Jungfruskällan (The Virgin Spring) is a great film with the ugliest kind of twisted religious message. Fortunately, its message is ambiguous enough that few fully understand its implications and those that do will have reason enough to withstand the assault on reason. The first thing that readers should understand about The Virgin Spring is that Bergman was not responsible for the story. In 1960, Bergman was financially bankrupt and accepted the task of directing this film based on a script written by novelist Ulla Isaksson. It was one of a very few films directed by Bergman that he did not also write. Thus, the credit for the brilliance of the filmmaking belongs to Bergman while the misguided metaphysical messages are all Isaksson. Bergman, himself, considered the ending of the film “bogus” and reminded his public that he had already said what he had to say on the matter of religion in previous films. The great film critic Pauline Kael denounced The Virgin Spring as “revolting”, but I agree with her only in so far as the message revolts. The film itself is brilliantly executed and has great power. One does not need always to agree with the message of a film. There is as much to be learned by thinking about how we disagree with a writer's perspective as in viewing films that comport with what we already believe.

Historical Background: The Virgin Spring was based on a fourteenth century legend. It was “remade” in 1972 as a rather brutal but feeble cult horror classic called Last House on the Left that is sometimes described as the first slasher film.

The Story: The film opens with Ingeri (Gunnel Lindblom), a girl in her late teens, performing her morning duties, such as starting the fire and opening the trap door in the roof. Ingeri is a shadowy individual in a shadowy old farmhouse. Viewers understand immediately from her shifty eyes, sarcastic expression, and her dirty hair that she is a disturbed individual. Ingeri, it seems, was a foundling adopted and then raised as part of this family. She is currently pregnant and unwed. Worst of all, by the logic of this film, she is pagan, invoking the God Odin as she watches light stream in through the opened hatch. Next, we see the owners of this home, Töre (Max von Sydow) and Märeta (Birgitta Valberg), praying before a crucifix. In contrast to Ingeri, they are bathed in the bright light of their Christian faith.

Soon, the household is at breakfast – except for the highly-pampered Karin (Birgitta Pettersson), daughter of Töre and Märeta, who is sleeping in, having exerted herself dancing the preceding evening. Over breakfast, Töre gently chastises Märeta for coddling their only daughter and reminds her that it is Good Friday and Karin must deliver the Virgin Mary candles to the church. Later, in Karin’s bedroom, Märeta coaxes her to get up. We see that Karin is a lovely and sweet child and certainly pampered. She easily elicits a promise from her mother to allow her to wear the fancy yellow silk dress that we learn was sewn by fifteen virgins.

Karin insists that Ingeri be allowed to accompany her to the church. The trip requires a horseback ride of several hours through the forest. Ingeri is seldom allowed such excursions but is permitted to go this time to please Karin. Ingeri lags behind at a cabin near the edge of a river as Karin rides ahead. When Ingeri starts to receive unwanted attentions of the owner of the house, she runs out and into the forest trying to catch up with Karin. Karin, in the meantime, has encounted three goat-herders, one a mere boy (Ove Porath). The innocent and generous Karin offers to share her lunch with these hungry strays.

ALL REMAINING PARAGRAPHS IN THE STORY SECTION CONTAIN SPOILERS. BY-PASS AS YOU LIKE.

Her kindness is repaid in the worst possible way. The two men among the trio rape her brutally, while the feckless boy watches from a short distance. Although the rape scene is not especially graphic by modern standards, it is certainly disturbing. Karin is barely able to whimper her distress. Ingeri, in the meantime, has just caught up with her companion and witnesses the rape from a hiding place in the distance. She seems torn between genuine empathy for her adoptive sister and satisfaction that the favored and unspoiled girl is getting her comeuppance. After the rape, one of the men strikes Karin with a tree limb and kills her. The goat-swains gather all that is valuable from the corpse including the silk dress. The two men go to gather their goats, leaving the boy to tend the murder scene. In a small act of decency, the boy attempts ineptly to cover Karin’s body with dirt.

As luck would have it, the goat-herders soon show up at the house of Karin’s parents, seeking shelter for the night. They are taken in and offered a share of the dinner and, later, a place to sleep. One of the sharecroppers who eats with the family delivers a rather gratuitous and frightening speech to the terrified boy, which will be discussed later below. As the older goat-herders are about to go to bed, one offers Märeta some valuable items for sale – which turn out to be Karin’s clothing. Showing great composure, Märeta only offers that she will discuss with her husband what kind of reward might be fitting for such valuable objects. She bolts the door where the goat-herders will be sleeping on her way out.

Märeta informs her husband of the horrible discovery. Töre locates his large knife and outside encounters Ingeri. She is overcome with grief and guilt (because her envy caused her to wish ill for Karin). Her tale also confirms his worst fears and those of his wife. Though outwardly controlled, Töre is very clearly now obsessed with the idea of justice and revenge. First, however, Töre literally wrestles a small birch to the ground, cutting some branches from the top. He then uses these branches in a ritual cleansing in the sauna before undertaking his revenge. He dresses in his fighting digs and enters the cabin where the goat-herders are sleeping. After searching their bag of goods and finding additional items that had belonged to Karin, we wakens the goat-herders before wreaking his revenge. After systematically slaughtering the two men, he turns to the boy. Even Märeta seems inclined toward mercy for the young lad. Töre, however, hurls him through the air to his death against the wall.

The entire household now sets out to recover the body of Karin, Ingeri leading the way. Grief of the darkest kind descends upon them as they encounter the limp and bedraggled body. Töre falls to his knees in a soliloquy to God (see details below), begging His forgiveness. As they lift the body of Karin, a spring miraculously wells up where Karin’s head had rested – seemingly a reply, of sorts, from God to Töre’s entreaty.

Themes: The Virgin Spring could be classified as propaganda in pretty much the say degree as Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky, though it is religious rather than political propaganda. The first element of that propaganda is the treatment afforded believers versus non-believers. Ingeri, the pagan, is a troubled, ill-spirited person. To emphasize her spiritual inferiority, she appears constantly as a shadowy figure. No foundation is offered for her mean-spiritedness other than the inference that it follows from her being a pagan. Ingeri, however, was raised in this Christian family from early childhood. One wonders, first of all, why she would not have been educated into Christianity. Looking at her circumstances from the vantage point of modern psychology, it seems to me that there is a more reasonable explanation for Ingeri’s nature at this stage of her life. The older servant of the household, Frida (Gudrun Brost), asks Ingeri what’s wrong. Ingeri replies, “Nothing more than usual.” Clearly, Ingeri has long standing “issues” and the likely principal issue is that she has been treated throughout childhood as inferior to Karin. Frida says, for example, “You should thank God on your bare knees for His mercy – to come to this farm, stay in this house like a child of the family. But you are, and will always be, a bad kid in need of a birching.” Has she really been treated like a child of the family? More likely, she has always been treated as an inferior child in relation to Karin. While Karin sleeps late, Ingeri does the chores. This is Cinderella turned upside down, in a way. The poor, unwanted child has developed the mean disposition while the pampered sister (by adoption) has the pure, good-natured spirit. Later, Märeta says to Ingeri, “I’m not afraid my daughter will walk in your filthy footsteps. You’ve always been as different as the rose and the thorn.” We see in that statement that only Karin has been thought of as a daughter. Such mean language is certainly not the words of a mother to a child. Whatever Ingeri was when she was adopted, her up-bringing has been such as to turn her into an embittered, ill-spirited teen. Yet, The Virgin Spring is structured in such a way as to invite viewers to write off Ingeri, despite her youthfulness, as an evil, lost soul. I blame the parents who, despite their claim of Christianity, have brought up this child in a most un-Christian way.

It is interesting how different viewers react to Karin as a character. One viewer says that “When Karin was first introduced, I immediately fell in love with her. She was so gentle, and so caring, and looked like an angel.” Another viewer, however, confesses that “I honestly didn’t care much for the virginal victim. Perhaps that was part of the point, that the audience, like Inge, would secretly be hoping for something bad to happen to her.” I’d guess that this viewer at some stage of his life harbored resentment toward someone better off than himself. The point being that bitter envy is an almost inevitable result of being brought up in an inferior station in life.

A second troublesome element of religious propaganda inherent in this film relates to the treatment of the issue of sin and redemption. Two terrible mortal sins are committed over the course of this film – even taking into account the time in which the events take place. Since there was nothing like the criminal justice system at that time that exists today, I’m prepared to accept Töre’s slaughter of the two adult goat-herders as rough justice. We and Ingeri know that the boy, however, was guiltless in the rape and the murder of Karin. There were means available to Töre to ascertain whether the boy was culpable and also deserving of retribution (if such retribution is ever appropriately exerted against a mere child). Töre’s murder of the boy, in my mind, is every bit as great an evil as was the murder of Karin. The fact that Töre acted under the influence of anger is no excuse any more than other emotions (resentment, lust, etc.) justify the rape of Karin. Two great sins have been committed, one by the non-Christian goat-herders, the other by the Christian Töre. The non-Christians (even the child) are entitled only to violent retribution in this story but Töre is entitled to God’s forgiveness (evidenced by the emergence of the spring), presumably because he is Christian. In my view, the most despicable aspect of the Christian religion (particularly Catholicism is this respect) is the offer of absolution for sins by the pledging of faith to the Church. It has the effect of creating a different standard of morality for believers and non-believers. Töre’s murder of the boy goat-herder is no more forgivable than his daughter’s rape and murder. By any fair moral standard, he too deserves to be brought to justice for his act.

It is all too self-serving. When religions offer absolution in exchange for supporting The Church, it amounts to offering bribes to ensure the support required for perpetuation of the religion. This is made especially evident in Töre’s final soliloquy: “You see it God? The innocent child’s death and my revenge. You allowed it.” [Well done, Töre, transfer the blame to God!] “I don’t understand you. Yet, I shall ask your forgiveness.” [Though Töre offered none to the goat-herders!] “I know no other way to make peace with myself than with my own hands. I don’t know any other way to live.” [Who now will make peace for the dead boy?] “I promise You, Lord, here on the dead body of my only child, I promise You that to cleanse my sins, here I shall build a church, on this spot, of mortar and stone, and with these, my hands.” [How does that pay for the wrong done to the boy, who has no interest in whether a church is or is not built?] Then, the film provides God’s answer by the emergence of the spring. Like some kind of huckster, God replies, “Deal!”

Finally, there is the unconscionable hell-and-brim-fire Christian speech delivered by one of the share-croppers to the terrified goat-herder boy, before any crime has been identified, as he sadly watches smoke wafting through the trap door in the roof:

Do you see the smoke shivering in the roof-hole? She is whimpering, scared. Still, she’s simply going into the air, and out there she has the whole sky to tumble about in, but she doesn’t want that, so she cowers and trembles in the ashes under the roof.

[The smoke is the soul, the cabin the body, the sky eternity.]

It’s the same for a human. She shakes and worries like a leaf in a storm, for what she knows, and for what she doesn’t know.

[Very interesting that the speaker chose the female pronoun, which the boy likely associated with Karin.]

You, you shall cross a narrow plank, so narrow you don’t know how to find a foothold. Under you rumbles a great river. It’s black and wants to swallow you. But you pass over it unhurt. There’s a valley in front of you, so deep you can’t see the bottom. Hands grope for you, but they cannot reach you. At last, you shall stand before a mountain of horror. It spews fire like a furnace, a vast abyss opens its jaws at its feet. A thousand colors flame out of it: copper and iron, blue vitriol and yellow sulfur. A blinding lightning explores from the molten rock, burns your skin. And all about are men, small as ants, for this is the furnace that swallows murderers and violent men.

[At those last words, the boys head turns abruptly away from the speaker, pained.]

But in the same instant you think you are lost, a hand shall grab you, a long arm shall encircle you. And you’ll be taken far away, where evil has no power anymore.

[Wait! One restriction on that last offer! Only if you are Christian! Otherwise, it’s into the furnace! Lest there be any doubt, the camera now cuts to a crucifix.]

Of course, when the boy is sent sprawling across that proverbial plank by Töre, no long arm reaches out to save him, though the long arm is later there for Töre. One morality for Christians; one for everyone else. It is the most dangerous aspect of religion and a large part of the reason why Christianity is one of the two religions (Islam being the other) whose adherents have been the most violent throughout history.

Production Values: The film-making technique of The Virgin Spring is extraordinary, of course. This is, after all, a Bergman film. The expressive facial close-ups are everywhere in evidence. The film is jam-packed with symbolisms, such as the squawking raven foreshadowing the horror of what transpires in the forest. The performances are outstanding, especially Max von Sydow as Töre and Birgitta Pettersson as Karin. I won’t say that it’s all lost on a perverse message because the thinking about religious propaganda can itself be enlightening.

Bottom-Line: The Virgin Spring won the 1960 Oscar for Best Foreign Film. I find it perplexing that Ingmar Bergman won Academy Awards three times in the Best Foreign film category but not for what I view as any of his three best works: The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, and Persona. I don’t mean to imply that he deserved either more or fewer such honors, only that there are some strange anomalies in the Academy Award selection process.

I highly recommend this film despite a message that is somewhat revolting and propagandistic. The skill with which the story is delivered is simply too much to miss and I trust that most viewers are thoughtful enough to interpret the message in accordance with their own values and to dismiss what each finds useless or misguided. The Virgin Spring is in Swedish with English subtitles and has a running time of just 88 minutes.


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You might want to check out these other excellent films from Sweden:

The Best Intentions
Cries and Whispers
The Magician
Miss Julie
Persona
Scenes from a Marriage
The Seventh Seal
The Shame
Smiles of a Summer Night
Through a Glass Darkly
Torment
Wild Strawberries

Recommended:
Yes

Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age