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The Magic Works of Ingmar Bergman is now located at www.bergmanorama.com. Please update your bookmarks. Thank you for visiting!
THE VIRGIN SPRING
(1959)
Bergman won his first Oscar for this cruel but unsensational medieval allegory, a tale of superstition, religious faith, rape and revenge set in a 14th century Sweden where the populace is vacillating between Christianity and paganism. On her way to church, the 15-year-old virgin daughter (Pettersson) of peasant parents (von Sydow and Valberg) is raped by two goatherds. Later, in a bizarre twist of fate, the culprits ask for food and shelter at the house of the dead girl's parents. Discovering the truth when the goatherds offer to sell them their dead daughter's bloodstained clothes, the parents exact a brutal revenge. The formal simplicity and overt symbolism (light and dark, fire and water) undercut the potentially sensationalist elements of the material, Sven Nykvist's luminous black-and-white photography conspiring with the austerity of Bergman's imagery to create an extraordinary metaphysical charge. (Nigel Floyd, Time Out)
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| Original title: |
Jungfruk�llan ["The virgin spring"] |
| Production: |
Svensk Filmindustri |
| Distribution: |
Svensk Filmindustri |
| Premiere: |
8 February 1960 (R�da Kvarn, Stockholm) |
| Running time: |
88 minutes |
| Language: |
Swedish |
| Filmed: |
on location at Styggeforsen and Skattungsbyn, Dalarna, and at R�sunda Studios; from 14 May to late August 1959. |
| CAST |
| T�re: |
Max von Sydow |
| M�reta: |
Birgitta Valberg |
| Ingeri: |
Gunnel Lindblom |
| Karin: |
Birgitta Pettersson |
| The skinny one: |
Axel D�berg |
| The one without a tongue: |
Tor Isedal |
| Beggar: |
Allan Edwall |
| Boy: |
Ove Porath |
| Bridge guard: |
Axel Slangus |
| Frida: |
Gudrun Brost |
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|
| CREDITS |
| Producer: |
Allan Ekelund |
| Director: |
Ingmar Bergman |
| Screenplay: |
Ulla Isaksson, based on the ballad T�re�s Daughter in W�nge |
| Cinematography: |
Sven Nykvist |
| Art Direction: |
P.A. Lundgren |
| Music: |
Erik Nordgren |
| Editor: |
Oscar Rosander |
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| COMMENTARY |
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"A film which was one of my shadiest, it seems to me just now, was The Virgin Spring. I admit it contains a couple of passages with immense acceleration and vitality, and it has some sort of cinematic appeal. The idea of making something out of the old folk-song 'Herr T�re of Venge's Daughters' was a sound one. But then the jiggery-pokery began�the spiritual jiggery-pokery. I wanted to make a blackly brutal mediaeval ballad in the simple form of a folk-song. But while talking it all over with the authoress, Ulla Isaksson, I began psychologizing. That was the first mistake, the introduction of a therapeutic idea: that the building of their church would heal these people. Obviously it was therapeutic; but artistically it was utterly uninteresting. And then, the introduction of a totally unanalyzed idea of God. The mixture of the real active depiction of violence, which has a certain artistic potency, with all this other shady stuff�today I find it all dreadfully triste....A fine example of how one's motifs can get all tangled up, and how limitations and weaknesses one isn't clear about�intellectual shortcomings, inability to see through one's own motives�can transform a work as it develops."
� Ingmar Bergman, Bergman on Bergman (1968)
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"Today I take full responsibility for the religious problem I set up in
The Seventh Seal. A genuine romantic piety rendered the special luster there. But with The Virgin Spring my motivation was extremely mixed. The God concept had long ago begun to crack, and it remained more as a decoration than as anything else. What really interested me was the actual, horrible story of the girl and her rapists, and the subsequent revenge. My own conflict with religion was well on its way out."
� Ingmar Bergman, Images: My Life in Film (1990)
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