to life and religion. Ingeri is clad in a coarse, unbuttoned dress, while Karin wears a magnificent silken shift (“sewn by fifteen maidens,” says her mother proudly), in honor of her Christian mission—bearing the candles to church this fateful medieval Sunday. Töre, a heathen who has converted (reluctantly, one senses) to Christianity, dons first formal, then outlandish, apparel, an indication of his equivocal attitude to faith.

Von Sydow, already stunning in The Seventh Seal (1957) and The Magician (1958), creates an imperious Töre from the start. He’s a patriarch whose obduracy will eventually bring him to his knees. As Ingeri, Gunnel Lindblom embodies a dark, sensual threat to the emergence of Christian morality, while Valberg’s mother suffers excruciatingly in her ascetic restraint and adoration of her daughter as the bright new hope of both the family and her faith. Birgitta Pettersson gives Karin a dangerous hint of vanity and sanctimoniousness. Spoiled by her parents, she nonetheless conveys an appalling pathos during the rape sequence.