Jungfrukällan
Ingmar Bergman (1960)
After it was over I went straight from NFT2 to the BFI bookshop and bought the DVD: there was too much to take in on a single viewing. It’s taken me months to do even this note, in which I know I can’t ‘say just what I mean’. Here is what Ingmar Bergman, several years later, had to say about the film:
‘Now I want to make it quite plain that The Virgin Spring must be regarded as an aberration. It’s touristic, a lousy imitation of Kurosawa. … I think its motivations are all bogus. … 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 Töres döttrar i Vänge’ was a sound one. But then the jiggery-pokery began – the spiritual jiggery-pokery. … I wanted to make a blackly brutal medieval 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 the other shady stuff – today I find it all dreadfully triste. … But when I’d finished making The Virgin Spring I thought I’d made one of my best films. …’
It’s hard to argue with Bergman – to the extent that only he can say whether the film he made fulfilled his ambitions for it. But I think he was right first time. His reasons for being so hard on himself in judging The Virgin Spring could include how long he’d known and been taken with the folk song on which the story is based, which he came across in his student days. If an artist feels impelled to realise a personally important experience (including the experience of someone’s else work), in order to make his audience feel what the original made him feel, the eventual results can easily disappoint him, emotionally and intellectually, especially if the project has been incubating for a long time. If the adaptation of the source material reshapes it so that the compulsive grip of the original is lost, a sense of failure is inevitable. In 1961, Bergman had written his own screenplays for a decade or more, apart from the few pieces that he directed for Swedish television in the 1950s. The only exception in his work for cinema was Brink of Life (1958), written by Ulla Isaksson. The success of that film seems to have inspired this second collaboration with Isaksson yet Bergman, so accustomed to writing his scripts, must have felt less in charge than usual – and this was a screenplay he’d wanted to create for some time. Besides, Isaksson was a practising Christian. There are major differences too between the events in the film and the story told in the ballad. In the latter, Herr Töre’s three daughters are all slain by herdsmen. In the film, Töre’s biological daughter, the beautiful, Christian, virginal Karin, is raped and murdered on her journey taking candles to a church; her pregnant foster sister Ingeri witnesses the event and returns home safely and eventually remorsefully.
The Virgin Spring shares many of the qualities of The Seventh Seal. The images make the story exemplary and mythic – yet the characters, although they have archetypal substance, are also humanly convincing, and the means by which Bergman and his actors animate and incarnate their spiritual conditions and struggles are extraordinary. Bergman recreates a medieval world in which religious belief is natural and the apprehension of good and evil very real to the people we’re watching – yet they still can’t make sense of what happens. Töre himself kills the herdsmen who raped and murdered Karin. When he and his wife, with the help of Ingeri, discover Karin’s body in the forest, Töre addresses God: ‘You see this. You allow this. I don’t understand. Yet I ask forgiveness … ‘. He resolves, to atone for what he’s done (but also, you feel, to try to impose a sense of moral order on the place), to build a church on the site of his daughter’s murder. As he and his wife lift Karin’s head, a spring begins to flow and they wash the dirt from Karin’s face with water from the spring (in which Ingeri also washes herself). This is no doubt the culmination of the ‘spiritual jiggery-pokery’ that troubled Bergman. His concerns would be justified if the spontaneous spring provided a straightforward, religiously hopeful ending – but it actually deepens the incomprehensibility of what’s gone before. Töre’s killing of the three herdsmen – although you sympathise strongly with his desire for vengeance – is almost as troubling as Karin’s death. Not only is one the trio a young boy; one of the men, initially bestial, seems to develop a conscience. (The effect of his doing so is alchemical, uncanny.)
Perhaps it’s easier to believe in the reality of this medieval world when you’re hearing voices in a language you don’t understand. If the actors were speaking English, it would increase the risk of their readings sounding ‘modern’. Yet even subtitles offer some scope for jarring anachronism and there isn’t any. None of this could, in any case, undermine the vivid physical reality that Bergman creates through his observation of the routines of Töre‘s household, the sight of them eating and drinking, the sound of their snoring. The visual scheme of the film, photographed by Sven Nykvist, is as powerful as it’s simple: the story begins on a golden morning, moves to a black night and ends in the light of the following day. We watch Töre and his wife dress at the start of the first day and disrobe at its end and reflect on what’s happened in the interim, and that Karin won’t be taking off the clothes we saw her put on before she set out for the church. (This is in our minds even before the terrible moment when the herdsmen, who’ve sought refuge in Töre’s house unaware that it was Karin’s home, offer to sell their victim’s clothes to her mother.) As she goes through the wood, Karin crosses a bridge, which takes her life from light into darkness. The creatures in the forest – a raven, a toad, the bridge-keeper whom Ingeri encounters and flees from – are fundamentally menacing. As Karin goes forward, everything seems to be tending towards corruption, physical and spiritual. I think it’s the tension between the moral clarity this structure and these images suggest and the moral incomprehensibility of what happens within the film that largely accounts for The Virgin Spring‘s power.
The relationships between the characters are richly complex. Töre’s wife Mareta (Birgitta Valberg) often looks to be a querulous, miserable woman yet she’s transformed in her indulgence towards her daughter. Her quiet weeping when she realises that Karin is dead is very moving. At the same time, you sense in Birgitta Valberg’s fine characterisation Mareta’s envy of her husband’s greater closeness to their daughter – because of which Mareta may envy both Töre and Karin. When he and Karin are together, Töre isn’t just a strongly paternal figure; he’s physically easy and expressive with her in a way that he isn’t with his wife. As Karin, Birgitta Pettersson has a beautiful sustained boldness the aspects of which include both the adored, spoiled child and the intrepid girl undaunted by the journey through the woods to the church. Max von Sydow is magnificent as Töre: as in The Seventh Seal, he’s completely convincing both as an heroic icon and as a thoughtful, troubled man. The way Bergman photographs Von Sydow makes him dimensionally protean: he can resemble a figure cut from a medieval tapestry, or a carving, or be flesh and bone. There is a sequence in The Virgin Spring when Töre, after he’s learned of Karin’s death but before he takes his revenge on her killers, brings a birch tree down with his bare hands (he then cuts branches from it to scourge himself with). The image of the man and the tree bending together in the wind is astonishing – this moment is a perfect example of Von Sydow’s ability to embody a symbol and an individual at the same time. He’s marvellous in a different way in his interactions with the women – for example, in Töre’s witty remoteness from wife at breakfast and unworried sleepiness as they go to bed that evening.
Every person in The Virgin Spring is remarkable: Ingeri (Gunnel Lindblom), whose dark hair, as much as her paganism (she worships Odin), indicates her separateness from the blond-haired family of Töre; the malignant bridge keeper (Axel Langus); the eccentric beggar-philosopher (Allan Edwall), who evinces a deep understanding and melancholy; the elderly woman servant Frida (Gudrun Brost), scolding other people whenever she’s not praising God; the herdsmen (Axel Duberg, Töre Isedal, and the boy Ove Porath). These three loom up to the camera and seem to move forward in the forest with incredible swiftness (is this one of the bits of ‘immense acceleration’ Bergman consoled him with?) Their assault on Karin is the most extraordinary rape scene I have seen: it seems both intensely realistic and to convey the essence of the act of rape. If I was looking to find fault with the film, I would struggle – perhaps it’s not quite clear how ‘accidental’ the herdsmen’s arrival at Töre’s home is since (I thought) Karin mentioned, on first meeting them, who she was and where she came from. Otherwise, I’m happy to leave adverse criticism of The Virgin Spring to Ingmar Bergman.
18 June 2010
