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Audience Rating: Unrated
Binding: DVD
Format: NTSC
Theatrical Release Date: November 14, 1960
Editorial Review:
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
Average Rating: 
Rating: - 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 ... Read More
Rating: - "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, ... Read More
Rating: - 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 ... Read More
Rating: - True Masterpiece
With a sublime precise passion the mighty Ingmar Bergman has created, with the beautiful and crisp cinematographer Sven Nykist, a stellar experience in The Virgin Spring, a medieval story of a coming to God through a parent's gravest nightmare.
The swiftness of the story, the space allowed for interpretation, the simplicity of intention; the ominous nature of dream, feeling, omen, impulse-all evenly and gently presented, make for a spectacular film.
The final section, focusing on the (Max ... Read More
Rating: - A dark parable of sin and vengeance
A virgin spring would be an early spring when the days break bright and clear but the nights are still forbiddingly cold. As one of the characters says, The day began with such promise only to end tragically--or words to that effect. A virgin spring is also that time in a young maiden's life when she is still innocent and has no sense of the hardships to come or the beasts that dwell in the deep dark woods. And a virgin spring may be a miraculous sign from God of clear spring water flowing spontaneously ... Read More
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