THE VIRGIN SPRING - DVD

Based on thirteenth-century folklore, Ingmar Bergman's film explores themes of religion and guilt in a medieval setting. A young girl is raped and murdered by three goatherds while en route to church. The girl's killers then take refuge at a farm, not knowing that it is owned by the parents of the girl they have just killed. All is revealed when the mother finds her daughter's bloodied robe and she realises what has happened. The father then avenges his daughter's death causing a spring to bubble up on the spot she was killed.

Amazon.co.uk Review

Made in 1960 and set in mediaeval Sweden, Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring is based on a folk ballad. It also examines a society in transition from worshipping the old Norse gods to Christianity. The film starkly contrasts Ingeri--a dark, feral Odin-worshipping brunette, foster daughter to a Christian family headed by Max Von Sydow--and their own daughter, Karin, pretty and blonde but also vain and naive, and resented by Ingeri. 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 goatherders, accompanied by a 13-year-old boy. By coincidence, the goatherders 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 Kurosawa, the Japanese director of The Seven Samurai, 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 Kieslowki's A Short Film About Killing in their sense of the futility of vengeance.

On the DVD: The Virgin Spring arrives on disc in a restoration that vividly enhances the sense of light and shade which is integral to the movie. Notes from critic Phillip Strick provide background to the movie, including the legend on which the film was based, as well as observing that Bergman was later so embarrassed by the film's debt to Kurosawa that he disowned it, only to be told by Kurosawa himself not to be so silly. --David Stubbs